The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama: Icon of Opposition (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

Edited by

William E. Cain Professor of English Wellesley College

A Routledge Series

Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory William E. Cain, General Editor Novel Notions Medical Discourse and the Mapping of the Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction Katherine E. Kickel Masculinity and the English Working Class Studies in Victorian Autobiography and Fiction Ying S. Lee Aesthetic Hysteria The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction Ankhi Mukherjee The Rise of Corporate Publishing and Its Effects on Authorship in Early Twentieth-Century America Kim Becnel Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel Adrian S. Wisnicki City/Stage/Globe Performance and Space in Shakespeare’s London D.J. Hopkins Transatlantic Engagements with the British Eighteenth Century Pamela J. Albert Race, Immigration, and American Identity in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner Randy Boyagoda

Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit Caroline J. Smith Asian Diaspora Poetry in North America Benzi Zhang William Morris and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings Andrea Elizabeth Donovan Zionism and Revolution in European-Jewish Literature Laurel Plapp Shakespeare and the Cultural Colonization of Ireland Robin E. Bates Spaces of the Sacred and Profane Dickens, Trollope, and the Victorian Cathedral Town Elizabeth A. Bridgham The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel The Aesthetics of Self-Fashioning in the Era of Globalization Stephen M. Levin Literature and Development in North Africa The Modernizing Mission Perri Giovannucci The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama Icon of Opposition Kristen Deiter

The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama Icon of Opposition

Kristen Deiter

New York London

First published 2008 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2008 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Deiter, Kristen. The Tower of London in English Renaissance drama : icon of opposition / by Kristen Deiter. p. cm. — (Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-415-96317-6 (acid-free paper) ISBN-10: 0-415-96317-6 (acid-free paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-203-89566-5 (ebook) ISBN-10: 0-203-89566-5 (ebook) 1. English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—History and criticism. 2. English drama—17th century—History and criticism. 3. Symbolism in literature. 4. Tower of London (London, England)—In literature. I. Title. PR658.S94D45 2008 822'.3093584—dc22 ISBN 0-203-89566-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-96317-6 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-89566-5 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-96317-6 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-89566-5 (ebk)

For Jason

Contents

List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Chapter One Introduction: Historicizing Original Tower Play Audiences

1

Chapter Two The Tower of London as a Cultural Icon before the Tower Plays

27

Chapter Three Stage vs. State: The Struggle for the Tower

54

Chapter Four The Tower of London: Dramatic Emblem of Opposition

78

Chapter Five Reading English Nationhood in the Dramatic Tower of London

114

Coda The Tower of London: An Evolving Icon

150

Notes

155

Bibliography

219

Index

243

vii

List of Figures

1.

2.

3.

Detail from “A Lamentable Ditty, Composed upon the Death of Robert Lord Devereux, Late Earle of Essex, Who Was Beheaded in the Tower of London, on Ash-wednesday in the Morning, 1600. To the Tune of Welladay,” c.1640-65, Wood 401 (75). Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

103

Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, 1603, attributed to John de Critz, the Elder. Boughton House, Kettering, Northamptonshire.

106

The London Plate, 1600, Tin-glazed Delftware Plate. Museum of London.

108

ix

Acknowledgments

This book began as a dissertation that met the requirements for a doctorate in English at State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton and won the University’s Distinguished Dissertation Award for Fine Arts and Humanities, 2006. I am deeply grateful to my advisor and mentor, Albert H. Tricomi, and readers Alvin Vos, Robin S. Oggins, and Andrew Walkling, who have generously shared their time and expertise, making the original project and its reworking into the present text an absolute joy. I would like to thank SUNY at Binghamton’s English Department for granting me a Francis X. Newman Research Travel Award, and Marywood University for professional development travel funds, which enabled me to conduct research for this study at the British Library; the National Archives of England, Wales, and the United Kingdom; the Museum of London; the British Museum; the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; and the Royal Armouries Library, HM Tower of London. Bridget Clifford, Keeper of Collections (South) at the Royal Armouries Library, HM Tower of London, provided invaluable assistance on several occasions, as did Dr. Geoffrey Parnell, Keeper of Tower History. I wholeheartedly thank them both, as well as Paul Perrone, Collections Administration Officer (South), at the Royal Armouries Library, HM Tower of London. I have presented earlier versions of these chapters, or parts thereof, at academic conferences. I thank the scholars who attended my presentations and helped sharpen my argument at the London in Text and History, 1400– 1700 Conference at Jesus College, University of Oxford; the Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London Conference at the University of Westminster in London; the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo; SUNY at Binghamton’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) Interdisciplinary International Conference; the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance xi

xii

Acknowledgments

Society of America/Pacific Northwest Renaissance Society in San Francisco; and two Crossing the Boundaries Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conferences at SUNY at Binghamton. Marywood University funded or partially funded my travel to several of these conferences, for which I am grateful. My thanks to those who granted permission for use of archival and copyrighted texts and images. Excerpts from Sir John Peyton, “A Declaracon of the State of Yor Highnes Tower of London,” 1597, Royal Armouries ms I. 243; “The Execution of Robert Late Earle of Essex the 25 of Ffebruary 1600 within the Tower of London,” RAR ms. 500/2; and “A View and Survey of All the Armour and Other Municion or Habiliaments of Warr Remayneing at the Tower of London, Taken in the Month of October 1660,” Dartmouth Loan ms. AL.3 5, are published by permission of the Board of Trustees of the Armouries, Royal Armouries Library, HM Tower of London. Excerpts from Dr. Anna Keay’s transcriptions of Sir John Peyton, “A Declaracon of the State of Yor Highnes Tower of London” and “A Declaration of the State of the Tower of London,” in The Elizabethan Tower of London: The Haiward and Gascoyne Plan of 1597 (2001), are published by permission of Hon. Editor, London Topographical Society. Excerpts from “A Lamentable Ditty, Composed upon the Death of Robert Lord Devereux, Late Earle of Essex, Who Was Beheaded in the Tower of London, on Ash-Wednesday in the Morning, 1600. To the Tune of Welladay,” c.1640–65, Wood 401 (75), and Sir John Peyton, “A Declaration of the State of the Tower of London,”1598, ms. Eng. Hist. e. 195, fols. 1r-8v, are published by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. The excerpt from the Register of St Peter ad Vincula, Tower of London, is published by permission of The Reverend Roger J. Hall, Chaplain, HM Tower of London. Excerpts from “Edward Coke, AttorneyGeneral, vs. Sir Michael Blount, Attorney General’s Information,” ms. STAC 5/A19/23, are published by permission of The National Archives of England, Wales, and the United Kingdom. Excerpts from Roger B. Manning’s transcription of the same manuscript in “The Prosecution of Sir Michael Blount, Lieutenant of the Tower of London, 1595,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 57.136 (1984), are published by permission of Blackwell Publishing. The excerpt from “A Perticular of the Names of the Towers & Prison Lodgings in His Majesties Tower of London; Taken out of a Paper of Mr William Francklyns, Sometymes Yeoman-Warder. Dat. 16 March, 1641,” Harley ms. 1326 f. 125r; and references to “The Second Part of the Inventorye of Our Late Sovereigne Lord Kyng Henry the Eighth,” Harley ms. 1419 f. 5, and Jasper Andries and Jacob Janson, “Petition to Elizabeth I,” Burleigh Papers, Lansdowne ms. 12 f. 131–32, are published by permission of the British Library, © The British Library, All Rights Reserved. Excerpts

Acknowledgments

xiii

from “Women, Space and Power: The Building and the Use of Hardwick Hall in Elizabethan England” (2000) are published by permission of Sara L. French, Ph.D. The detail from “A Lamentable Ditty, Composed upon the Death of Robert Lord Devereux, Late Earle of Essex, Who Was Beheaded in the Tower of London, on Ash-wednesday in the Morning, 1600. To the Tune of Welladay,” Wood 401 (75), is reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. The portrait of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, attributed to John de Critz, the Elder, from the collection at Boughton House, Kettering, Northamptonshire, is reproduced by kind permission of His Grace The Duke of Buccleuch & Queensberry, KT. The image of the London Plate, 1600, Tin-glazed Delftware Plate, is reproduced by permission of the Museum of London, © Museum of London. I would like to express my gratitude to William E. Cain for his interest in this project and to my editors at Routledge, Erica Wetter, Max Novick, and Elizabeth Levine. Thanks also to Carey Nershi, Page Composition Supervisor, at IBT Global. Special thanks go to my friends and colleagues for their support throughout this study: G. Gregory Molchan, Dr. Erin A. Sadlack, Elizabeth Kohinsky, Kelly McDonough, Dr. William Conlogue, Dr. Éva Tettenborn, Dr. Laurie McMillan, Dr. Helen Bittel, Sarah Hauer, Marilu Serowinski, Christine Mandarino, Dr. Adam Hansen, James Hart, John Coval, Juneann Greco, Robert Reese, Vanessa Leigh White, Wendy Yankelitis, Maria Michelle Sitko, Mark Pitely, Clara Hudson, and Dr. Michael Mirabito. Last and foremost, I want to express my love and thanks to Jason, my husband and travel partner in the cultural journey that our life together has become.

Chapter One

Introduction Historicizing Original Tower Play Audiences

The Tower of London’s representations in English Renaissance culture turned on the hinge of historical drama. By the late-Elizabethan age, the castle’s oldest and largest building, the White Tower, was about five hundred years old, and the Tower of London complex occupied a space whose history visibly dated to the Roman occupation of Britain.1 The Tower had played a significant role in English culture up to Elizabeth I’s reign, and its symbolic meanings, having developed and evolved over the centuries, affected how Renaissance Londoners perceived and reacted to it as an icon. Then, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, twenty-four English history plays—twenty of which were most probably first presented between 1590 and 1624—represented the Tower, revolutionizing its cultural meanings. The twenty-four plays include Thomas Legge’s Richardus Tertius (1579); William Shakespeare’s The First Part of King Henry the Sixth (1H6, 1590) and The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth (2H6, c.1590); The True Tragedie of Richard the Third [ . . . ] (True Tragedie R3, 1588–94); The Life and Death of Iacke Straw, A Notable Rebell in England (Iacke Straw, 1590– 93); Shakespeare’s The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth (3H6, c.1591); George Peele’s, The Chronicle of King Edward the First, Surnamed Longshanks, with The Life of Luellen Rebel in Wales (Edward the First, 1590–93); Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (R3, 1591–92); Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second (1591–93); Anthony Munday et al.’s Sir Thomas More (originally composed c.1592–93); Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Richard the Second (R2, 1595); Thomas Heywood’s The First Part of King Edward the Fourth (1E4, 1592–99) and The Second Part of King Edward the Fourth (2E4, 1592–99); Munday, Michael Drayton, Robert Wilson, and Richard Hathway’s The First Part of the True and Honorable Historie, of the Life of Sir John Old-castle, the Good Lord Cobham (Old-castle, 1599); The Life and Death of Thomas, Lord Cromwell (Cromwell, c.1599–1602); Thomas 1

2

The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama

Dekker and John Webster’s The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat (Wyat, 1602); Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me You Know Me (When You See Me, 1604); Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, or The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth (1 If You Know Not Me, 1604–05) and If You Know Not Me, You Know No Body. The Second Part (2 If You Know Not Me, 1604–05); Woodstock (c.1605–09); Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s The Life of King Henry the Eighth (H8, 1613); Thomas Drue’s The Life of the Dutches of Suffolke (1624); Robert Davenport’s King Iohn and Matilda, A Tragedy (Iohn and Matilda, c.1628–29); and John Ford’s The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, A Strange Truth (Perkin Warbeck, c.1625–34).2 For brevity I refer to these works collectively as the Tower plays.3 Although the Tower, as a royal palace and fortress, may appear to stand for royal control in the Tower plays, the dramatic representation of that control is always compromised. The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama demonstrates that while Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I were fashioning the Tower as a showplace of royal temporal and spiritual authority, magnificence, and entertainment, English history plays disrupted this metanarrative by revealing the Tower’s instability as a royal symbol and representing it, instead, as an emblem of opposition to the crown and as a bodily and spiritual icon of non-royal English identity. The details of time and place that constructed and coincided with this “art of space as well as words” are paramount to my study of drama, as they were for Stephen Mullaney in The Place of the Stage (vii, 7). Places in Renaissance London, such as the marginal locations of the playhouses, were sites of multiple and emergent cultural meanings, for not until 1576, when James Burbage built London’s first playhouse, the Theatre, just outside the city walls, was the early modern theater itself envisioned as a place—a building.4 The Tower, another of London’s marginal structures replete with cultural significance, had been the setting of many of England’s defining moments, and the theaters redefined the Tower’s meanings when playwrights brought that setting from London’s margins to the popular stage. Because drama helped shape early modern culture and history,5 its representations of the Tower are a key to understanding Renaissance England. In fact, the Tower plays, Tower history, and other cultural representations of the Tower can be read as texts that interacted to produce new cultural meanings.6 As the Tower is today a familiar symbol of English national identity (The Tower of London: The Official Guide), so it was during the Renaissance. And because historical drama played a crucial role in the construction of English Renaissance national identity, playgoers’ experiences of the Tower in history plays revolutionized their image of the Tower and of themselves in relation to

Introduction

3

it.7 I read the Tower, a landmark whose history reached back for centuries before the playhouses were constructed and which history plays represented for over fifty years, like Mullaney has read Renaissance London: as “a cultural artifact,” an emblem.8 THE TOWER OF LONDON AS A DRAMATIC EMBLEM By dissociating the Tower from the royal ideology that had come to define its meanings, and associating it instead with the oppositional ideology to which many disempowered, repressed, and disaffected playgoers subscribed, playwrights proved the Tower to be “quintessentially emblematic” or iconic (John Manning 27). Sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century English people of all social degrees were acutely aware of emblems—“combinations of mottoes and pictures, as well as emblematic motifs with their implied meanings.”9 Emblems, being vital to English Renaissance culture, influenced almost all visual and verbal communication and adorned every domestic and public space, and anything could be potentially emblematic.10 “Emblematic combinations of word and picture or emblematic designs with their implied meanings” were found in paintings, portraits, wall and ceiling decorations, carving, stained glass, and jewelry; embroidered onto cushions and bed valances; and woven into table carpets and tapestries. They were commonly used in books, triumphal arches, and Protestant and Catholic sermons, and were seen and heard in tournaments, pageants, state entries, court masques, and poetry.11 Emblems were especially notable in drama, “the most emblematic of all the literary arts, combining [ . . . ] a visual experience [ . . . ] with a verbal experience” (Daly, “Emblematic Drama” 153). Scholars attribute Renaissance drama’s emblematic qualities, especially scenic devices, to the prominence of emblem books, one of the most popular early modern literary forms (Diehl, An Index of Icons 3). By 1585 the emblem was “a serious, well-known genre commanding the attention of the sober literary critic” (Leisher 3). In 1589 George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie included a five-page discussion of emblematics that explained the desired effect of emblems upon their viewers: “the vse and intent [ . . . ] is to insinuat some secret, wittie, morall and braue purpose, presented to the beholder, either to recreate his eye, or please his phantasie, or examine his iudgement, or occupie his braine or to manage his will either by hope or by dread, euery of which respectes be of no little moment.”12 By 1598, in Palladis Tamia, Francis Meres praised English emblem writers as “household names” (Daly, “England and the Emblem” 4–5). Peter M. Daly and Roy C. Strong have cited twelve such texts published in England between 1569 and 1635, eight

4

The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama

of which were sixteenth-century works, and many emblem books published on the Continent after 1531 were influential in England.13 Although not all playgoers took note of dramatic symbolism or emblems in plays, and Renaissance antiquaries did not write about the Tower in emblematic terms,14 early modern English people were receptive to symbolism involving the Tower. Robert Greene treats lions emblematically in his 1590 fictional work, Never Too Late, deriving “from the fact that the Tower lions were a sight not to be missed.”15 This synecdoche reveals two expectations Greene had of his readers: first, that they acknowledged the Tower’s status as a visitor attraction for ordinary people; and second, that a feature of the Tower, the lions in the Menagerie, could stand for the whole castle. Over the next few decades, as a result of the Tower’s appearance on the stage, it became an emblem of English subjects’ struggles with the crown and a corporeal and spiritual icon of their national identity. In the plays, the Tower not only serves as a scenic unit that localizes the action in London but is truly emblematic in that it points to meanings beyond itself, plays a major role in the action, and gives the plays new levels of interpretation (Daly, “Emblematic Drama” 174–75, 178). Despite the Tower’s centrality in English history and culture, literary and cultural studies have not yet historicized, nor revealed in any other mode, the Tower’s emblematic meanings in early modern drama. Nor has the Tower’s role as an evolving cultural icon been treated beyond its obvious functions as a medieval royal palace and fortress.16 Although the Tower’s prominent role in early modern English literature has received limited or marginal commentary in studies of Tower history or English history,17 scholars have not yet explored that role in any depth or attended to it in terms of national identity. In fact, research on the Tower’s evolution into the architectural symbol of the English people and their history has centered on the Restoration period or the Victorian age, when large numbers of tourists began to visit the castle.18 Such symbolism began to emerge, it appears, as early as 1579, when the Tower first appeared spatially on the early modern stage.19 The Tower of London developed, I will argue, as an icon of opposition to the crown and an evolving and complex symbol of English national identity alongside its representations in twenty-two history plays from 1579 to 1624 and two more in c.1628–29 and c.1625–34.20 PRACTICING CULTURAL HISTORICISM Like others engaged in the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies, I aim to interpret culture, specifically English Renaissance culture, by “draw[ing]

Introduction

5

from whatever fields are necessary to produce the knowledge required” (Nelson et al. 2, 4). My critical practice has grown out of, and thus incorporates enduring features of, new historicism. Along with new historicists and the intellectual historian Michel Foucault, whose work on “the new history” shaped their ideas, I am interested in “discontinuity and rupture, the moments of transformation and difference”—especially moments when the Tower took on new emblematic meanings in English culture—and the power relations that surrounded those transformations (Brannigan 46, 51). In addition to Foucault’s conception of new history, new historicists deploy cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s method of thick description: analysis of how a practice or idea is “produced, perceived, and interpreted” within its own culture (Geertz 6–7). Because Geertz viewed culture as “webs of significance,” he extrapolated “large conclusions from small, but densely textured facts” (5–9, 28). For new historicists, this practice involves placing a cultural text within “a network of framing intentions and cultural meanings” (Gallagher and Greenblatt 21). My critical practice follows this inductive method of analyzing tightly-woven threads of cultural evidence. Additionally, I utilize two concepts that the first and predominant new historicist, Stephen Greenblatt, has studied—self-fashioning and the theater’s exchanges with the surrounding culture—to explain Renaissance monarchs’ and other social groups’ efforts to shape their identities through the Tower.21 Another new historicist, Mullaney, first studied Renaissance drama in terms of London’s cultural spaces (vii), a topic I address with specific regard to the Tower. And Emily Carroll Bartels’ work on Christopher Marlowe’s negative representations of alien character types “as a strategy for self-authorization and self-empowerment” in Renaissance culture (xv) has influenced my thinking of the Tower’s dramatic and cultural representations. Historicist critical practice differs from formalist literary analysis of the text alone as well as traditional historiography, which assumes that history can be known or seen objectively.22 Rather, I view history itself as a construct or a text, not a background against which to understand literary works.23 Because history plays were events where the Tower’s cultural meanings were constructed,24 I accord them an equal place with documentary history in the Tower’s development as a cultural icon. Like many early modern English people did, I recognize plays as profound sources of social power, “at once shaped by and, more actively, shaping the culture” that produced them.25 The Tower plays are, in fact, a source of evidence that reveals new historical knowledge about the Tower’s early modern cultural meanings. Indeed, no place is better than the early modern stage to discover the formation of English national identity with the Tower, for the Tower’s evolving identity as a cultural symbol

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The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama

was defined there. The Tower’s symbolic meanings are located not only in the plays but also in their playwrights and original audiences; thus, I attempt to read the “social energy” in texts: how playwrights represented the Tower, how Renaissance playgoers might have reacted to those representations, and how an object represented—the Tower—was affected by “its encounter with the theater.”26 Although my critical practice builds upon new historicists’ most compelling ideas, like other recent historicists I break from their classic methods in two important ways. First, new historicists have often relied upon Foucault’s theory that forms of state power control subversion and even produce it, only to incorporate it into themselves.27 This subversion/containment model has been criticized for unnecessarily totalizing cultures, despite Greenblatt’s stated resistance to totalization.28 While I analyze subversive cultural practices, I reject the classic new-historicist subversion/containment theory, with its a priori conclusion. Second, as a signature practice, classic new historicists have analyzed “marginal, odd, fragmentary” anecdotes alongside literary texts, “pull[ing] even the most canonical works off to the border of history,” where literature could be reinterpreted “in opposition to history’s dominant narrative discourse.”29 Critics of new historicism contend that the anecdotal method produces readings that are more formalist than historical and disparage it as “notorious anecdotalism with its habitual gesture toward historic specificity (‘On May 13, 1542 . . . ’), offering some bizarre incident as the point of generation of a cultural principle that is then discovered in a canonical text.”30 Thus, rather than employ anecdotes as evidence or as a license “to retotalize the culture” (Kastan 30), I attempt to amass a credible, solid base of evidence drawn from multiple cultural sources including traditionally historical texts. Because of these weaknesses in classic new historicism, in recent decades certain historicist critics have written interventions or developed reformist practices from it,31 facilitating the movement’s evolution from Greenblatt’s original mode, which critics have attacked as “undertheorized” and not historical, not “a genuinely historicized critical practice.”32 Such revisionist practitioners deploy new historicism as a springboard for their “new historicisms,” each one filtering out perceived weaknesses of classic new historicism, emphasizing selected strengths, and adding innovations, thereby shaping historicist critical practice to become continuously more effective, more historical, and new.33 My critical practice springs from the work of two interventionists: Albert H. Tricomi, whose reformist practice of cultural historicism I adopt and enlarge, and David Scott Kastan, who, along with Tricomi,

Introduction

7

has articulated and put into practice some of cultural historicism’s salient features.34 By proposing that the Tower of London’s emblematic meanings are a significant way to understand English Renaissance culture, I focus upon reconstructing and understanding the past.35 I emphasize interdisciplinarity and the intertextuality of historical and cultural texts of all kinds; I hold the conviction that such texts shape culture and construct history “as an ongoing cultural, not merely event-based, process”; and I acknowledge this conviction’s dependency upon the affectivity of texts.36 Indeed, it is readers and spectators who, through their reactions, give texts and history multiple meanings.37 A text or performance acquires its meanings “from the discourses that circulate through it”; thus, knowledge about original readers and audiences facilitates cultural-historicist textual interpretation.38 Cultural historicism, like new historicism, being “an association of practices, whose nature is fluid and changing or changeable” (Tricomi, Reading Tudor-Stuart Texts through Cultural Historicism 15), my work also assimilates features of other interventionist practices, especially cultural materialism. Like cultural materialists I adopt some terminology from Raymond Williams, who treated cultural systems as having dominant, residual, and emergent elements39—terms useful for describing institutions, organizations, and cultural practices at the Tower as they waxed and waned throughout the medieval and Renaissance periods. This study also incorporates a tenet of cultural-materialist practice, demonstrating “ways in which defiance, subversion, dissidence, resistance, all forms of political opposition, [were] articulated, represented and performed” in Renaissance England.40 Like the cultural materialist Catherine Belsey, I associate my critical practice with cultural history, which “records meanings” and “constructs a culture by reading its artifacts.”41 My practice of cultural historicism is, thus, especially intertextual and interdisciplinary: It goes beyond the interpretation of plays to analyze oppositional representations of the Tower in a broadside ballad, a portrait, and a delftware plate. This project emphasizes material culture— song lyrics, pottery, diaries, portraiture, tracts, poetry, sermons, woodcuts, speeches—as cultural artifacts, texts that can be read and that have the power to influence other texts and events. As another key feature of my “audience-centered” practice of cultural historicism, I attempt to recover various groups of early modern readers and playgoers’ responses to the Tower’s cultural representations (D. Watson 2, 5). Although Andrew Gurr has documented Renaissance London’s known playgoers and hundreds of quotations about plays from that period, very little documentary evidence is available regarding audience reactions to any English Renaissance plays.42 Nevertheless, by analyzing the Tower plays’

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The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama

original playgoers and their attitudes toward the crown and government, I reconstruct the probable reactions of social groups of playgoers whose socioeconomic or religious persecution or ambitions “made them particularly susceptible to the influence of plays” (Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience 62) and other cultural texts that represented resistance through the Tower. As Arthur F. Kinney argues, “Playgoing is a matter of cognition—that is, how human beings acquire and process information” (Shakespeare and Cognition xv). Because perceptions depend upon one’s “cultural values, practices, and conditioning,” they are “linked [ . . . ] with memory and experience”—both individual memories and experiences and “social, communal beliefs and experiences.”43 According to Kinney, “semiosis, the making of meaning, derives from both sets of information”; therefore, “cognitive response [ . . . ] draw[s] on the predispositions of a person’s past and a person’s culture.”44 Playgoers with disparate cultural backgrounds probably would have interpreted a representation of the Tower in different ways, “depending on how the raw data [was] combined with past experiences, cultural conventions, and personal memory to form the basis for meaning. Interpretations [could] vary widely” (Shakespeare and Cognition xiv). For these plays’ original audiences, then, the Tower’s dramatic meanings included the actual Tower’s socially-constructed meanings over the centuries and especially during playgoers’ lifetimes, but also “interactional meanings, meanings established by [every] playgoer’s current individual association with” the actual Tower, the Tower’s representation in the play, and any other Tower plays in their memories (Shakespeare’s Webs xxiii). Kinney’s work on Renaissance playgoers’ interpretations of stage properties, “physical objects that contribute to signification and meaning in drama” (Shakespeare and Cognition xv), similarly informs my project. By merging cognitive theory with material culture, he interprets “material objects in a play by looking at those objects as they are employed (or conceived) elsewhere in the play, or in other works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries or in their contemporary cultural practices” (Shakespeare’s Webs ix). In this way, I extrapolate certain social groups of playgoers’ likely responses to the Tower’s dramatic representations based upon those groups’ interactions with the actual Tower and their respective monarchs, for whose authority the Tower ostensibly stood. Renaissance audiences were “crowds,” but they were also “assembl[ies] of individuals” (Gurr, The Shakespeare Company 47–48). Therefore, while I sometimes argue for an audience’s “collective experience” (Lopez 18), more often I consider the experiences of specific categories of playgoers. Because Renaissance England was intensely divided by social degree, and individuals within certain social groups of that time and place

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had similar cultural experiences of the government and, by extension, the Tower, the memories and experiences of playgoers from those social groups predisposed them to react in certain ways to the Tower’s onstage representations. Moreover, the few extant accounts of Renaissance playgoer reactions “normally focus on the level of the world of the drama” (Gras 23, 40). Since the world of the Tower plays is, for the most part, medieval or sixteenth-century London, and much is known about medieval and early modern Londoners’ history with the Tower, formal evidence about specific social groups of Renaissance Londoners is a gauge for discerning these theatergoers’ likely reactions to the represented Tower. According to John J. Ratey, a cognitive scientist whose work Kinney cites, “one’s emotional state at a given instant affects how the amygdala processes the emotional tag of a memory [ . . . ]. An individual who is depressed is predisposed to see a certain memory in a negative light—so it’s a different kind of memory than it would have been had the person been generally happy.”45 Therefore, a dramatic scene’s tone, from one social group’s perspective, affected how playgoers from that group would have received the Tower’s representation in that scene. For instance, as a playgoer received “emotionally charged information,” his or her brain would have “activate[d] an immediate aggressive or defensive response.”46 Thus, when historicizing certain playgoers’ likely response to a Tower passage, I consider those playgoers’ cultural milieu as well as the scene’s tone, characters, discourse, and action that takes place before, within, and after the passage, all of which affect the Tower’s emotional appeal to those playgoers. For “what makes an idea subversive is [ . . . ] the context of its articulation—to whom, and to how many and in what circumstance it is said or written” (Dollimore 22). Like other historicist critics, I also take into account, where possible, the timing of each play’s production, which is vital for interpreting a play’s probable meaning to its original audiences (Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation 47). Renaissance playgoers were acutely aware of “implied analogy” between their time “and episodes from past history”; in fact, they “assumed that all history [was] contemporary history.”47 The dates of Tower play performances are also important for determining their cumulative effects upon theatergoers. Since “repeated patterns of thought over time [ . . . ] assemble data into meaningful configurations,” the frequency of Tower plays collectively reinforced the Tower’s oppositional “neural associations” in playgoers’ minds.48 Tower plays, thus, could recondition groups of playgoers’ communal memory of the actual Tower, altering its meanings in English culture. Because “memories can be recalled from any number of sensory cues,” even in scenes that represented the Tower verbally but not visually, “the unseen

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stage property cognitively dramatized in the mind’s eye” demanded playgoers’ reactions.49 And reactions to the Tower’s representations, like the representations themselves, were often oppositional. EARLY MODERN OPPOSITION TO THE MONARCH Elizabeth I, in whose reign the Tower plays made their debut, elevated herself to heavenly heights in her subjects’ eyes. Throughout her reign, and especially after Pope Pius V excommunicated her in 1570, by which time the popular and essentially Catholic Corpus Christi plays were being abolished, she appropriated the cult of the virgin, specifically a Protestant adaptation of the Virgin Mary, fashioning herself as celestial and encouraging her subjects to worship her as virgin, bride, mother and protector, and queen of the church.50 England’s church and state supported this practice, for the nationalistic Elizabethan Englishness “was, above all, a Protestant Englishness [ . . . ]. Now, Protestantism and patriotism were one and the same.”51 After the English defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, an event “interpreted [ . . . ] as evidence of divine sanction for England and the European Protestant cause,” festivals celebrating Elizabeth and her reign, such as Accession Day and the queen’s birthday, intensified.52 By the 1590s portraits represented her as a goddess: ageless, supernatural, omniscient.53 Elizabeth’s divine image bolstered her authority and her subjects’ sometimes tenuous loyalty, for female rule remained controversial, especially for an unmarried queen whose succession was in doubt and whose reign was, in the later years, “sullied by various political tensions” (Hackett 9). However, at the same time that many subjects worshipped Elizabeth, others considered her to be a tyrant. Subjects were cognizant of the discrepancies between their divine queen’s image and the experience of life in her kingdom, especially “the asymmetries in the allocation of resources,” the persecution of recusants, and the crown’s expanding authority over the nobility.54 Early modern England’s government was religiously and municipally oppressive, for the monarchs themselves were repressive.55 In fact, although in some years more antagonistic feelings were directed toward the sovereign than in other years, many English subjects endured “a repressive culture” throughout the period of Tower play production, even into the reign of Charles I.56 An Homilie Agaynst Disobedience and Wylful Rebellion, published in 1570, 1571, and 1623, demonstrates the extent of royal repression in Elizabethan and early-Stuart England.57 It names rebellion as “the first and the greatest, and the very roote of all other sinnes, and the first and principall cause both of all worldly and bodyly miseries, sorowes, diseases, sicknesses, and deathes, and

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[ . . . ] the very cause of death and damnation” (A2r). Citing two New Testament scriptures, its author argues, “kings, Queenes, & other princes [ . . . ] are ordained of God, are to be obeyed & honoured of their subiectes,” even if a Prince is evil, for “God (say the holye scriptures) maketh a wicked man to raigne for the sinnes of the people” (A3v, B2r). As a result of the repression that Elizabethan subjects faced, despite Elizabeth’s power, success, and popularity, “another, darker discourse” developed, a “contrasting rhetoric of dissent, criticism, and disrespect” of the queen.58 This discourse coincided with sixteenth-century English and Continental reformers’ “resistance theory,” an emergent ideology that encouraged “social protest” and “disobedience to oppressive government,” even “popular revolution” against “tyrannical magistrates.”59 In Catholic countries Elizabeth’s enemies verbally and visually portrayed her as “the scourge of Catholic martyrs,” and some demonstrated their opposition “by stabbing, burning, or otherwise destroying her image” (Strong, Portraits 32, 40). Pope Pius V’s 1570 Bull, Regnans in excelsis, furthermore “excommunicated heretical monarchs and even suggested that Catholic subjects of such monarchs might be justified in assassinating them,” all of which Sixtus V was believed to have reaffirmed in a second bull of excommunication, A Declaration of the Sentence and Deposition of Elizabeth, in 1588.60 Even Elizabeth’s story in the Protestant propagandist text, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, has recently been reinterpreted as implicitly critical of Elizabeth for her Catholic conformity during her 1554 imprisonment, by Mary I, in the Tower (Freeman 106–16). While historicist critics have interpreted Jacobean and Caroline opposition drama as “a vehicle” for proliferating “the oppositionist agenda,”61 more recently they have treated Elizabethan plays from an oppositional viewpoint.62 And certain groups of London theatergoers consistently embraced themes that resisted their powerlessness or disaffection from as early as 1590, when the Tower plays entered the scene.63 It is important at this point to consider the reasons why these groups “respond[ed] favorably to representations of transgressive behavior and ideas” (Cartelli, Marlowe 37), especially those involving the Tower. The represented Tower “simultaneously addressed itself in different ways to different constituencies”; therefore, understanding certain social groups of playgoers’ “expectations and mindsets” is imperative for interpreting the Tower’s role in the plays.64 How a Renaissance playgoer “received and responded to” the Tower’s dramatic representations depended upon that playgoer’s predispositions toward the crown, the government, and the actual Tower of London—“the facts of his or her life and preoccupations”—and playwrights’ representations of those facts (40, 129).

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THE AMPHITHEATER AND INNYARD AUDIENCES Of the twenty-one plays that represented the Tower from c.1590 to 1624, scholars know with reasonable certainty the provenance of seventeen, and all seventeen were performed in open-air amphitheaters—the Theatre, the Rose, the Globe, the Fortune, and the Curtain—and two inn-yards, the Boar’s Head Theatre and the Red Bull.65 Although “audiences were deeply divided socially” and, for the most part, geographically within each playhouse, “with the plebeians in the pit and the gentlemen in the galleries (or the other way round at the indoor theatres),” amphitheater audiences represented all degrees of English society: noble lords and ladies, gentlemen, citizens and merchants, apprentices and journeymen, whores and vagrants.66 Inn-yard theaters, where playing was allowed until 1604, evidently accommodated a higher proportion of playgoers of lesser degree, for the yard of the Boar’s Head, at least, where admission was less expensive than in the two-penny galleries, “had about as much room for people as that at the Fortune, but the main galleries had much less than the equivalent places at the Fortune.”67 After 1599 and 1600, when hall playhouses reopened for boy companies to resume playing, and after 1608, when the King’s Men acquired the Blackfriars theater, and other hall playhouses opened, the prohibitive costs of playgoing at these private venues excluded most of the populace, thereby increasing the proportion of citizens and those of lesser degree to that of gentles in the more affordable open-air theaters.68 Although the social composition of the audiences changed gradually over many years, citizens, artisans, and apprentices are believed to have composed the majority of amphitheater audiences from 1576 to 1642.69 To some extent, they were also known to attend the expensive hall playhouses, such as the Cockpit, later the Phoenix, where two Tower plays were first produced in the late 1620s or early 1630s and two others were revived in c.1632.70 Still, the public playhouses that staged Tower plays through 1624 were the only theatrical venue that most working Londoners could afford;71 thus, the open-air theater playwrights must have acknowledged that citizens, artisans, craftsmen, laborers, and apprentices composed a large segment of their audiences. Renaissance performances being designed to please and elicit an instant response from “a tight grouping of people,” authors knew and aimed to satisfy their audiences.72 And in Elizabethan and early-Stuart England, three groups of playgoers within the large, heterogeneous amphitheater and inn-yard audiences were especially predisposed to enjoy witnessing an oppressive royal icon’s meaning becoming dislodged from royal control.

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Apprentices and Other Disadvantaged Playgoers By the 1590s apprentices and other Londoners below the degree of gentleman—laborers, journeymen, “servants, vagrants, [ . . . ] discharged soldiers and sailors,” and even boys, all of whom officials included in the “vague and disparaging term” apprentices73—had ample reasons to oppose the crown’s social and economic policies. Though scholars debate whether the scale of England’s social problems of the 1590s constituted a crisis, they tend to agree that this was the worst decade of the century for Londoners, who perceived that they were living through a crisis.74 Four successive harvest failures, 1594– 97, threw farmers out of work and led to food shortages and severe inflation of food prices.75 This, in turn, along with other exorbitant living expenses, particularly rent in London, increased poverty even among laborers and craftsmen.76 Demand for goods and services fell, leading to high unemployment, and wages for workmen, journeymen, hired servants, and laborers had been regulated, most recently in 1589 and 1590 for Londoners.77 The years in which London’s public theaters were open, 1576–1642, were the weakest for “real purchasing power” between 1260 and 1950, real wages reaching their lowest point in those seven centuries in 1597.78 “Perhaps two-fifths of [England’s] total population of four million fell below the margin of subsistence” (Guy, Introduction 10). In 1593 anti-enclosure acts were repealed, and the enclosure of commons, which benefited landowners including members of Parliament, forced many farmers who had worked that land to pay drastically increased tenant rents or become “wandering poor.”79 Although England was “about 45 per cent enclosed” in 1500, and only another two percent of the country was enclosed by 1600, popular resistance to enclosures was evidently severe: The 1593 repeal “opened the flood-gates to fresh enclosures, and, following the bad harvest of 1595, panic caused [the acts] to be revived.”80 Enclosures being blamed for food scarcity in Hampshire in 1586 and Oxfordshire in 1596, even John Stow in 1598 complained about illegal “inclosures” of a “common field” outside of London, “all which ought to lye open & free for all men.”81 These poor from the countryside as well as discharged and deserting soldiers and refugees from religious wars on the Continent migrated to London seeking “employment or relief,” increasing the city’s distress.82 It would take years for the 1597 Poor Law to alleviate the situation in London, where “Salubrity was threatened. The Walbrook and the Fleet rivers had become sewers; waste littered the streets.”83 In fact, poverty and crowded tenements exacerbated epidemic diseases, leading to sharp rises in urban mortality.84 London and smaller towns fought outbreaks of plague, “influenza, typhus,

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dysentery and smallpox,” as well as sweating sickness, “their impact frequently aggravated by malnutrition.”85 Despite widespread poverty that left ten to thirty percent of Londoners destitute, throughout the 1590s and beyond, English subjects faced heavy taxation to fund military activities in Spain, the Netherlands, France, and Ireland.86 In 1602–03, a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross cited London’s “exceeding outcry of the poor that they are much oppressed of the rich of this city, in plain terms, of the Common Council” and criticized the disproportionate tax policy of “fifteenths, wherein the burden is more heavy upon a mechanical and handicraft poor man than upon an alderman” (Calendar of the Manuscripts [ . . . ] Salisbury 12:672). Because of these hardships, “as expressed in anonymous libels, seditious utterances reported from alehouses, and the few surviving examinations of rioters and insurrectionaries, the opinions of common folk reveal a deep hatred of the people possessed of the power, social standing, and landed wealth denied to them.”87 Crime, banditry, beggary, and vagrancy rose, and public disorder, protest, and rebellion were growing threats.88 In St. Martin’s, west of London, enclosure riots took place in 1592 (P. Clark, “Crisis” 53). And the scarcity of work and “competition from foreign labor” led London’s apprentices and “poor tradesmen” to hold “anti-alien protests” in 1586 and 1592, and in 1593 to advocate attacks and mount a revolt, by over two thousand apprentices, on foreigners.89 These conditions brought London’s apprentices and journeymen into conflict with foreigners, gentlemen, and city and crown officials.90 Over a third of London’s more than “96 insurrections, riots, and unlawful assemblies” from 1517 to 1640 were concentrated in the years 1581–1602 (R. Manning, Village Revolts 187). The “late-Elizabethan epidemic of disorder” began in 1581, when a crowd outside Ludgate Prison tried to free the prisoners, who rioted within (202). This “apprentice solidarity” was rekindled in June 1584, when on three consecutive days, apprentice disturbances took place, two involving five hundred and one thousand people “very nere the Theatre or Curten at the tyme of the Playes” and “at Theatre door”; again, rioters conspired to free imprisoned “prentizes.”91 Social tensions led apprentices and journeymen to ransack Lincoln’s Inn and brawl with the law students in September 1590.92 Also that year an apprentice was rescued from imprisonment “in a cage in Aldersgate Street,” and “a London baker was indicted for declaring he would kill the Queen and drink blood.”93 Elizabethan officials responded to these disturbances by temporarily closing the theaters in 1590—further oppressing London’s working poor by removing one of the chief pleasures they could afford94—and by issuing proclamations to suppress disorders among those of low social degree. After

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the 1590 attack on Lincoln’s Inn, a curfew was strictly enforced for “apprentices, journeymen, servants”; and “masterless men and other vagrant persons” were banished from London to prevent further uprisings (Tudor Royal Proclamations 3:60–61). In 1591, following “great disorders committed in and about [ . . . ] London,” including attempts to rescue prisoners, a proclamation prohibited unlawful assembly, under martial law, by “multitudes of a popular sort of base condition, whereof some are apprentices and servants to artificers” (82). The proclamation was meant to control “sundry sorts of base people, some known apprentices such as are of base manual occupation, and some others wandering idle persons of condition of beggars and vagabonds, and some coloring their wandering by the name of soldiers returned from the war” (82). Another 1591 proclamation placed vagrants under martial law, including those pretending to be soldiers having returned from wars overseas and actual soldiers who had either served or deserted their service, who were now begging or robbing subjects and travelers (96–97). This proclamation was reissued on July 4, 1595 (143). In the few known cases in which members of this social group articulated their discontent in writing, they were punished (Suzuki 185). Thomas Deloney and fourteen other weavers were imprisoned in 1595 for printing the pamphlet “Complaint of the Yeomen Weavers against the Immigrant Weavers.”95 And in 1596 the Lord Mayor suppressed Deloney’s now lost “Ballad on the Want of Corn,” a “Complaint of great Want and Scarcity of Corn within the Realm” that characterized Elizabeth as extraordinarily compassionate, satirizing “her actual unresponsiveness to her people.”96 In many ways, then, hardworking Londoners carried much of the burden of the capital’s early modern social problems, and as a result they evidently “recogni[zed . . . ] that they held common political and economic interests as a group” (183). Catholic Playgoers By the 1590s Catholics of all social degrees likewise struggled against royal oppression that had developed and progressively increased throughout Elizabeth’s reign. Elizabeth ostensibly, “not liking to make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts,” believed “that consciences are not to be forced” and told the French ambassador in 1597 that the religious differences between two Christian princes could easily be overcome, “for there was only one Jesus Christ and one faith, and all the rest that they disputed about but trifles.”97 As Elizabeth intended to follow a theological via media between Calvinism and Catholicism, her Settlement of 1559 maintained a policy of adiaphora or “things indifferent,” in which all things relating to

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“liturgical, ethical, and doctrinal matters” not mentioned in the Bible were left to the jurisdiction of the queen and her bishops.98 Officially, Catholics could comply with the Act of Uniformity through “outward conformity,” attending Protestant church services at least once a month while privately retaining Catholic beliefs.99 However, the actual practice of the Elizabethan Settlement was inflexible. “The Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity were supported by royal injunctions and commissions for a visitation to enforce them” in 1559.100 The injunctions attacked “images, relics, and miracles,” outlawed “unlicensed preaching,” and ordered that recusants be handed over to government officials (Guy, Tudor England 291). Throughout the 1560s visitors enforced the injunctions through iconoclasm: altars and images were removed from churches, and “bonfires consumed roods, statues, banners, ornaments, and sometimes even vestments” (292). Moreover, by 1565 a “general and less fraternal assault on nonconformity” had been introduced, and bishops were “commanded to treat all nonconformity with uncompromising severity.”101 Adiaphora became a matter of “obedience to crown and Parliament,” transforming things indifferent “into categories of submission and obedience” (Jenkins 163–64). By 1570—with Elizabeth’s excommunication, increasing resistance from recusants in England, and pressure from Catholic forces abroad—oppression of Catholics intensified (Bacon 98–100). Elizabeth came to view Catholics as traitors, and according to the 1581 Act to Retain the Queen’s Majesty’s Subjects in their Due Obedience, Anyone saying mass was to be fined 200 marks (£133) and imprisoned for a year, while anyone hearing it was to pay half that fine but suffer the same detention. Fines for non-attendance at church were raised to £20 per month; anyone absent for a year was to be bound over in the sum of £200; and any person or corporation employing a recusant schoolmaster was to pay £10 per month. (Guy, Tudor England 277, 299)

In Elizabethan England, Catholicism became closely connected with some of the gentry, who could most easily afford to support and harbor priests and maintain private chapels.102 Catholic gentry were “concerned essentially with the preservation of their households and the practice of the old religion” there (Smith 153). In the north, Catholic gentry were more resistant and slower to adopt religious reform, and recusancy rose sharply as Elizabeth’s reign drew to a close.103 An estimated twenty-five percent of the Yorkshire West Riding gentry were recusant in 1605, and of 128 known recusant members of the Elizabethan laity from twenty-two counties, 115 were peers, peeresses, knights, esquires, gentlemen, or gentlewomen.104 This

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“obstinacy of a section of the nobility and gentry in clinging to Catholicism” fueled conflict with the crown (Trimble 209). Three major Catholic plots against Elizabeth had involved nobles; the Duke of Norfolk had participated in all three, and his 1572 execution on Tower Hill was Elizabeth’s first “shedding of noble blood.”105 In fact, nearly all of the sixty-two Tudor and earlyStuart executions on Tower Hill were those of nobles and gentry, including two famous Catholics in 1535: John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and Sir Thomas More.106 By the 1590s Catholicism had enjoyed a revival in England.107 William Allen’s seminary at his English College at Douai had supplied over one hundred missionary priests from 1574 to 1585, “breathing new life into [ . . . ] English Catholicism.”108 Even in London a small Catholic community thrived: The list of 128 Elizabethan recusants includes twenty-two in London-Middlesex (Trimble 271). Through the 1580s masses were offered in London’s French and Spanish embassy chapels and nobles’ homes; safe houses harbored priests; and London was the site of a Catholic conference and the center of England’s Jesuit activity.109 Catholics, including priests, even attended theaters during the period of Tower play production.110 Nevertheless, at times throughout the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, Catholics “were perceived as a grave threat to civil order” and were severely oppressed, both at the Tower and beyond, especially after the queen’s excommunication.111 In a 1582 epistle, the Jesuit Robert Persons (or Parsons) described “outrages, whiche in this Tower of London are perpetrated” upon Catholic prisoners, “aflictions and torments whiche are there practised withein doores, [ . . . ] buried [ . . . ] in darknesse, and cleane hyd in blynde and obscure dungeons,” and complained that, when confronted, the authorities “either flatlie denie all that was done, or with pleasant woords extenuate the matter” (87). After the Jesuit Edmund Campion was tortured in the Tower, false reports containing “a supposed confession” were published “for a trapp to beguile other Catholiques” (88–89). Another Catholic prisoner who became ill from hunger and cold had his bed taken away by the Lieutenant of the Tower and was made to “lie vpon the bare floore,” which caused his death (90–91). Yet another Catholic Tower prisoner was tortured and “throwen in to a verie obscure doungeon, that was bothe darke & dredefull, withoute light, withoute bedding, withoute nedefull apparell,” and when a donation was made for his relief, “the lieutenant of the tower wolde not suffer the poore man to enjoy the benefit of that almes” (92–95). After six months in the Tower, this prisoner’s public execution began with a brief hanging, hardly long enough “to dull the

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sense and felyng of payns in the torments foloweinge,” and, as was typical for Catholics, he was disemboweled as he revived; for, as Persons writes, “oure aduersaries are more rigourouse and more mercylesse against vs, than they are againste anie sort of malefactors” (95–96). In fact, according to John Bayley in The History and Antiquities of the Tower of London, Elizabethan Catholics were watched, hunted down, and persecuted; not by fair and open means, but by every dark and crafty proceeding that could mislead, ensnare, and betray them. [ . . . ] the Tower was crowded with prisoners, chiefly Jesuits, and the cruelties and tortures of which that place became the scene, about this period, excited so great an outcry both at home and abroad, that it was deemed expedient to put forth a paper to explain and excuse the measures of government. (486–87)

The author of that paper, a 1583 tract entitled “A Declaration of the fauourable dealing of her Maiesties Commissioners appointed for the Examination of certaine Traitours, and of tortures vniustly reported to be done vpon them for matters of religion,” denied some of the tortures but minimized and justified others and represented the Elizabethan government’s treatment of Jesuits as “milde and gratious clemencie” (A4v). Sixty-four priests and twenty Catholic laymen were executed in England in the 1580s, and such executions peaked again in the early 1590s (Plowden 219). In the 1590s when subjects, under crushing social conditions, opposed “the crown’s fiscal and military demands,” the Privy Council and magistrates reacted by dealing more harshly with rebels and Catholics, intensifying Catholic resentment toward the government (Guy, Introduction 1). “Savage legislation against Jesuits and seminarians” supported the 1584–85 Act for the Queen’s Safety; through it, 123 priests were executed by 1603 (Guy, Tudor England 301). Laws against Catholics toughened in 1587 and were more strictly enforced in 1597 (Morey 68–69). In fact, as I will emphasize in Chapters Two and Three, English Catholics faced religious persecution throughout the Tudor and early-Stuart periods, often at the Tower. For this reason, and because many Catholic martyrs were buried within the Tower complex or in nearby chapels, early modern Catholics considered the Tower to be “one of the most hallowed shrines of the city.”112 Noble Playgoers By the 1590s Elizabeth’s rule was more authoritarian than in the past, based on her belief in the divine right of kings, which aggravated the nobles on her

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Council as well as Catholics: Robert Persons contended “that the ruler’s prerogative was strictly limited by law and [ . . . ] that while the pope derived his powers directly from God, kings drew theirs from the people” (Guy, “Introduction” 12–13). D. G. Watson explains, “Parliament, the forum for the aristocracy and gentry, was bypassed at times and at others silenced—religious reform and the question of succession, for example, could not be discussed—and the nobles outside the exclusive inner circle complained of the difficulty of gaining access to the Queen” (22). Even the disgruntled Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Michael Blount, who had confided in a Catholic rebel about a separate plot against Elizabeth, facilitated an apprentice riot in 1595 (R. Manning, “The Prosecution of Sir Michael Blount” 219–20). In 1597 the French ambassador André Hurault wrote, “The nobility and the people are dissatisfied with the government of the Lord Treasurer and hate him strangely. The people are very hardly treated, and there is no justice where the nobility has any interest” (12). Elizabeth inconsistently distributed “favors and rewards,” and to her courtiers’ chagrin, under the economic strain of war, she was forced “to reduce her favours and gifts to suitors.”113 In this tense political climate, ambitious subjects competing for limited patronage led to factionalism, especially between Sir Robert Cecil and Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex.114 Elizabeth once had favored Essex. By the late-Elizabethan age it was customary for courtiers ambitious for financial, social, and political advancement to fashion themselves as the queen’s amorous suitors. Elizabeth, in turn, used the conventions of courtly love to fashion her own image as their desired but chaste mistress—a powerful woman in a patriarchal society (Campbell 246). By posing as the unattainable object of her courtiers’ chivalrous displays of affection, she provided them with a socially acceptable means of submitting to a woman in power.115 Courtly devotions to the queen ranged from reverent to sexual, and courtiers’ political behavior likewise reflected a certain intimacy with her (Levine 29). Among other courtier poets, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Ralegh, and Essex used Petrarchan discourse to fashion themselves as Elizabeth’s wooers,116 each establishing with her a very profitable relationship. Essex, the queen’s favorite in the 1590s, received more of her “gifts, titles, and honors” than any other Elizabethan courtier (May 16). In fact, Nicholas Hilliard’s 1588 miniature of the Young Man amongst Roses, believed to represent Essex, “has to be seen as the supreme artistic expression of one of the greatest [ . . . ] romances of the age, that between a lonely ageing female ruler in her middle fifties and a dashing aristocratic youth of twenty.”117 Elizabeth and Essex’s sixteen-year courtly romance was a tumultuous one. He envied the queen’s partiality toward his rival, Ralegh; she became

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jealous upon discovering that Essex had secretly married Sidney’s pregnant widow, fulfilling a pact he had made on his friend’s deathbed (Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth 79). The queen permanently banished Essex’s wife from court, for it was during Essex’s deception of Elizabeth in 1587–90 that she actually had fallen in love with him (79). She remained enamored “up to the last minute,” despite Essex’s behavior toward her from 1598 on, so arrogant as to be treasonous, and the humiliation of public censure that followed his failed military campaign to suppress Tyrone’s rebellion in Ireland in 1599.118 By 1600, when Elizabeth refused to renew the monopoly that was the source of his livelihood, the financially desperate earl decided to risk his life in an attempt to recover “his career and self-esteem.”119 Numerous lords and noblemen supported Essex and thus opposed Elizabeth so strongly that they too were willing to conspire against her. The members of these social groups who attended the Tower plays, then—apprentices, religious dissidents, and certain nobles—were, in various ways, socially repressed; that is, psychologically or physically crushed by the denial of human dignity, the legal practice of their religion, or a living wage; or denied rewards to which they felt entitled. Many of them had experienced royal tyranny, suffering from their monarch’s placing “personal desires” above “the common good” (G. Walker 7). These playgoers were forced to abide by unjust laws, even by early modern standards; the tyrannical “imposition of excessive taxes”; irresponsible stewardship of the kingdom’s wealth; or their coreligionists’ being tortured or killed for practicing their faith (Kelley 64). As the playwright John Bale wrote in 1543, “The lawes of menne are to be allowed, so longe as they agree to the lawes of God. For els are they no lawes, but vyolence and tyrannye. Prynces and magystrates beynge the mynysters of god, ought to make no laws for their priuate commodite, but for the publyque welthe of ther commons.”120 TOWER OF EMPOWERMENT The Tower plays were uniquely situated to transform the Tower’s popular cultural meanings, for they empowered theatergoers whom the crown had oppressed. This empowerment took place on several levels. First, playgoing was an inherently liberating experience because it took place in London’s Liberties, “neighborhoods” both within and without the city proper that were “specific legal entities, free from the lord mayor’s jurisdiction and—crucially—self-governed,” where subjects literally had more freedom.121 “Geography [being] a significant axis of influence determining audience response,” members of repressed social groups such as London’s apprentices, who were,

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for instance, placed under a curfew in 1590 and 1591, would have been acutely aware of the freedom the Liberties afforded them.122 Moreover, the public playhouses were themselves “democratizing institution[s],” enabling commoners to sit among lords who had paid the same entry price, in contrast with court or private theaters, where the monarch sat at the focal point, surrounded by the audience (Orgel 8–11). And in a public playhouse “the act of common spectatorship” created a sense of community, enabling playgoers to “feel at one with the anonymous others who paid their pennies for the same entertainment” (Howard, Theater of a City 12). Thus, even as a dramatic production began, repressed playgoers would have felt to some degree liberated, less restricted, and socially connected, predisposing them to be further empowered by the play. Second, plays that represented oppositional themes acknowledged and validated oppressed playgoers’ plight. The Tower plays thereby elicited these playgoers’ sympathy—both empathy and commiseration—for similarly oppressed characters and stimulated solidarity with fellow playgoers who shared their troubles. The Tower plays’ being set primarily in London would have facilitated London playgoers’ identification with the characters and with their neighbors in the playhouse, which, in turn, validated their self-images (Cartelli, Marlowe 31). Thus, the plays’ representations of social or religious oppression would have “draw[n]” certain social groups within an “audience into a feeling of common cause in the face of their shared subjection to royal prerogatives” (144). Third, plays often encouraged political resistance, to which playgoers responded well (Bartels xv). English Renaissance playwrights understood the power of their craft to incite resistance, and they deliberately “transform[ed] the theater into one of the most popular and powerful arenas for social and political comment and dissent” (xiii). And playgoers were receptive to that development: According to Kastan, theaters were places not only where private people came together but where they came together as a public. In the theaters people assembled, were provided with a political vocabulary that served to construct and clarify their interests, and were endowed, by the theaters’ commercial logic, with an authority over [dramatic] representations. The audience was thus not merely a public assembly but a public now constituted as a domain of political significance. (216–17)

Thus, as assemblies, theater audiences were considered to be dangerous to the very social order that repressed many playgoers, especially laborers and

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religious dissidents.123 In fact, since the late fifteenth century, Londoners, who composed the majority of London theater audiences, had “regarded themselves as a sort of proxy for the English: they were The People” and, as such, could be “vociferous partisans” for certain ideas (Starkey, Six Wives 49). They were known to discuss plays in social settings (Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience 127). Plays being “the least inhibited medium of late-Elizabethan political commentary” and “by far the most substantial form of social intercommunication available, the only kind of popular journalism and the only occasion when large numbers of people gathered together except for sermons and executions,” and drawing an average attendance of three thousand London playgoers per day,124 no medium was more pervasive in shaping the Tower’s oppositional meaning among the populace. The authors of the Tower plays seized upon early modern London’s most culturally oppressive royal structure and represented it as a highly suggestive symbol of opposition to the crown; in fact, their dramatizations or suggestions of uprisings involving the Tower evidently encouraged certain oppressed playgoers to consider rebellion. Playgoers “craving for freedom” were “predisposed [ . . . ] to enjoy temporarily the pleasures of inhabiting another, more satisfying reality” in which repressed characters experience some degree of liberation.125 Renaissance drama, especially the Tower plays, represented “enormously suggestive material” which, as some contemporaries acknowledged, could not be rescinded and lingered in playgoers’ minds long after the final act.126 Indeed, like many early modern performances and other cultural texts, the Tower plays encouraged theatergoers to contemplate participating in the types of resistance the plays represented, for these theatrical experiences brought some oppressed playgoers “joyous liberation” and “its extended gratification.”127 According to Thomas Cartelli, “whether by authorial intention or through the theatrical translation of intention into apparently unintended effect, audience engagement [ . . . ] was often elicited in a manner that encouraged resistance to authority and vicarious participation in the enactment of transgressive fantasies.”128 Since “plays rely on and manipulate audiences’ awareness of themselves,” playgoers who imagined themselves resisting their oppression were empowered (Lopez 15). The experience of plays that represented rebellion—especially by characters with whom playgoers identified—would have changed those playgoers’ perceptions of themselves (Ratey 55). And the more Tower plays that one experienced, the greater the empowerment, for “the brain’s nerve cells self-organize when they have been trained enough by repeated contact with a particular stimulus” (55–56). Dramatic representations of subjects seizing the Tower, thereby contradicting and destabilizing received

Introduction

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meanings, would have caused playgoers’ nerve cells to “perceive the input as new and disturbing” and to reconstruct their ideas of the Tower (56). Thus, the Tower’s oppositional meanings, and playgoers’ corresponding empowerment, could become “entrenched by reinforcement” (Kinney, Shakespeare’s Webs xxiv). In fact, playwrights evidently made some theatergoers’ “vicarious empowerment” irresistible.129 Sometimes the Tower’s representations can be read as inviting certain groups of playgoers to resist royal authority at the Tower itself. Having witnessed several seasons’ Tower plays, certain groups of Londoners staged actual rebellions involving the Tower, some of which—for the first time since the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381—took place within the Tower’s environs. THE TOWER OF LONDON IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE DRAMA In Chapter One I have laid the foundation upon which my subsequent analysis builds. Throughout the following chapters, aiming to be comprehensive but not exhaustive, I historicize the Tower’s evolving meanings in English Renaissance culture alongside its representations in the Tower plays. These plays embody a progression through which a landmark came to symbolize a people and reveal new perspectives on the Tower’s history and symbolic role in the construction of Renaissance English nationhood. Chapter Two, a brief cultural history of the Tower through 1579, explores the Tower’s cultural meanings and its evolution as an icon before it appeared onstage. It illuminates, for the first time, the Tower’s symbolic and evolving meanings in English culture up to 1579 and thus its cultural meanings in Renaissance Londoners’ collective memories, laying the groundwork necessary for historicizing playgoers’ reactions to the Tower onstage thereafter. Because the Tower’s cultural role as a showplace evolved considerably during the years of Tower play production, this chapter concurrently traces the castle’s early development as a visitor attraction. In fact, it examines the basis for Graham Keevill’s 2004 claim, “Indeed the great historic significance of the Tower of London, and the iconic status of its central feature, William the Conqueror’s White Tower, have made the castle a public attraction since the reign of England’s first Queen Elizabeth” (xvi). Although much of this chapter is necessarily historiographical, I apply cultural historicism by reading art, literature, and folklore as texts that exemplify the Tower’s meanings through the likely attitudes of those who created and experienced them, and I underscore features of the Tower’s history that intimate themes in the Tower plays. I demonstrate in this chapter how English monarchs and their subjects, especially Londoners, perceived, reacted to, and fashioned the Tower,

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illustrating that, from the Tower’s earliest days, it was an unstable symbol of English identity—one whose meaning was not fixed and thus could be negotiated. The Tower’s cultural meanings fell into two general categories. England’s monarchs fashioned the Tower as a proud symbol of their kingdom; however, the Tower simultaneously developed as an emblem of conflict. Whether the conflict was a contest for the crown, a struggle between England and another country, or opposition between monarch and subjects, the Tower’s representation, and thus its cultural significance, was frequently out of royal control. In subsequent chapters I treat playwrights’ creations of new, ahistorical meanings of the Tower, further demonstrating Renaissance monarchs’ lack of control over the Tower’s ideology. In Chapter Three I argue that, from the Tower’s earliest appearances on the stage, it was never the monolithic symbol of royal power and magnificence that the Tudor and early-Stuart monarchs aimed to fashion. Rather, its dramatic meanings contradicted the official royal image of the Tower, dislodging the Tower from the crown’s self-promoting ideology. This chapter interprets the crown’s ideology of the Tower when the plays were produced and argues that, in all twenty-four Tower plays, the Tower is a symbol whose iconic meaning is unstable and contradictory to that royal ideology. In each play this instability takes at least one of these forms: the sovereign loses control of the Tower; the Tower serves as a power base for traitors to the crown; the monarch or protector deploys the Tower for a crime or a questionable purpose; and/or the Tower’s contradictory meanings destabilize the crown’s ideology. By representing monarchs who are not in control of the Tower or its significance, these plays suggest that actual Renaissance monarchs were not in control of the Tower’s ideology. This chapter illustrates the contest between the stage and the state for the Tower’s cultural significance. It also makes the case, as subsequent chapters do, that four Tower plays that represent the Richard III plot became particularly important in reshaping the Tower’s early modern cultural meanings. As Chapter Four demonstrates, because of the Tower’s instability as a dramatic emblem, it was a prime target for symbolic appropriation by London’s repressed and disaffected social groups, especially apprentices and laborers, Catholics, and certain nobles. The Tower’s iconic instability provided these subjects the opportunity to refashion the Tower as an icon of their power. This chapter treats oppositional dramatic representations of the Tower alongside other contemporary discourse of opposition, illustrating that playwrights recast the Tower as an icon of opposition to the reigning monarch. The opposition takes several typical forms, each representing English subjects using the Tower to limit the monarch’s control over them. Each play represents at least one of these scenarios of opposition: the escape, release, or diversion of the sovereign’s

Introduction

25

prisoners from the Tower; the imprisonment of the monarch in the Tower; counselors, clerics, or commoners dictating the sovereign’s use of the Tower; the monarch’s misuse of the Tower as a warrant for rebellion or revenge; or the Tower’s role in a rebellion against the sovereign. I argue that the Tower’s oppositional role in the plays encouraged repressed Londoners to express their frustration. In 1595, at the height of the Tower plays, apprentices and other underprivileged groups whose members also attend plays staged a riot on Tower Hill, after which almost every subsequent Tower play represented the Tower’s role in a rebellion against the sovereign. A few years later Essex and his noble and Catholic supporters evidently viewed the Tower plays as an incitement to their rebellion and plot to seize the Tower. And by 1600 oppositional representations of the Tower in other media began to emerge. For instance, a visitor to the Tower in 1602 was shown Essex’s execution site, and his travel diary describes a very popular song, most likely an early version of the broadside ballad—an edition of which was in print by 1603—“A Lamentable Ditty, Composed upon the Death of Robert Lord Devereux, Late Earle of Essex, Who Was Beheaded in the Tower of London, on Ash-wednesday in the Morning, 1600. To the Tune of Welladay,” c.1640–65, Wood 401 (75), Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. The date in the ballad’s title requires an explanation. Following the modern calendar, most modern historians cite Essex’s revolt, imprisonment, and execution as having taken place in February 1601. However, from the late twelfth century through 1752, a common practice in England used 25 March, or “Lady Day,” the feast of the Annunciation, as the opening of the year.130 Even G. B. Harrison, whose biography of Essex dates these events to 1601, explains elsewhere that the various methods of reckoning the beginning of the year in the Elizabethan period present difficulties for dating records ascribed to the first quarter of each year.131 Historical sources sometimes account for the ambiguity by dating events and documents from the first quarter of each year with nomenclature such as “1600–1.”132 Consistent with the widespread early modern use of the Christian calendar, at least five contemporary sources that document Essex’s rebellion, incarceration, and beheading, date these events to February 1600.133 This song of 1600, along with a portrait of Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, painted during his imprisonment in the Tower for his role in the Essex revolt and inscribed “FEBRVA: 8: 1600,”134 support my reading of another cultural artifact, a tin-glazed delftware plate known as the London Plate (1600), an early representation of the Tower in fine art. Painted around the stylized image of the Tower is the verse, “The rose is red the leaves are grene God save Elizabeth ovr Queene.” This verse ostensibly praises Elizabeth, the

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Tudor Rose. However, juxtaposed with the Tower’s image, the verse seems to criticize her for Essex’s execution and for the persecution at the Tower of Catholics, such as the Jesuit missionary Edmund Campion, whose publicly staged debates with the crown’s Protestant ministers at the Tower preceded his public execution in 1581, or Shakespeare’s Catholic relatives and their friends, who were imprisoned and tortured in the Tower in 1583. This plate illustrates an emerging attitude about the Tower as art intended for display, while advancing, in a new way, the Tower as a space for resisting royal power. Chapter Five addresses the Tower plays’ continuous juxtaposition of the castle with human bodies, body parts, violence, and death. I demonstrate the evolving concept of identity in early modern England as a result of scientific discoveries and other cultural developments, and I show that certain prominent people in Tudor-Stuart England identified themselves and Englishness through architectural structures. I then extrapolate playgoers’ likely sympathetic reactions to dramatic representations of murders and executions at the Tower, considering spectator reactions to actual public executions in early modern England. Several Tower plays represent the murders or executions of kings, princes, and nobles within the Tower walls. Although these historic deaths, as a matter of record, occurred in secret, the audiences’ viewing them onstage likely engendered a communal sense of compassion for the victims, coupled with a feeling of owning their national history, having witnessed it taking place at the Tower. I demonstrate that these affective responses opposed the royal ideology that the Tower represented royal spiritual authority and that they fostered English subjects’ physical and spiritual connections to the Tower. Also in Chapter Five I establish that the year 1599 marked another shift in the oppositional direction of the Tower plays. Throughout the 1590s playwrights personified the Tower, associated it with ghosts, and represented it with anachronistic reference to Julius Caesar. However, these representations ceased to appear in new Tower plays after 1599. From that point on, nearly every Tower play commemorated English subjects’ role in the English Reformation, constructing the Tower as a symbol of non-royal, English Protestant national identity. Thus, the Tower plays not only pulled the Tower’s ideology out of royal control but also humanized the castle as a national icon that ordinary subjects could claim and embrace as their own. I conclude this chapter with four non-dramatic seventeenth-century representations of the Tower that epitomize the diffusion of these ideas in English culture. The Coda underscores the crown’s failure to maintain its hold on the Tower’s ideology in the Renaissance and interprets the Tower plays’ influence upon the first known historic exhibit at the Tower, concluding with recent developments in the Tower’s history as a national icon.

Chapter Two

The Tower of London as a Cultural Icon before the Tower Plays

My purpose in this chapter is to trace the Tower through time to 1579, establishing the development of its multiple cultural meanings, and to interpret those meanings (Diehl, An Index of Icons in English Emblem Books, 1500–1700 6) from the perspectives of then-contemporary English people, especially Londoners. Since the Tower made its first known spatial appearance on the stage in 1579, it is necessary to read the Tower as an evolving cultural icon up to that point, to illuminate the Tower’s status in English history and its roles in English minds before it emerged as a recurring icon in popular drama. History had proven the Tower to be an unstable symbol, one whose symbolic meanings were never fixed and thus always open to renegotiation. From the time it was built, Londoners and English monarchs struggled to assert the Tower’s complex cultural meanings and used those meanings to fashion their own identities. Traditionally, England’s monarchs fashioned the Tower as a patriotic symbol of English culture and royal tradition, an opportunity for subjects to take pride in their kingdom. They constructed the Tower as a symbol of the state, associating it with legitimate authority by using it as a royal residence and fortress palace. As a result, the Tower came to be read, in part, as a respected symbol of English kingship, enabling English people to identify the castle with the monarch and take pride in the reflection of that identification upon themselves. Royal organizations and institutions were established there, further identifying the Tower with the monarchy and strengthening the Tower’s role as an extension of sovereign strength. As a site of traditional royal festivities, the Tower became a place to display royal authority and magnificence,1 especially as the starting point for the coronation procession. This recurring event provided an opportunity for each sovereign to showcase the Tower as an icon of national importance in English history; in turn, it associated the monarch with royal authority and right by demonstrating his or her role in the continuity of the monarchy and royal traditions. 27

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Because the Tower has played a constant role in English history (Rutton 61), and every English monarch since William the Conqueror has fashioned the Tower’s meaning in some way, the Tower’s magnitude in the construction of English culture cannot be underestimated. As a palace the Tower became deeply connected to the royal family’s cultural and religious ceremonies. It was also read as an instrument for defining Englishness to the English people, partly by helping to delineate the concept of “other”: It was not only a prison for foreign enemies but also a place where labels, such as traitor, heretic, and martyr were defined and redefined. English religious identity was embodied at the Tower through propaganda and rituals of inclusion and exclusion, but monarchs also refashioned and renovated it for more welcoming uses, especially as a showpiece. The Tower was a landmark that identified and helped define London and was a focal point of the city. At times throughout the Middle Ages, and increasingly throughout the sixteenth century, visiting that landmark was a form of popular entertainment, fostering positive associations with the castle as a showplace of national history and royal power. And yet, as a symbol of royal power, the Tower also stood as an emblem of conflict, a token in the struggle for control of the crown or the state—a struggle in which the monarch sometimes lost control of the Tower or its cultural significance. International power was expressed there when forces abroad aimed to pressure the English monarch or take advantage of royal weakness. The Tower also represented opposition between monarch and subjects, and the king or queen often articulated royal tyranny there; that is, used the Tower as a prison, trial site, or location of torture, execution, or even murder, to suppress personal and political opponents. While the sovereign worked to fashion the Tower as a symbol of royal authority, English citizens simultaneously acted on the Tower to assert themselves and their power. As the Tower complex expanded in size from a single building to a concentric castle, Londoners used its encroachments on city property as leverage for obtaining rights. Additionally, medieval Londoners often used the Tower to resist the monarch’s injustices toward them by targeting it during rebellions. The sovereign’s use of this royal fortification as a refuge also conveyed royal vulnerability, and on several occasions Londoners besieged the Tower, wielding some control over the sovereign who had taken refuge from them. Such rebels saw the Tower as an emblem of their oppression, and they resisted that oppression by attacking the Tower. For other rebels, the Tower became a token that could be used to undermine royal authority: It represented a subject’s ability to reduce or assume the sovereign’s power. Rebels imprisoned in the Tower sometimes escaped, epitomizing a further weakness in the Tower’s representation of monarchical authority.

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Over the course of five centuries, the Tower’s dual representation as a traditional symbol of English pride and an emblem of conflict gradually evolved and developed new manifestations. Adding to the complexity, a single historical moment could evoke the Tower’s representation of both sides of a conflict. To grasp the Tower’s historic instability as a symbol, and to perceive its meanings to the English people before it appeared onstage, it will be helpful to trace the emergent, dominant, and residual elements of the Tower’s cultural significance through 1579. THE ROMAN AND SAXON PERIODS: SITE OF THE FUTURE TOWER The late-medieval and early modern myth that Julius Caesar had founded the Tower of London was an embellishment of Caesar’s role in conquering Britain and establishing London’s first settlement; nevertheless, the Tower’s history does reach back to Roman times. Parts of the White Tower rest on foundations from the Roman occupation, and sections of Londinium’s thirdcentury defensive wall still stand today.2 As late as the collapse of Roman Britain in the early fifth century, Roman activity may have taken place near the site of the White Tower.3 Although little is known about the future site of the Tower during the nearly seven-hundred-year Saxon Period that preceded the Norman Conquest, a Saxon arch and burials at the nearby church, All Hallows by the Tower, and a Saxo-Norman ditch within the Tower complex attest to local activity at this time.4 The original Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, incorporated into the Tower complex in the thirteenth century, also may have been built in the late-Saxon Period.5 Because the public worshipped at this chapel since its construction (The Tower of London: The Official Guide), Londoners were in close proximity to the Tower throughout its history. ELEVENTHCENTURY SPECTACLE: DEFINING AUTHORITY, INVITING RESISTANCE The Tower’s architectural history embodies how its reputation was built, especially its emblematic meanings to the medieval kings and Londoners who knew it as a cultural icon and used it to fashion their identities. Shortly after 1066, William the Conqueror built a stronghold on the future site of the White Tower.6 Within a few years, the White Tower either replaced, or was constructed adjacent to, that fortress in the southeast angle of the Roman wall.7 Though it was situated marginally in the southeastern corner of the

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ancient city, the Tower complex took as two of its sides the Roman wall, emblematic of “London’s coherence and integrity, the most prominent of its figures of space,” which in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries “still defined the city with relative clarity” (Mullaney 20). Like the wall, then, the Tower also served as a landmark that identified and helped define London. It was constructed, mainly of Kentish ragstone and white Caen stone, as a stronghold and royal residence designed to symbolize sovereign authority and “Norman hegemony” over Londoners and their city, and also to guard the conquering king from rebellion by the masses.8 The Conqueror’s new relationship to his subjects initiated Londoners’ continuous identification of the castle with their monarch and the reflection of that identification upon themselves: “Because it was started by a feudal prince who was introducing into England a style of feudalism centred on the person—and the personality—of the king, the Tower has to be regarded as the principal feudal structure and symbol of Norman England” (Fry, The Tower of London 8). The Tower was a spectacle that both attracted attention and represented Londoners’ subjugation, and as such it invited their resistance. Alan Borg stresses that the castle was a showplace from the start: “the massive stone keep, dominating the surrounding landscape, would have attracted sightseers as soon as construction began” (“The Museum” 69). Plantagenet Somerset Fry and Keevill attest to the Tower’s fame throughout its twenty-year construction.9 Conversely, the scale of the White Tower must have caused the Anglo-Saxons considerable anguish as a massive emblem of their defeat.10 Even in the Elizabethan period, and for centuries thereafter, Londoners knew the White Tower as the city’s largest building after St. Paul’s Cathedral (Impey and Parnell 18). At 118 x 107 feet long and ninety feet tall to the battlements, with turrets another sixteen to twenty-one feet high, and with walls from twelve to fifteen feet thick at the base, the three-story Tower was an imposing edifice and a symbol meant “to dominate the City physically and visually.”11 Londoners must have been greatly affected by the sight of it (Thurley Impey, and Hammond 46); in fact, they most likely experienced deeply negative feelings about the Tower. Londoners and nearby Anglo-Saxons also must have resented this symbol of their oppression by a foreign king and their subjection to him, as well as their compulsory role in helping to build it. Alongside masons from Normandy and England, Anglo-Saxon laborers were forced to construct the Conqueror’s Tower for little if any compensation.12 Additionally, the Tower has always contained the king’s armor,13 further inscribing it as a constant reminder of the Conqueror’s military domination of the Anglo-Saxons. As a fortress of the conquering king, the castle was a symbol of sovereign authority to be resisted by Londoners, and resist they did. As early as 1097, the English

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expressed discontent with the sovereign’s use of the White Tower when the Conqueror’s son and successor, William Rufus, pressed them into service to build a stone wall around it.14 TWELFTHCENTURY CONFLICT: REGAL RESIDENCE, TARGET FOR REBELLION By the twelfth century, as “a base for royal power in the City of London” (46), the Tower represented opposition between monarch and subjects. Its dominant cultural significance was as a site of royal oppression, and its earliest use as a prison both expressed and undermined that significance, demonstrating that the icon’s new cultural meanings were already developing. Londoners began to see the Tower as a target for rebellion, causing crown officials to take refuge in the Tower and fortify it against insurrection, exposing further weaknesses in the façade of royal authority. In this century the Tower also became a site of the struggle for control of England, and Londoners entered the skirmish, winning power as a fee for the Tower’s encroachments on city property. By the end of the century, a second iconic meaning emerged that would eventually become dominant: the Tower as a source of English pride. The Tower proved to be a symbol of royal oppression and non-royal resistance and a site of the struggle between church and state. In 1100, during the reign of Henry I, Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, became its first prisoner—and, six months later, its first prisoner to escape.15 It was not unusual for a castle to serve, occasionally, as a prison (Borg, “The State Prison” 86), so this function merely fashioned the Tower as an emblem of the king’s authority to enforce his rule. The ability of an imprisoned subject to escape, however, embodied a weakness in that authority. The Tower’s development as an icon of both royal and non-royal power had begun. During the nineteen-year civil war that ensued over Henry I’s daughter, Matilda, and King Stephen’s opposing claims to the throne, Stephen became the first known monarch to use the Tower as a residence,16 a statement of the sovereign’s personal ownership of the Tower and, by association with previous kings, the authority that reinforced his entitlement to the monarchy. Londoners responded by resisting royal power with force. After 1140 they expressed hostility toward the man who controlled the Tower, its Constable, Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, for the favor Stephen bestowed on him, and they “besieged him in the Tower.”17 The first of two major dominant meanings had been established: The Tower was an emblem of conflict. It would later evolve into a proud symbol of English national identity, and this century witnessed an early glimpse of that future. In the reign of

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Henry II, the Descriptio Londoniae, “the earliest detailed account of the city that has survived,” was written (Hibbert et al. 22). Its author, the monk and biographer William Fitzstephen, called the White Tower arx palatina, “which strictly means fortress palace, a phrase very sparingly used in that century and then only to describe buildings constructed ‘for regal majesty.’”18 This honorific term not only tied the Tower to London’s Roman heritage, the Palatine being one of Rome’s seven hills and the location of an imperial residence,19 but also illustrated for the first time that the Tower was becoming a respected symbol of English kingship, a tradition in which English people could take pride. No less significant a source of pride was the Tower’s emerging lore, specifically its legendary association with blood. Fitzstephen wrote that the mortar of the Tower walls was “tempered with the blood of beasts,” a myth that explained the crushed red Roman tiles and bricks within the walls.20 This emergent cultural meaning continued to develop alongside the Tower’s dominant significance as an emblem of internal and external English conflict. Both meanings developed in Richard I’s reign. In 1189 London Jews took refuge in the Tower from a rioting mob after Richard’s coronation, the Tower representing the king’s protection of “alien financiers” for his loans.21 However, while Richard was fighting in the Third Crusade, the Tower developed as an emblem of conflict, a token in the struggle for state control. Two prelates charged with governing the kingdom during the king’s absence, the Bishops of Ely and Durham, fought over the Tower (Bayley 8). The tyrannical chancellor, William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, expanded the Tower complex to the west, built two large towers including the surviving Bell Tower into the defensive wall, and had a ditch dug around the complex to fortify the Tower against civil disobedience.22 He then took refuge in the Tower while the nobility besieged it.23 Fortifying the Tower against the rebellious English nobility provided for the safety of the king or his delegate, but the need for such fortification also represented weak authority. While Londoners used these fortifications to negotiate power for themselves, the kings, recognizing their “royal weakness” and the people’s “bargaining powers,” made concessions to secure the city’s cooperation (R. Porter 25–26). The fortifications, which more than doubled the size of the complex, caused it to encroach upon city property, and Londoners required payment for their loss (Chamberlin 31). Additionally, when the king’s brother, John, entered London in 1191, “Longchamp took refuge in the Tower, while the citizens watched to prevent his escape” (Inwood 58). In exchange for Londoners’ recognizing John as heir to the throne, they gained the rights to collect and spend their own taxes, elect their sheriffs, and have

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“a corporate identity in the form of the first Mayor of the City of London.”24 Having won these rights, Londoners exercised their collective power to besiege Longchamp in the Tower. They “forced him into surrender and exile and allowed John to take control of the kingdom,”25 thereby acknowledging the Tower as the key to the control of England and exercising their power to turn that key. THIRTEENTHCENTURY POWER: ROYAL EXPANSION, EMERGING LORE By now the Tower represented both sides of England’s sovereign-subject relationship: the king’s often oppressive authority and Londoners’ power to resist that authority. It was also recognized as a majestic royal residence—a positive association with the monarch—and a symbol of the power of whomever controlled it. In the thirteenth century more cultural traditions that anticipated English identity emerged, the Tower Menagerie expanding the fortress into a showplace that the English could visit; and the Tower became associated with supernatural lore. The Tower became a stronger symbol of the tensions between monarch and subjects in this century. With Londoners’ support, King John’s barons laid siege to the Tower in the struggle for Magna Carta, and John was forced to yield the castle to the Archbishop of Canterbury.26 As civil war broke out in England, the French captured the Tower in 1216 and used it as a base from which to harass the English,27 fostering English resentment of French control of the Tower and strengthening the view of the fortress as a target for rebellion. Upon John’s death that year, Henry III took control of the Tower, and throughout his reign he fortified it against his barons, constructing the Wakefield Tower, probably the Lanthorn Tower, and what is known today as the Bloody Tower.28 He also used the Tower as a refuge against his barons in 1261 (Colvin et al. 2:713). After he conceded to their demands in 1263 and the barons, led by Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, with the Londoners’ support, took possession of the Tower, Henry’s queen, Eleanor of Provence, angrily left the castle to travel by water to Windsor.29 As her barge approached London Bridge, Londoners gathered there to scream insults at her and pelt her barge with “dirt, rotten eggs, and stones,” forcing her to return to the Tower.30 Throughout the remainder of Henry’s reign, he at times sought refuge in the Tower again and once lost control of both Tower and kingdom to his barons (Bayley 14–20), reinforcing that possession of the Tower signified power: Whoever controlled the Tower controlled England. The Tower was the people’s agent for achieving some control over

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their lives, and English subjects must have taken pride in their ability to use it to advance their interests. And yet the Tower’s roles in English culture were complex, multifaceted, and in some ways even pleasant. English people visited the Tower Menagerie, a collection of exotic animals dating from John’s reign and expanded by Henry III in the 1230s.31 The public visited the Menagerie from the outset; in fact, “the expression ‘going to see the lions’ probably dates from the 13th century” (J. Watson 1637). The chronicler Matthew Paris attested that in 1255, when England’s first elephant was introduced into the Menagerie, throngs of people went to see it, “perhaps marking the beginning of the menagerie as a public attraction”32 and expanding the Tower’s role as a showplace. Visiting the Menagerie would have given the English an opportunity to see up-close and touch the Tower’s fabric, fostering positive associations with the Tower, not least for the thrill of experiencing large and exotic wild animals in this impressive castle. This form of entertainment fashioned the Tower as a social setting, humanizing the Tower and inviting Londoners to interact with it. The animals on display likened the Menagerie to a ring for familiar entertainments such as cockfighting, cock-throwing, bear-baiting, or bull-baiting (Reeves 23–29). Some medieval people likewise took pleasures in bird watching and domestic pets or kept dogs that guarded their households (100–16), and seeing animals at the Tower may have resonated with such pleasures or domestic comforts. Moreover, among the Menagerie’s most exotic animals were gifts from foreign kings to Henry III,33 fashioning the Tower as the architecture that housed symbols of goodwill between England’s king and other monarchs. Under Henry III and Edward I the castle developed rapidly, as did its iconic significance as an index of the relationship between English sovereigns and Londoners. In addition to the towers Henry III had built earlier, in the 1230s he strengthened and enlarged the Tower complex to the north, west, and east, expanding beyond the eastern Roman wall that was demolished at this time, and enclosed the complex within a curtain wall lined with nine adjoining mural towers—the eight that survive are known today as the Salt, Broad Arrow, Constable, Martin, Brick, Bowyer, Flint, and Devereux Towers—all surrounded by a moat.34 Each of the chapels was rebuilt or repaired, gardens were started, and the interiors of the royal residence were repaired, enlarged, and lavishly decorated throughout Henry’s reign, bringing to light the Tower’s importance as a royal residence and its renovation into a royal palace.35 In 1240 Henry ordered the Conqueror’s Tower to be whitewashed inside and out, giving it a brilliance that drew Londoners’ eyes and for which, at some later time, it came to be called the White Tower.36 Henry

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III’s “strained relations with the citizens of London” led to his many fortifications of the Tower (Colvin et al. 2:710). Londoners resented their king’s view of them as a threat severe enough to warrant such a massive works project, though again they acquired power: Many Londoners, associated with local institutions, were paid for property lost and damages incurred as a result of the expansion.37 Despite these gains, the works project fueled opposition between the king and his subjects, which caused the Tower to emerge as the subject of dramatic folklore. Matthew Paris wrote that, in the reign of Henry III, at the same hour on the Feast of St. George, in 1240 and 1241, the foundations of the Tower’s newly completed landward gateway collapsed, which Londoners attributed to their guardian saint, Thomas à Becket, former Constable of the Tower.38 On the night of the second collapse, a London priest dreamed that [ . . . ] an archprelate, dressed in pontifical robes, and carrying a cross in his hand, came to the walls which the king had at that time built near the Tower of London, and, after regarding them with a scowling look, struck them strongly and violently with the cross, saying, “Why do ye rebuild them?” Whereupon the newly-erected walls suddenly fell to the ground, as if thrown down by an earthquake. The priest, frightened at this sight, said to a clerk who appeared following the archprelate, “Who is this archbishop?” to which the clerk replied, “It is St. Thomas the martyr, a Londoner by birth, who considered that these walls were built as an insult, and to the prejudice of the Londoners, and has therefore irreparably destroyed them.” The priest then said, “What expense and builders’ labour have they not cost.” The clerk replied, “If poor artificers, who seek after and have need of pay, had obtained food for themselves by the work, that would be endurable; but inasmuch as they have been built, not for the defence of the kingdom, but only to oppress harmless citizens, if St. Thomas had not destroyed them, St. Edmund [sic] the confessor and his successor would still more relentlessly have overthrown them from their foundations.” (Paris 1:326)

When Londoners heard of the fallen walls, they “were not sorry for it; for these walls were to them as a thorn in their eyes, and they had heard the taunts of people who said that these walls had been built as an insult to them, and that if any one of them should dare to contend for the liberty of the city, he would be shut up in them, and consigned to imprisonment” (1:326–27).

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Paris’ narrative foreshadows the Tower’s representation in Renaissance drama. His characters include a legendary archbishop and a national hero whose conflict with his king had led to his murder, and the story specifies a costume, a hand property, stage directions, dialogue, and the spectator priest’s interpretive process and interaction with the actors in his “vision” (Paris 1:326). Like many of the Tower plays, it embodies active opposition to the crown, on behalf of the kingdom and London’s poor and repressed citizens, at the Tower. The narrative also incorporates several prominent themes of the Tower plays. It depicts the body, specifically the hand, of a martyred oppositional hero—a saint of the national religion, dressed in pontifical robes that represent his ultimate victory over his king, on the feast of the kingdom’s patron saint—using a Christian symbol to strike, with violence, the fabric of the king’s oppressive Tower complex. Similarly, Londoners’ interpretation of the king’s new defenses as repressive to them, and their collective reaction of relief at the fallen walls, intimate early modern Londoners’ responses to the represented Tower in the plays and the actual Tower in their lives. Like Henry III, Edward I “enlarged and strengthened the Tower of London [ . . . ], not to protect the city from riverborne attack but, rather, to tighten his grip on London itself ” (Baron 242). He expanded the Tower complex to the south, extending it into the river; constructed the watergate St. Thomas’s Tower, the Beauchamp Tower, perhaps the Develin and Well Towers, and the Wharf; built a second concentric curtain wall with mounds in the northern corners, forming the castle’s “narrow outer ward”; and replaced Henry’s moat with a new 160-foot-wide moat around the entire complex.39 Additional fortifications incorporated an elaborate entrance of stone causeways, drawbridges, portcullises, a semicircular barbican—the Lion Tower—which housed the Menagerie, and two gatehouses: the Middle and Byward Towers.40 “To the citizens the Tower always symbolized the hostile power of the king” (242); however, with the king’s permission, commoners also used the Tower as a refuge in this century. In 1220, 1236, and 1264 Londoners, sometimes specifically Jews, took refuge in the Tower as a precaution against anticipated riots or when actual riots broke out in the city (Lipman 144). While the king used the Tower, at times, to protect London Jews for the purpose of “royal taxation and extortion,” at other times he used it as an exclusionary device, imprisoning the same resident aliens, as he did in 1240, for not paying heavy taxes imposed on them.41 In 1279, eleven years before the Jews were expelled from England, the Tower became a site that exemplified English religious identity—as well as royal tyranny—when Edward I had hundreds of Jews imprisoned there, and hanged, for supposedly clipping

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coins.42 Coupled with the protective function the Tower had served for Jews in this century, these acts fashioned the Tower as a means of defining English identity by contrast with the “others” within it. The Tower’s role as a prison amplified the castle’s emblematic instability as it began to epitomize international royal expansion and defiance against that expansion. In 1244 the Welsh prince, Gruffydd ap Llewellyn, fell to his death attempting to escape from imprisonment in the Tower; in 1296 John de Baliol, former King of Scotland, whose crown Edward I had obtained in battle, was imprisoned there; and in 1305 the Scottish rebel leader, William Wallace, was held at the Tower.43 FOURTEENTHCENTURY TRADITION: CORONATION, EXECUTION In the following century the Tower had two dominant cultural meanings, one as a symbol of conflict, especially the heightened power struggle between Londoners and the crown; the other, as a symbol of English nationhood. Londoners continued to use the Tower as a target for rebellion against the sovereign’s unjust treatment; in fact, it was in this century that an English subject actually imprisoned his king in the Tower, where he forced that king to abdicate. The Tower emerged as an execution site in this century, with English rebels as executioners and the king’s ministers as victims. And, while the Tower still represented royal authority in terms of oppression, other senses of the English monarchy were developing at the Tower, those which Londoners could endorse: the Tower as a prison for foreign enemies, royalty as English tradition, and royalty on display. Edward I, Edward II, and Edward III fashioned the Tower into a more powerful symbol of the state by establishing royal offices there. Edward I created a branch of the Royal Mint at the Tower; made the Tower the main repository for the Great Wardrobe, the royal collection of arms and armor; and had the Crown Jewels moved to the Tower in 1303.44 Edward II made the Tower a repository for the kingdom’s records (Impey and Parnell 41). And, in addition to building the Cradle Tower, Edward III established at the Tower the Privy Wardrobe, a division of the Great Wardrobe that stored the royal jewels and coronation regalia and stored and supplied military equipment as an arsenal during the Hundred Years’ War.45 The war also motivated him to renew the Tower’s role as a prison, to have gunpowder manufactured there, and to extend the Tower Wharf to ship supplies to his forces in France.46 This emphasis on France as England’s enemy, and the Tower’s role in defining that enemy through the incarceration of prisoners of war

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and the deployment of military supplies, made the Tower part of a movement for defining Englishness to the English people, united against a foreign enemy. Imprisoning foreign kings in the Tower contributed to this meaning. In 1346 King David of Scotland was captured in battle and imprisoned there, and many French prisoners, including the captured French king, John the Good, were held at the Tower in 1360.47 However, while the sovereign worked to fashion the Tower as a symbol of royal authority, English subjects often simultaneously acted on the Tower to assert themselves and their power. In 1308 and 1313, for instance, Edward II ordered that the Tower be fortified against his barons (Colvin et al. 1:234). In 1321 the “royal itinerant justices” who examined London’s privileges sat not at the Guildhall but at the Tower, and London’s aldermen “were made responsible for erecting, at their own expense, the benches and seats in the Tower to be used for the judicial sessions,” which “must have aggravated the sense of menace in the city.”48 The following year Edward sent the rebellious subject Roger Mortimer to the Tower, but the Londoners helped him escape in 1324.49 In 1326 the king retired to the Tower for his safety; however, unable to raise support among the Londoners, he abandoned it when Mortimer and his followers advanced (Bayley 22–24). That year Londoners again took control of the Tower and freed the king’s prisoners.50 Mortimer then deposed the king and ruled England for three years before Edward III arrested him and sent him back to the Tower until his execution (Hammond 19). Though the king could use the Tower to imprison his offending subjects, Londoners could, in turn, limit this royal power. The Tower’s cultural meanings became more elaborate in Richard II’s reign. He stayed at the castle before his coronation, which began with a magnificent procession from the Tower to Westminster Abbey. While some part of this tradition dates to 1308 or earlier, Richard was “the first king known for certain to have made the coronation journey straight from the Tower.”51 By the late thirteenth century, then, Londoners must have viewed the coronation procession, and the Tower’s and their own roles in it, as emblems of the English monarchy (Dufty 16). The Tower’s iconic use in this production also fashioned it as a setting of pageantry, theatrical spectacle, and uniquely English traditional entertainment, prefiguring its use as a setting in historical drama and building its reputation as a stage for English history. Fourteenth-century Londoners used the Tower to resist more forcefully the king’s injustices toward them. In 1381, during the Peasants’ Revolt or Wat Tyler’s Rebellion, led by Tyler and Jack Straw, thousands of peasants surrounded the Tower where Richard, his family, and his closest supporters had taken refuge, demonstrating that, “though impregnable to assault, the Tower

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was a trap.”52 Having captured the Tower, the insurgents plundered armor and weapons from the Privy Wardrobe (Dufty 18). They murdered several of the king’s ministers, including Treasurer Robert Hales and Chancellor Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, on Tower Hill, the first of 112 beheadings to take place on Tower Hill over the next four hundred years.53 The first official execution took place there in 1388, when Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, led an uprising against the king’s misgovernment that resulted in the execution of Richard’s Lord Chancellor and former tutor, Sir Simon Burley.54 Executions of peers on Tower Hill, later to be represented in history plays, marked the Tower as a place deeply connected to English bodies and English national identity. As Richard’s reign progressed, the Tower came to represent not only the king’s vulnerability but also a subject’s ability to use the Tower to reduce and assume the king’s power. In 1387 Richard again sought refuge in the Tower against his ministers (Impey and Parnell 45). And in 1399, when Henry of Bolingbroke usurped the throne, Richard was imprisoned in the Tower, where his forced abdication took place.55 Before his coronation Henry IV created a new royal tradition at the Tower: Knights of the Order of the Bath bathed in St. John’s Chapel in the White Tower, kept vigil, and took Communion there as part of their initiation on the eve of the coronation, before participating in the royal procession to Westminster.56 This custom elaborated the Tower’s role in the coronation and deepened selected Englishmen’s involvement in the celebration. It also fashioned the castle as the stage for a performance in which subjects played a part, foreshadowing the Tower’s role onstage. FIFTEENTHCENTURY NATIONALISM: ART, RELIGION, FESTIVAL, WAR The Tower encompassed many cultural meanings by the fifteenth century, each of which supported one or both of two dominant ideas. First, it was an icon of oppressive sovereign authority and thus a site of Londoners’ rebellions against that authority and a token in the struggle for state control. The kings used the Tower as a refuge during these rebellions, indicating the rebels’ strength. Asserting royal supremacy over their subjects, kings also used the Tower as a prison for conspirators and to exhibit the royal authority that epitomized monarchical continuity and legitimacy, despite intense struggles over the crown. As a result of these struggles, murders and executions took place within the Tower walls, though this fact evidently did not yet mark the castle as a place of fear. Indeed, the royal family continued to use the

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Tower as a residence and a site of traditional royal festivities well into the sixteenth century. Second, the Tower represented English people’s delight in their country; in fact, for the first time the Tower was considered to be an object worthy of artistic representation. Though the Tower’s use as a prison was by then firmly established, that occasional function would not be widely used until the sixteenth century (Brown, “Architectural History” 37). And yet, early in this century, the Tower emerged as a prison for proto-Protestant heretics, again distinguishing the castle as a place where the authorized English religion, and thus English identity, was articulated. As their predecessors had done, Henry IV and his subjects fashioned the Tower as a symbol of their tumultuous relationship: Its presence announced, at the same time, the usurper’s enforced authority and his subjects’ resistance. When Richard’s supporters rebelled against Henry, the king used the Tower as a refuge (Impey and Parnell 45), demonstrating not only his fortified power but also that he considered the rebels to be a serious threat. Henry IV and Henry V also fashioned the Tower as a symbol of their international might. The Tower served as a prison for conspirators and others captured during Henry IV’s campaigns, including foreign royalty, such as the future James I of Scotland in 1406 (45). And when Henry V invaded France, renewing the Hundred Years’ War, he captured and imprisoned in the Tower “the French King’s nephew Charles, Duke of Orléans, held there intermittently from 1415 until 1440” (45), a symbol of the king’s military prowess and power over England’s foreign enemy and thus another occasion for his subjects to take pride in their Englishness through the Tower. In fact, it was in the late fifteenth century that artists began to represent the Tower in various media as a legendary emblem of English patriotism. Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (1485) depicts the Tower as Queen Gwynevere’s refuge from Sir Modred, drawing the Tower into Arthurian legend to provide for the queen’s defense.57 At the end of the century, the earlier imprisonment of Charles, Duke of Orléans, inspired the Tower’s earliest recognizable visual representation: a brightly colored illumination in Poems of Charles, Duke of Orléans (c.1500),58 complete with characters, setting, visual narrative, and action, foreshadowing the Tower’s representations onstage. The image of Orléans represents several events surrounding his imprisonment: his arrival at the Tower—or his leaving it—by boat; his composing poems or a letter requesting payment of his ransom; his looking out a window of the White Tower, awaiting his rescue; his greeting the knight who arrives with his ransom—or the messenger who arrives to take his letter to France; and his riding to freedom on a horse—or his messenger’s riding away with his ransom letter.59 The image celebrates the Tower as a

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place both pleasant to behold and foreboding, an integral part of the story of the English nation and the geography of its capital city. At or near the same time, the Scottish poet William Dunbar composed his poem (Bawcutt 1), “To the City of London,” celebrating—among the Thames, London Bridge, and the people of London—the Tower, which he attributes to Julius Caesar: By Julyus Cesar thy Tour founded of old May be the hous of Mars victoryall, Whose artillary with tonge may not be told: London, thou art the flour of Cities all. (Dunbar p.27)

The Tower’s placement near the poem’s center, flanked by landmarks including the Thames, London Bridge, and various Londoners—lords, barons, knights, ladies, prelates, merchants, wives, virgins (p.26–27)—conveys its high significance in English minds and humanizes it by surrounding it with people. In the poem, the person most closely associated with the Tower is its supposed founder, Caesar. By naming the Tower the “hous of Mars,” Mars being the Roman god of warfare and “the protector of the whole people,”60 Dunbar emphasizes the castle’s connection to Rome as well as defense, protection, and victory in battle, allusions to the Tower’s “artillary” and the fortress’ defensive capabilities. According to Roman mythology, Mars was the father of the founders of the walled city of Rome;61 thus, Dunbar reads the English people’s pedigree in the Tower. He calls the Tower a house, not a castle, further associating it with ordinary subjects. As early as the late fifteenth century, then, the Tower was considered to be a subject worthy of artistic celebration, closely associated with the English, especially Londoners. Nevertheless, the Tower remained a symbol of Londoners’ oppression. Caroline M. Barron notes that, in the fifteenth century, Tower officials such as William Brigis and his man John could harass the inhabitants of the surrounding area by charging them for access to the Thames to collect water and wash their clothes, by rounding up their horses and cattle and driving them away into the security of the Tower, or by seizing barges and boats and forcing their owners to buy them back. The Tower, indeed, brooded over the eastern part of the city, menacing and hostile. (242)

In fact, toward the end of Henry V’s reign, the Tower was again used in new ways that conveyed royal oppression. The proto-Protestant religious sect, the

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Lollards, became the first group to suffer Tower imprisonment explicitly on politico-religious grounds. The first Lollard to be executed, in 1417, was Sir John Oldcastle, who had escaped from imprisonment there,62 representing the Tower again as a site where English—Roman Catholic—religious identity was expressed. Subjects assaulted the Tower several times in Henry VI’s reign (Fry, Tower 71), demonstrating that they understood the Tower to be an emblem of royal oppression. The government likewise used the Tower to control rebellion and dissent: Though not widespread at the Tower in the Middle Ages, torture was practiced there, and the rack was a standard torture device in the Tower by the reign of Henry VI.63 Because torture enacted violence on English bodies, its setting in the Tower invited English people, once again, to identify physically, though painfully and fearfully, with the Tower. The Yorkist kings took their predecessors’ cultural uses of the Tower to new extremes. Edward IV lived at the Tower more than any previous king had done and “held lavish courts there in 1465 and 1470,”64 signifying the Tower’s continued importance as a royal residence. During the Wars of the Roses, as Edward IV struggled to obtain the crown, he twice imprisoned Henry VI in the Tower, where Henry was murdered in 1471 by, according to legend, Richard, Duke of Gloucester (Impey and Parnell 46). This was the first of a series of unnatural deaths in the Tower, all to be represented on the Renaissance stage. Next was the murder of George, Duke of Clarence, in his prison lodgings (Fry, Tower 74). Gloucester, now protector, held a meeting of the minority council in the Tower, where, in a sequence of actions that appeared to have been “prearranged,” he accused Lord Hastings, loyal to the young king, of treason and ordered Hastings’ hurried execution within the walls of the Tower complex (Hibbert et al. 94, 43). The young Prince Edward and Richard, Duke of York, whom the protector had confined in the Tower (Impey and Parnell 46), the usual place for the uncrowned king to stay before his coronation, were also probably killed there after Gloucester became king in 1483. The Tower was now a significant site of conspiracy, intrigue, and murder in the struggle for the throne. However, these dark events apparently did not yet refashion the Tower’s image as a dungeon of death. On the contrary, for the next thirty years the Tower continued to serve as a royal residence, and for nearly fifty years it was the setting of numerous royal festivals of “magnificent spectacle,” including processions, ceremonies, and celebrations associated with two royal marriages and five coronations.65 In fact, in 1485 Henry VII “entertained his victorious supporters” at the Tower (Thurley, Impey, and Hammond 50). In 1487, only four years after the young princes’ disappearance, the coronation festivities of

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their sister, Elizabeth of York, included a procession on the Thames in which a red dragon in a boat breathed fire into the river,66 a precursor to the Tower’s dramatic use as a setting onstage. And Henry evidently gave Elizabeth, as a gift, the volume of c.1500, Poems of Charles, Duke of Orléans, which, as stated, had been composed by a Tower prisoner and visually represented the Tower.67 These festivities and pleasantries demonstrate that the Tower’s tragic events before the Tudor dynasty had not transformed its image into a castle of dread, as it often would be remembered in Renaissance history plays. By the reign of Henry VII, the Tower’s role as a fortress was becoming residual, and its defensive role was updated. Henry sent his wife and son there for safety during the Cornish Rebellion of 1497; however, the monarchy became more centralized under the Tudors, reducing the nobility’s power and thus the frequency of baronial uprisings that had characterized the Middle Ages,68 thereby reducing the need to use the Tower as a fortress. Instead, three new state organizations and institutions were formed at the Tower in the fifteenth century, further identifying the Tower with the monarchy and strengthening its role as the sovereign’s arm: the Yeoman Warders or royal bodyguard; and the Armoury Office and Office of Ordnance, both of which developed from the Privy Wardrobe (Impey and Parnell 47). At the same time, the need for a royal bodyguard and the expansion of military functions at the Tower during this turbulent period of contention for the throne announced that the Tower still represented royal vulnerability and was required to defend the monarch. By the end of this reign, the Tower was emerging as the acknowledged prison for those charged with treason (Cowie 596), refashioning the castle as a symbol of centralized monarchical authority whose prisoners were read as traitors. The Tower was a token that English subjects and enemies abroad could use to undermine royal authority, as well as the monarch’s instrument for suppressing such threats. Having secured the crown in battle, throughout his reign Henry VII faced challenges from Yorkist pretenders, whom he imprisoned in the Tower. One of them, Perkin Warbeck, gained international support in the 1490s by claiming to be the young Duke of York, allegedly murdered in the Tower in 1483 (Fry, Tower 79–81). Though Warbeck was imprisoned and executed, his legend would live on in a Stuart history play. During the Tudor dynasty the Tower also evolved into a more elaborate symbol of monarchical power and ostentation, for by this time effective kingship depended upon magnificence and “the ritual display of that magnificence” (Anglo, Images of Tudor Kingship 8). Tudor monarchs, “careful to exploit every possible sanction to power” (20), displayed the Tower’s splendor to promote their royal image. In this way they strengthened the

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image of sovereign power, which, in turn, fashioned the monarchy as a more attractive feature of Englishness and a source of English nationalism. This spectacular function included the Tower’s dominant role as a symbol of “the continuity and authority of the monarchy” (Impey and Parnell 51) and thus the Tudor dynasty’s legitimacy. During the Middle Ages, “Whoever held the Tower had the best claim to the kingdom,” and in Tudor England, the coronation, a longstanding custom of English kings, with its traditional procession from the Tower to Westminster, was “the grandest occasion of all, and the one most saturated with symbolic significance.”69 Therefore, since Henry had a questionable claim to the throne, establishing himself at the Tower and beginning his coronation procession from that traditional place, “with great pompe,” helped establish his authority.70 As further evidence that the Tower was emerging as a showplace in a new way, in 1489 the German knight, Wilwolt von Schaumburg, became one of the earliest known foreign dignitaries to be shown the royal ordnance there (Borg, “The Museum” 69). SIXTEENTHCENTURY TRANSITION: REFORMATION, TERROR, SHOWPLACE The Tudor period involved several turning points for the Tower as an icon and made it a central location of revolutionary cultural change. For these reasons, and because Londoners who experienced English historical drama knew the Tower in this age, the Tower’s sixteenth-century significances warrant special consideration. Though the Tower remained the starting point of the coronation procession that demonstrated legitimate monarchical succession throughout the sixteenth century, the castle’s function as a royal domicile became residual in Henry VIII’s reign as new cultural uses emerged in its place. Changes in the national religion prompted successive rulers to perceive Catholics, then Protestants, then Catholics again as heretics or traitors and to imprison and execute them at the Tower, a practice used so freely that the Tower then developed its traditional reputation for terror. The widespread use of torture on Tower prisoners added to this “sinister reputation” (Borg, “The State Prison” 88), as did the private and public executions of many who represented dynastic threats, including prominent nobles and members of the royal family. As a symbol of sovereign oppression and tyranny, the Tower was targeted for rebellions. It was, at times, still used as a refuge, though this function too was residual by mid-century. As another result of the Reformation, the Tower emerged as a location for asserting the supremacy of the national church, and thus English identity, both dominant and persecuted, through sermons preached there, again emphasizing the Tower’s

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role as a showplace. The Tower’s final cultural use to become dominant by 1579 was its function as a tourist attraction, a showplace of royal magnificence, promoting both the monarch’s greatness and English people’s proud identification with this symbol of their collective past. Considering that medieval kings spent more time living in Westminster than in London, Henry VII “spent much time in the Tower”; in fact, it was his preferred London residence.71 In addition to building a new Jewel House on the south side of the White Tower, he built a new mural tower in 1501–02, a two-story gallery in 1506, and rooms known in 1531–32 as “Henry VII’s bedchamber, council chamber, and library,”72 all of which illustrate the Tower’s early-sixteenth-century importance as a royal residence. And when Henry’s wife, Queen Elizabeth, died in the Tower nine days after giving birth there in 1503, her body lay in state in the Chapel of St. John the Evangelist, in the White Tower.73 These events exemplify the castle’s function in the royal family’s cultural and religious ceremonies of some of Tudor England’s most personal rites of passage—birth and death,74 strengthening the Tower as a symbol of English culture and identity. Henry VII also contributed to the Tower’s role as a showplace, for in May 1501 he attended “a royal tourney of lords and knights in the Tower of London,”75 placing his royal presence on celebratory display for his subjects to see. In several ways Henry VIII’s reign was a period of transition for the Tower, its functions and cultural meanings evolving and growing in complexity with the Reformation and the king’s dynastic ambitions. For the first twenty years of the reign the Tower was still in use as a royal domicile; in fact, Henry was the last English monarch to make significant improvements on the palace buildings (Impey and Parnell 51). He rebuilt the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula and extensively renovated the living spaces of the palace interior and decorative features of the White Tower’s exterior, most likely “to ensure that it formed a statuesque backdrop for Anne Boleyn’s coronation procession.”76 Like the illumination of the Tower in Poems of Charles, Duke of Orléans, this works project established the Tower’s emergent significance as a structure of beauty and medieval nostalgia, a symbol of Henry’s devotion to feudal chivalry.77 Again, the theatrical coronation revels included a water pageant with a fire-breathing dragon, now surrounded by costumed characters following a script and acting with spectacular props: “terrible monsters and wylde men casting fyer, and making hideous noyses” (E. Hall 799). Throughout the procession, music was played, and as the party approached its destination—the Tower—guns were fired from ships on the river, at which time “the Tower’s mighty guns, by pre-arranged signal, joined in the salute, firing four at a time” (Starkey, Six Wives 493–94), the Tower now participating in the show.

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Henry greeted and kissed Anne at the Tower in a scripted ceremony, huge crowds of onlookers standing “on euery shore to beholde the sight.”78 That night the couple hosted a reception at the Tower, and the festivities continued there until the coronation procession two days later (495). These events celebrated the Tower as a showplace of royal pageantry and represented the castle as a setting for “carefully choreographed” (493) productions, foreshadowing its role as a setting onstage. Londoners who watched the festivities must have been impressed with the Tower as the entertainment’s spectacular centerpiece, though, evidently, the festivities were dampened by their disdain for Anne Boleyn, who had supplanted Henry’s first wife, the popular Catherine of Aragon.79 In the 1530s Henry completely refashioned the Tower as an icon of the monarchy. After Anne Boleyn’s coronation he “rarely, if ever,” stayed at the Tower again.80 Henry’s break from the Church of Rome and the subsequent Reformation led to a major transformation in the Tower’s cultural significance. In fact, the Tower’s use as a state prison and torture site expanded more than ever (Fry, Tower 82, 83), especially when Henry began to imprison in the Tower as traitors, and publicly execute on Tower Hill, members of the nobility and clergy who refused to acknowledge him as Supreme Head of the Church in England. These actions caused the Tower again to emerge as an oppressive symbol of royal tyranny, the architecture that housed enemies of the state, and a symbol of England’s national, now reformed Catholic, identity. The first to suffer this fate was Henry’s former Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, in 1535 (92–93). Though More was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, the king commuted his sentence to beheading—a privileged death reserved for nobles—on Tower Hill, enabling the Tower to represent the king’s ostensible mercy and the recognition of More’s status as a gentleman, worthy to die quickly and honorably.81 That year, when Pope Paul III reacted to Bishop John Fisher’s Tower imprisonment by creating him a cardinal, Henry had Fisher executed on Tower Hill, proclaiming through the Tower that he would not succumb to international ecclesiastical pressure.82 For the king, public executions at this site recast the Tower as a stage where social messages, beyond punishment for crimes, were communicated to the nation or the world. For the populace, these executions fashioned the Tower as a place of terror. The Tower’s emergent iconic significance as a site of fear was reinforced in 1536, when the king’s unfulfilled wish for a son resulted in the accusation of Queen Anne Boleyn and five men, including her brother, of criminal conduct: adultery.83 The trials of Anne and her brother took place before “2,000 spectators” in the Great Hall of the palace within the Tower,84 giving

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the trumped-up charges the appearance of royal justice while expanding the Tower’s cultural use as a dramatic showplace of national history. Anne was also imprisoned in the Tower, representing the castle’s ability to define as a traitor a person who had enjoyed the king’s highest favor, and she and her co-accused were executed (Chamberlin 56–57). The men, as gentlemen of the king’s privy chamber, had their sentences commuted from the horrors of Tyburn (Fraser, The Wives of Henry VIII 253) to the quicker, more dignified execution by beheading. Anne, who had been sentenced to the king’s pleasure of either burning or beheading, was beheaded within the Tower walls by sword, allowing Henry, again, to appear to be merciful.85 For this, “the first, formal execution within the Tower,” a scaffold was built so spectators could view the scene (Chamberlin 57), again emphasizing the Tower’s cultural use as a theatrical showplace. Anne’s execution, less than a year after More’s, represented the Tower’s emergent cultural association with death and terror. As Henry VIII used the Tower as a prison and a site of torture and execution, the Tower became an emblem of royal oppression. Another former Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, was imprisoned there for treason and beheaded on Tower Hill without trial in 1540 for having persuaded the king to enter into an unhappy marriage with Anne of Cleves.86 Henry’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard, was beheaded within the Tower walls for committing adultery—which, for a queen, constituted treason—along with Lady Rochford, her lady-in-waiting and accomplice.87 At the Tower Henry also imprisoned and executed many dynastic threats, among them the Duke of Buckingham; Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey; and the seventy-year-old Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, daughter of George, Duke of Clarence, beheaded within the Tower walls.88 The Tower’s new symbolic function as a site of terror was widespread, multifarious, and often connected to defining Englishness and royal power. In addition to the four women Henry VIII had executed within the Tower walls, twenty-three people were put to death on Tower Hill during his reign (Chamberlin 49), and unknown numbers were victims of torture in the White Tower. Two instruments commonly used were the rack and the Scavenger’s Daughter, a device introduced during Henry’s reign.89 Anne Askew, for one, was racked for her “religious beliefs condemned as heretical” (Hibbert et al. 89). By authorizing the torture of his subjects whose religious convictions he opposed, the king deployed the Tower as a symbol of the national religion, inscribing those with different beliefs as England’s enemies. But the Tower also represented English resistance to royal spiritual authority. Askew, for instance, refused to expose “her fellow sectarians,” even after her torture (89).

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Prior to 1579 a handful of powerful works in various media influenced popular perceptions of the Tower as a prison and a site of tortures, murders, and executions. Prominent among these was Sir Thomas More’s ahistorical and revisionist The History of King Richard the Third (c.1513),90 the premise of which was later reproduced as fact in chronicles such as Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1548) and Raphael Holinshed’s The Chronicles of England, Ireland, and Scotland (1577, 1587).91 Another text influential in constructing “the Tower’s reputation as a grisly torture chamber” was John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, or Book of Martyrs (1563, 1570, 1576, 1583, 1596, 1610, 1632), its large woodcut of the Protestant deacon Cut[h]bert Simpson’s torture “within ye Tower” being “the most famous view of the rack.”92 Bishops fueled this book’s popularity by ordering it “to be placed in every cathedral church in England, where it was often found chained, as the Bible was in those days, to a lectern for the access of the people.”93 Like the story of Becket in 1241, these works increased the Tower’s popular lore in English culture and its significance as an emblem of opposition between subjects and their monarch. Nevertheless, during Henry’s reign the Tower developed further as a showplace of royal magnificence, a representation of national splendor and thus a source of subjects’ pride. Since the Middle Ages, the state regalia had been shown to the public, “at least by special arrangement,” and by the sixteenth century the Jewel House, containing the king’s “jewels, plate and precious-metal objects,” had broken away from the medieval Great Wardrobe; a new Jewel House, built in 1535–36, became “one of the most famous of the Tower’s attractions.”94 The Mint also attracted visitors, for by 1532 it was the only authorized mint in England (Chamberlin 98). And Henry’s armor became a “Tower attraction,” as the Office of Ordnance had expanded since its separation from the Wardrobe and especially during Henry’s reign (98–99). By this time the nation’s history, in the form of its records, was stored within the Tower walls, and throughout the sixteenth century the Menagerie was “another hugely popular tourist attraction” (Keay, The Elizabethan Tower of London 37, 28). Such visits were meant, it seems, to impress the visitors. In 1515 the Venetian diplomat, Peter Pasqualigio, visited the Menagerie and the armory, which he noted as “very fine.”95 When Frederick, count palatine, visited England in 1539, Cromwell was advised to consider showing him the Tower’s ordnance (Borg, “The Museum” 69). And in 1543–44, Don Manriquez de Lara, Duke de Najera, was shown the lions in the Menagerie (Rye xlvi). In the reign of Edward VI and the brief reign of his cousin, Jane Grey, powerful nobles used the Tower’s established cultural meaning as a symbol of

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royal authority to advance themselves and their religious and political agendas; in so doing, they revived the Tower’s status as a site of the struggle for control of the state and a locale of popular rebellions. But they also continued the Tower’s cultural function as a symbol of political intrigue, nobles acting in their own interests under the veil of royalty. The regency council of Edward VI, viewing the Tower as “the natural power base,” secured the castle for the nine-year-old king, who lodged there for three weeks before processing to Westminster for his coronation.96 Because the council would control Edward VI—and the country—throughout his reign, establishing Edward at the Tower asserted his authority and, through it, theirs. In this reign of radical Protestant reforms, prominent Catholics were imprisoned in the Tower, among them four bishops including Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester (Fry, Tower 97). The factious council also twice imprisoned the boy king’s uncle and protector, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, in the Tower and had him publicly executed as a felon on Tower Hill,97 giving his death the appearance of royal justice that provided his successor with a political advantage as he came into power. The Tower’s cultural meanings played a significant role in the transitions that followed. The radical Protestant John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland, controlled the government in the later years of Edward’s reign (Loach 101) and used the Tower’s status as an icon of royal authority to advance his personal and political interests as the reign ended. Defying the Succession Act of 1544 and Henry VIII’s will, which directed the succession to Henry’s Catholic daughter, Mary, Northumberland ensured that the young king, in the last months of his life, probably suffering from poisoning or tuberculosis, signed “a document that [ . . . ] vested the succession in the descendants of Henry VIII’s younger sister, Mary,” specifically, in the Protestant fifteen-year-old Jane Grey.98 This alteration was most likely made just after Jane married Northumberland’s son, Lord Guildford Dudley (163). Upon Edward’s death, Queen Jane took up residence in the Tower’s royal apartments. Because discontent was rife in England, her supporters chose to make the fortress her palace, though that function was, by then, residual. Mary Tudor’s support grew with the news that a new queen had been established in the Tower, and her Catholic supporters plotted to seize that ultimate symbol of legitimate rule for her.99 Here the Tower represented the struggle for the state as one queen fell from power and another restored lawful rule. Mary used the Tower’s iconic status as a symbol of royal authority to endorse her rule with theatrical flair and to redefine certain cultural labels on her terms. Her army having quickly defeated Northumberland, she rode into

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London and “promptly took possession of the Tower.”100 Using the castle as a stage to assert her authority and promote her religious and political image, Mary began her reign with mercy and dramatic spectacle in the White Tower’s courtyard by releasing most of the Catholic prisoners, each with a kiss (Chapman 158). One released prisoner, Stephen Gardiner, she elevated to the office of Lord Chancellor (Loades 190), demonstrating heresy and treason to have unstable meanings in England and the Tower to be a place that demarcated those meanings. Like her predecessors, Mary stayed at the Tower for a few days before her magnificent coronation procession to Westminster, which included the traditional “speeches and pageants.”101 However, Mary also used the Tower to imprison traitors and those who threatened her politically. Jane Grey and Northumberland’s sons, including Guildford, convicted of treason, remained imprisoned there (Chamberlin 65). Northumberland apostatized but was nevertheless executed on Tower Hill before a crowd of over ten thousand spectators,102 the Tower again theatrically representing royal authority, oppression, and power. Catholics in the crowd must have felt vindication; Protestants, defeat and indignation at Northumberland’s apostatization and execution, and dread for the reign ahead. The Tower’s marginal location on the city’s border made it an opportune site for subtly introducing controversial activities into mainstream English culture. Although Mary faced strong religious opposition in London, she used St. John’s Chapel in the Tower to assert her authority by celebrating religious rituals that were unacceptable or unpopular with her Protestant subjects. During Edward VI’s funeral at Westminster Abbey, “according to the rites of the Church of England,” a requiem mass was celebrated at the Tower for Mary’s brother (Llewellyn 131). In the same chapel she was betrothed, by proxy, to the Catholic Philip of Spain.103 Her practice of these religious rituals in the Tower at once represented her authority to re-establish Catholicism as England’s national religion and to use the Tower to do so; the re-association of Catholicism with English national identity; the Tower’s ongoing role in the royal family’s culturally significant ceremonies;104 and the struggle for control of the state, which, by the sixteenth century, included the country’s religious leadership. Mary also resorted to religious persecution at the Tower, negating any positive spiritual associations she aimed to create there. When her promotion of Catholicism instigated rebellion, she imprisoned leading opposition figures in the Tower. Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, was imprisoned there in 1553 and later burned at the stake for supporting Northumberland’s Protestant activity against Mary.105 The next year, the Protestant reaction to Mary’s betrothal to a Catholic Spaniard culminated in Wyatt’s Rebellion, led

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by Jane Grey’s father—the Duke of Suffolk—and the courtier Thomas Wyatt (Chamberlin 65). In response to the uprising, cannon positioned on the roof of the White Tower fired at the rebels camped in Southwark.106 Later the queen asserted her authority and tyranny through the Tower: Wyatt, Suffolk, and at least six hundred men were imprisoned there, approximately one hundred of whom were executed, including Wyatt, who was racked.107 Mary, her confidence shaken, also had Guildford Dudley executed on Tower Hill, immediately followed by Jane Grey’s beheading within the Tower walls, where, as a member of the royal family, she was entitled to a semi-private execution.108 These deployments of the Tower illustrated not only Mary’s oppressive rule but also her fear of future rebellion—and thus her vulnerability. In the wake of Wyatt’s Rebellion, the Imperial ambassador regarded the Protestant Princess Elizabeth as a threat to Philip’s security and insisted that she be executed before Philip would come to England. Mary subsequently imprisoned Elizabeth in the Tower, where the royal prisoner resided for two months, Mary’s councilors interrogating and attempting to implicate her in Wyatt’s Rebellion.109 A Jacobean play would represent her experiences there. Queen Elizabeth I began her reign by observing customs at the Tower that associated her with royal authority and right and that showcased the Tower as a dramatic icon of national history. After staying there for a week in 1558, she arrived at the Tower again in 1559, prior to her coronation, in a spectacular water procession (Nichols, The Progresses [ . . . ] of Queen Elizabeth 34). As the Tower artillery went off for nearly half an hour and trumpets sounded, she passed the crowds on the newly graveled streets, where children made speeches to her and subjects “declared their inward rejoisings by gesture, words, and countenance, [as] she entered the Tower” (32–35). She stayed there for three days, and on the eve of her coronation, about a thousand people processed with her from the Tower through London amid music, speeches, and “magnificent scaffolds and pageants.”110 Mullaney has called this procession “one of our more impressive instances of the city in symbolic action, as a cultural performance,” and a contemporary, Richard Mulcaster, compared London on that day to “a stage wherein was shown the wonderful spectacle,”111 associating the Tower with the theater, where it would soon debut. Under Elizabeth’s rule the Tower continued to develop its iconic significance as a site where England’s acceptable religious practices were defined. As Mary had used the Tower to practice Catholicism in her Protestant kingdom, Elizabethan preachers delivered sermons there, including Edward Dering’s address, A Sermon Preached at the Tower of London, the Eleuenth Day of December, 1569, a scathing attack on Judaism and Catholicism. This custom

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further emphasized the Tower’s unstable symbolic meanings: It could represent English religious identity, whether Catholic or Protestant. The Elizabethan Tower also developed in its dominant role as a prison (Chamberlin 67) and site of torture and oppression. Under Elizabeth the Tower held more prisoners than ever before, and the many inscriptions dating from her reign in the walls of the Beauchamp and Broad Arrow Towers attest to her prisoners’ use of the Tower’s fabric as a text for recording their torment.112 The Tower was often used to contain recusants who plotted to restore Catholicism in England; Elizabeth imprisoned six Catholic bishops in the Tower, where she kept them for years.113 Torture at the Tower, especially the use of the rack, was also prevalent in this reign.114 In 1579 the Lord Mayor complained to the Council that the Tower’s Porter was “compelling poor victuallers strangers, coming by water to London by ship or boat with fish, fruit, or such like victuals, to give him such a quantity as he pleased him to take, as two or three cod-fish from each boat, &c., without payment. Such as refused he caused to be imprisoned in the Tower.”115 And in November 1579, when the Puritan John Stubbs’ right hand was “cut off with a Cleaver, driven through the Wrist by the force of a Mallet, upon a Scaffold in the Market-place at Westminster” for writing a tract that opposed Elizabeth’s betrothal to the Catholic Duke of Anjou, he was imprisoned in the Tower, not to be released for over a year.116 Another theatrical, if oppressive, popular entertainment at the Tudor Tower connected the castle to drama for Renaissance audiences who attended both types of spectacle. London’s entertainment that “probably drew the greatest crowds of all was the occasional public execution on Tower Hill” (Fisher x). These executions of lords and noblemen were “great public occasions” at which crowds of thousands “would roar their approval as the executioner did his duty.”117 If most Londoners saw the Tower as a site of oppression, many of them actively participated in fashioning that image, and some even benefited financially from it: at executions, “street vendors would sell their wares, and the whole spectacle took on a carnival atmosphere” (The Tower of London: The Official Guide). Despite the castle’s oppressive late-sixteenth-century functions, it was also refashioned and renovated for more welcome emergent uses. The Office of Records progressed during Elizabeth’s reign, particularly the first important efforts at cataloging the collection, improving its accessibility for research.118 Additionally, in 1579–80 the record office was glazed, and lights and ladders were installed, as members of the public could then consult the records “by appointment and for a fee” (Keay, Tower 37). But the greatest Elizabethan innovation at the Tower was its growing use as a visitor attraction and public showcase of royal power. Exhibiting the

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Tower and its contents became more popular in Elizabeth’s reign, particularly when “its royal storehouses—the Jewel House and armouries, together with the Menagerie—beg[a]n to be enhanced for public view” (Impey and Parnell 97). Two new armories, established in the White Tower in 1565–66, were shown mainly to impress notable foreigners.119 Even Elizabeth visited the Mint, where a new building had been constructed a year earlier, in a rare visit to the Tower in 1561.120 In 1569 the new Lord Mayor, Sir Alexander Avenon, “was presented to the Lieutenant of the Tower at the outer gate” (Analytical Index to [ . . . ] the Remembrancia 312 n.2), an acknowledgement of royal authority over the Tower. And in 1572 the Warden of the Mint objected to crowds of visitors who came to see Mestrell’s engine, a machine that stamped a design on coin edges.121 These crowds indicate that visiting the Tower was becoming a form of popular entertainment, fostering more positive—and theatrical—associations with the castle. By the mid-Elizabethan age it was customary for crown officials to show the Tower’s sights to foreign dignitaries, and other visitors were touring the Tower on their own, for the Tower’s “appeal was already taking on another dimension, based not just on its appearance, but its associations with many of the great events and personalities of history” (Impey and Parnell 97). In fact, the Tower and its sights were even being shown to less distinguished visitors: In 1578 the Privy Council wrote to the Lieutenant of the Tower and the “officers of the Ordinance and Armourie,” requesting that they show Monsieur Kentell, a gentleman from high Germany, “the Tower of London and suche thinges as are usuallie shewed therein” (Acts of the Privy Council of England 10:441). By 1579 the Tower was attracting visitors who could see England’s sovereign power on display in all its manifestations, transforming the Tower into a stage that presented England’s history as entertainment. This practice fostered the Tower’s role as a proud symbol of English national identity. The Tower had developed into a source of national pride for the queen and her subjects, as well as a powerful but unstable icon that could represent royal power and non-royal resistance. History plays were about to represent that instability, beginning a new chapter in the struggle for the Tower’s iconic meaning.

Chapter Three

Stage vs. State The Struggle for the Tower

By the time history plays represented the Tower of London spatially onstage, most playgoers had primarily experienced the actual Tower as the icon of royal tyranny that it had become during the Reformation. Its cultural meanings must have appeared to be non-negotiable, fixed by the crown to serve only royal interests. Imagine playgoers’ surprise, then, seeing and hearing the Tower repeatedly represented as a symbol whose meanings were unstable and thus up for renegotiation. I propose in this chapter to demonstrate, first, the crown’s ideology of the Tower from 1579 to c.1634, when twenty-four history plays represented the Tower; second that all twenty-four plays represented the Tower’s symbolic instability in ways that contradicted the royal ideology; and third, that the plays about Richard III were especially important for shaping the Tower’s cultural meaning, eliciting a struggle with the crown for the Tower’s ideology. THE ROYAL IDEOLOGY OF THE TOWER Both Elizabeth I and James I fashioned the Tower as a showplace of royal and spiritual authority, magnificence, and entertainment, and to a lesser extent, Charles I continued this trend. In the sixteenth century the Tower Menagerie “became an important tourist attraction” (P. Thomas 32), drawing international visitors who were also shown the royal Mint, Wardrobe, jewels, and armories. Starting in Elizabeth’s reign, Tower warders were paid to escort these visitors around the complex (Raeburn, “The Officers of the Tower” 79–80). Also in this century, foreign visitors began to record their impressions of the Tower,1 and travel diaries from 1584–1628 bring to light the crown’s attitude toward the Tower through the warders’ presentation of it. The diaries reveal that the crown was fashioning the Tower, through this entertainment, as a showplace of ancient 54

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magnificence, increasingly associated with Julius Caesar and all that his name implied for the pedigree of the English nation and monarchy. They indicate that, as the sixteenth century ended, the crown publicized Elizabeth’s 1554 imprisonment in the Tower to emphasize her splendor by contrast with her unfortunate past. And the diaries exemplify that, throughout this period, the crown strove to fashion a consistent representation of the Tower by introducing progressively more procedures for visitors to follow and through standard tours and narratives that appear to have been scripted. First, throughout the period of original Tower play production, the White Tower was consistently presented to foreign visitors as having been built by Julius Caesar. Elizabethans embraced the Tower’s lore as Britain’s link to the Roman Empire and to Caesar, whose “conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils” Shakespeare celebrated and whom Stow called “the first Conqueror of the Britaines.”2 Stow, for one, knew the White Tower had been built in the eleventh century; nevertheless, he noted that Elizabethans often ascribed the castle’s construction to Caesar,3 whose name represented their lineage, their nation’s derivation from the ancient Roman Empire, and their monarch’s association with a great emperor’s royal authority. By connecting the Tower, a “distinctively British” entity, to the Roman occupation of Britain, the historical moment when “Britons” became aware of their “Britishness,” Elizabethans strove “to regain the glory of that long-lost age when Britannia was part of a grand civilization” and when Londinium was established as an urban settlement.4 Thus, the White Tower’s epithet, Julius Caesar’s Tower,5 helped fashion the identity of the English people, especially the monarch. This myth became increasingly elaborate by the late 1590s. In 1584, for the first time on record, a Tower warder and tour guide told a foreign visitor, Lupold von Wedel, that the White Tower, also known as Caesar’s Tower, had been built by Julius Caesar.6 In 1598 Paul Hentzner’s party was told the same legend about “that very antient and very strong Tower” (Hentzner 37). A year later, the guard who guided Thomas Platter’s party through the Tower repeated the story that the White Tower had been “erected by Julius Caesar,” adding that Caesar had dined in the hall there (Platter 161, 162). By 1600 Caesar was credited with building the White Tower and the “ancient dining-hall,” as Baron Waldstein was told, and in 1602 Philip Julius, Duke of Stettin-Pomerania, was shown “the Tower of London, [ . . . ] built by Julius Caesar” as well as “Julius Caesar’s dining rooms.”7 Justus Zinzerling toured “Caesar’s Tower” around 1610 (“Justus Zinzerling, circa 1610” 133). And as late as 1625–28, Jean Fontaine and Louis Schönbub were shown “The Great Tower, built by Julius Caesar” (Ffoulkes 68). Although Caesar predated the Tower by a millennium, attributing its construction to him and placing him

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historically in the White Tower exaggerated the castle’s age and associated it, and the English nation and monarchy, with his antiquity, power, and fame. To be linked with Caesar through this massive stone structure reinforced Elizabeth’s notoriety, legitimacy, and authority. Julius Caesar’s Tower was, after all, Her Majesty’s Tower,8 and connecting the queen with Caesar made her appear even more eminent than she was. Second, nearly all of this period’s Tower visitors’ recorded impressions include historical information provided by the Tower guides,9 and from 1598 to 1600 the history lessons included details of Elizabeth’s imprisonment there as a princess. The image of this celebrated queen in prison must have instilled visitors with sorrow for Elizabeth’s mistreatment, serving to portray her royalty as more illustrious in contrast to her previous hardship. Hentzner was told that “queen Elizabeth was kept prisoner here by her sister queen Mary, at whose death she was enlarged, and by right called to the throne” (Hentzner 39). Thomas Platter was shown artifacts from the imprisonment, “a stool and chair of Queen Elizabeth’s,” and “a grating [the watergate later called Traitors’ Gate] through which criminals are led,” with the story, then believed to be true, that the prisoner had been “brought this way.”10 And in 1600 Baron Waldstein’s multiple Tower guides “pointed out the place [ . . . ] where Queen Elizabeth was kept prisoner: only twice was she allowed to go into the garden alongside” (Valdštejna 71). The restrictive rules of Elizabeth’s incarceration were apparently recounted to make her accession and power seem more impressive, disseminating an ideology of royal authority and magnificence through the Tower. Third, these Tower tours were increasingly controlled, and after 1592, parts of the narratives that visitors from a range of countries recorded were so consistent that they may have been scripted. The fact that Tower warders were the castle’s only authorized visitor guides (Raeburn, “Officers” 79–80) epitomized the crown’s attempt to shape the Tower’s representation. All six late-Elizabethan visitors to the Tower who recorded the experience referred to their tour guide(s) and/or to being shown features of the Tower complex.11 In the last months of Elizabeth’s reign, the Council requested that the Lieutenant of the Tower “shewe the Florentine Ambassador the ordinaunce and offices in the Tower, &c., when hee shall repaire thither for that purpose” (Acts of the Privy Council 32:508). Early in James’ reign, in January 1604–05, the Lieutenant of the Tower was asked to show the Lord Chancellor of Scotland, “who [was] very desirous to see the [Tower],” the places therein that he wished to see, evidently deviating from the usual tour for this special guest, and to inform the officers of the ordnance to treat him with “the greater courtesy” (Calendar of the Manuscripts [ . . . ] Salisbury 17:14). Later that month

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the Lieutenant of the Tower was ordered to show the Spanish ambassador’s party “those things in the Tower, which all strangers are curious to see,” things that “the French and others” would see, things that “Monsr. Taxis,” a member of the Spanish ambassador’s party, had even seen before (17:39). Moreover, the procedures that visitors were required to follow throughout the tour increased in number and formality during Elizabeth’s reign. In 1584 Von Wedel’s guide allowed his party to touch certain objects that were brought out to them and required merely that the visitors view one of the rooms from its doorway without entering (Von Wedel 257). In 1598 Hentzner’s guide required members of his party to leave their swords with a guard at the gate before he introduced himself and showed the guests around the Tower (Hentzner 37), a regulation demonstrating the tours’ becoming more official and systematic. In 1599, at eight of the most fascinating points during the tour, Platter’s party paid a gratuity to the attraction’s “keeper in attendance,” gratuities becoming a well-established Tower tour ritual by 1639.12 As another indication that the Tower tours were controlled, many of these visitors not only were shown the same features at the Tower but also heard the same details about those features. The account of Stettin-Pomerania’s guide’s armory narrative in 1602 so closely resembles that of Platter’s in 159913 that it appears their guides were following a script, however informal, that they delivered to each tour group. Similarities also abound between Hentzner and Platter’s diaries in 1598 and 1599. These similarities have led Charles J. Ffoulkes to suggest that Platter and Hentzner seem to have known one another, or that Platter had read Hentzner’s diaries, “for some of the descriptions of the two travelers are almost word for word identical”; alternatively, Dr. Rosedale, who translated the edition of Platter’s diary that Ffoulkes used (66), may have read Hentzner’s journals, explaining the similar wording. In fact, it is not only Platter’s and Hentzner’s accounts of their Tower tours that are remarkably similar. Frederick, Duke of Wirtemberg, in 1592, and Hentzner and Platter all recorded seeing a wolf in the Menagerie that was either very scarce or the only one in all of England, and both Platter and Wirtemberg were told that, by contrast, wolves were plentiful in Scotland.14 The similarities continue as the diarists recount historical events associated with objects in the Tower, especially artifacts related to the military and courtly exploits of Henry VIII and his brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. The diaries of Von Wedel, Wirtemberg, Hentzner, Platter, and Stettin-Pomerania all mention Brandon’s tilting lance.15 And the narrative heard by Stettin-Pomerania also resembles Hentzner’s and Platter’s description of two wooden pieces used by Henry VIII to gain Boulogne, “using a peculiar stratagem.”16 As late as 1613 and 1625–28, Tower visitors

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recorded this story in their diaries (Ffoulkes 68). The diaries are consistent and so similar that, from 1584, at least parts of the tour narratives seem to have been scripted, exemplifying the government’s desire to shape visitors’ interpretations of the Tower. Even for Elizabeth’s royal guests who did not visit the castle, the Tower was a frequent gateway to the capital and a magnificent first glimpse of the city. As Anna Keay explains, “A secondary function of the Tower wharf was as the landing place for official visitors [ . . . ]. The royal stairs were frequently used for this purpose” (Tower 48). From 1592 to 1602, in fact, Elizabeth was building an expensive new Wharf and new privy stairs to enhance their appearance “for the ceremonial reception of foreign ambassadors.”17 She had also refurbished the Tower in general with new stone in 1565–66 and restored the White Tower’s turrets in 1573–74 (Colvin et al. 3:271), thereby controlling the Tower’s representation and using it as a showplace of her magnificence. Another source of evidence for the crown’s ideology of the Tower was the castle’s use for events of national political and spiritual importance, one of “the Tudor dynasty’s efforts to concentrate authority and power, both temporal and spiritual, in the person of the monarch” (Montrose, The Purpose of Playing 21, 23–24). In 1592, when the plague precluded the traditional celebration of the Lord Mayor’s Pageant, Lord Mayor Sir William Rowe was sworn into office at the Tower (Analytical Index 2 n.1). And by the 1580s the Tower was a location for reasserting the supremacy of the national church. Like the popular theaters, it had become a showplace, a stage for the performance art of Protestant propaganda, and a setting for dramatic cultural events that were eventually published for an international audience. In 1581 at least three sermons were preached at the Tower, one “in the Hearing of Such Obstinate Papistes as Were Prisoners There” and two to “Jesuites [ . . . ] and Other Adversaries to the Gospell of Christ [ . . . ]. In which, Were Confuted to Their Faces, the [ . . . ] Cheefe Poincts of Their Religion.”18 Also in 1581, in a theatrical show staged at the Tower, the Jesuit missionary Edmund Campion became Elizabeth’s most famous victim of Catholic persecution (Holleran 16). Following his arrest he was led through London’s streets to the Tower, wearing a paper in his cap that read, “Campion the Seditious Jesuit,”19 reduced, by crown officials, to a caricature and labeled like a role in a play. He was imprisoned in the Tower, questioned, and racked three times (36, 38). Weeks later, in front of a large crowd of spectators in one of the Tower’s chapels, Protestant divines interrogated him for hours under the guise of a public debate on religious issues that Campion had requested (41, x), fashioning the Tower as a stage where English

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national identity was proclaimed. Three more daylong debates followed at a private location within the Tower (42–43), reinforcing the castle’s role in this drama. The English government even published an account of the disputations, claiming that Campion had lost the debates, which gained widespread attention throughout Europe,20 the Tower representing English Protestantism to the world, all under the crown’s control. Then, Campion having “become the public embodiment of Catholic dissent against [Elizabeth],” the queen used him to exemplify “English justice” (81). Having been convicted of high treason, he was drawn on a hurdle from the Tower to Tyburn, where he was hanged, castrated, disemboweled, and quartered.21 Again, Elizabeth fashioned the Tower as a showplace of her spiritual authority, magnificence, and—for those spectators who enjoyed watching the queen’s Protestant clerics harass a Jesuit onstage in his prison—royal entertainment. From his first day in London, Elizabeth’s successor, too, fashioned the Tower as a showcase of royal and spiritual authority, magnificence, and entertainment. When James arrived from Edinburgh on May 11, 1603, he visited the Tower, where hundreds of pieces of ordnance were shot in his honor.22 This was both magnificent—“a peale of so good order was never heard before”—and entertaining, as the king chose to watch the spectacle from his barge (Nichols, The Progresses [ . . . ] of King James the First 1:118). Upon James’ disembarking at “his owne Staires, so called The King’s Staires,” the Lieutenant of the Tower presented him with the keys to the castle, symbolizing his royal authority (1:118–19). During his stay at the Tower over the next several days, James was shown many features that were on the standard Tower tour.23 The White Tower, and the Tower of London in general, continued to be called “Julius Caesar’s Towre” in James’ reign (1:118; 2:88). In fact, for his coronation in July 1603, a production entitled “England’s Caesar” was printed and sold in London.24 Its sonnets called James “England’s Caesar” and “Defender of the Faith,” and London “Caesar’s towne,” and addressed the Tower itself: “Ope wide, yee oryent gates of Caesar’s Tower!”25 These passages reinforced the early-Stuart Tower ideology: James was Caesar; the Tower, the magnificent symbol of his authority. When James entered the Tower for a three-day stay in its royal lodging before his triumphal entry in March 1604, William Hubbocke, the Tower’s chaplain, delivered “An Oration Gratvlatory to [ . . . ] Iames of England [ . . . ], King, Defendor of the Faith [ . . . ],” which centered on the Tower as a symbol of James’ temporal and spiritual authority.26 Hubbocke described the Tower as “the threshold [ . . . ] of the land of your behest: and the first step of your investiture vnto a kingdome, determined vnto you by divine

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decree, before you were borne” (B1r). The Protestant discourse of predestination proclaimed the Tower as an emblem of James’ temporal and spiritual power. This ideology intensified: “England, Fraunce & Ireland, the soveraigne authority of all which by the possession of this one place, you do claspe and as it were gripe in your hand. For this Tower and royal Castle is the pledge for them all” (B1r). The speech connected James’ sovereign and sacred authority and royal legitimacy to the Tower, invoking the Menagerie by calling him “a true ofspring of the Lyon of Iuda, and rightly discended of Kings” and again comparing him to King David: “So that there was not a more dutifull striving betweene Israel and Iuda to bring home David there king: then there is ready obsequiousnes of the whole kingdome of England [ . . . ] for the bringing in of our David a King after Gods owne hart” (B1r, B2r). It also evokes James’ authority over the Tower’s other magnificent features: the “Lieuetenant” and “Gard,” “Records of Estate,” prison, armory, and “Iewell-house and the wealth of the kingdome, containing implements of great valew aboue number, and al the gold and silver plate, with a most rich princely wardrop; all which haue now long since powred themselues into your bosome, as the iust owner & ful heir to them al” (B1r-v). James’ royal magnificence and authority were likewise evoked through the Mint, the coins of which bore his image as “our Caesar” (B1r). This association led to the traditional identification of England’s monarch and the Tower with Caesar, and even a gendered personification of the White Tower: “a great and square Tower [ . . . ], a watchman for the City, [ . . . ] wherein antiquity hath especially made memorable the hall of the Romaine Caesar” (B1v). Consistent with Elizabeth’s ideology toward the castle, then, the earlyStuart Tower represented sovereign and spiritual authority and magnificence as the royal symbol of England, the biblical and ideological Key to the Kingdom: “receiue (here) the keyes of the kingdome: take into your hand the helme of this Empire: [ . . . ] goe vp into the chiefe fort of your land, [ . . . ] this Tower of London” (B3r). Other Jacobean activities at the castle exemplified the royal ideology’s consistency, fashioning the Tower as magnificent and entertaining at once. James’ “Tryumphant Passage (from the Tower) through [ . . . ] London,” the traditional procession of royal authority, was honored with yet another “Magnificent Entertainment” of dramatic spectacle,27 and the king often focused on royal amusement at the Menagerie. During his stay at the Tower before the royal entry in 1604, the royal family and several lords went to the Lion Tower and watched as, at the king’s request, mastiffs were placed into the den to fight a lion (Nichols, James 1:320–21). In 1604–05 James remodeled the lions’ quarters at the Menagerie, adding, among other

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features, a walk to be “maintayned and kept for especiall place to baight the Lyons with dogges, beares, bulles, bores, &c” and a platform for viewing these spectacles, which he replaced in 1623–24 with a permanent viewing gallery ninety-two feet wide, for the entertainment of the Court and visiting dignitaries.28 The barbaric royal performances, which involved cocks, a lamb, and dogs in 1605 and a bear, dogs, and a horse in 1609, were apparently well-known, as a 1622 masque opens with a dialogue associating the king with seeing the lions.29 Additionally, James entertained his brother-inlaw, Christian IV, King of Denmark, in 1606 with stops at Tower Wharf and Tower Hill and a personal tour of the Tower’s magnificent contents, followed by one of the kings’ discharging a piece of ordnance from the White Tower, and a banquet there.30 James also used the Tower to assert his authority over his Catholic subjects. In 1603 he imprisoned one of his chaplains there for seeking toleration for Catholics, and he imprisoned two knights and two lawyers from Ireland for merely requesting that the Irish be allowed to practice Catholicism.31 Having allegedly participated in the Bye (or secondary) Plot, and the Main Plot, a Catholic conspiracy to depose James, the courtier Sir Walter Ralegh was a Tower prisoner from 1603 to 1616 and was later executed.32 And for Guy Fawkes’ role in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, a Catholic conspiracy to restore England to the Roman Church, Fawkes was imprisoned in the Tower, where, by James’ handwritten warrant, he was tortured before his execution.33 In addition to these punishments, James conveyed his spiritual authority at the Tower with benevolence: the only known new structure built at the Tower in his reign was a residence for the Tower’s preacher in 1616–17 (Colvin et al. 3:275). In addition to continuing Elizabeth’s image of the Tower as a showplace of royal authority, magnificence, and entertainment, James, an imperialist like his Tudor predecessors and “increasingly absolutist in his thoughts and actions,”34 fashioned the Tower as an emblem of his despotism. In 1613 the murder of a Tower prisoner, Thomas Overbury, involved James’ protection of his favorite, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, who was imprisoned in the Tower in 1615 and joined by his wife, Frances Howard, the following year.35 Though James was not responsible for Carr’s adulterous premarital affair with Howard, which had led to Overbury’s poisoning (Travers 59, 62– 64), the light sentence his favorite received was hardly justifiable. Despite being tried and sentenced to death in 1616 for the murder, Carr and his wife were merely imprisoned and released from the Tower in 1622.36 James also allowed his cousin, Lady Arabella Stuart, to die in 1615, malnourished and insane, after four years of incarceration in the Tower for entering into a

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marriage he had prohibited and for attempting to escape to France with her husband, himself a Tower escapee.37 Arabella, having a strong claim to the throne and a spouse with whom to produce legitimate heirs, did not benefit from the royal favoritism James had lavished upon Carr. Thus, James’ use of the Tower as a symbol of his authority served his personal interests so well as to be considered tyrannical. Charles I had far less to do with the Tower than his predecessors did, but he used it mainly to assert his royal authority, believing strongly, like his father, in the divine right of kings.38 Although he did not stay at the Tower before his coronation, he was the penultimate king to make the authoritative, magnificent, entertaining procession through the city on that occasion in 1626.39 Later that year he “use[d] his Regal authority in committing [ . . . ] to the Tower” two members of Parliament who had impeached his favorite.40 DRAMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF THE TOWER: UNDERMINING THE ROYAL IDEOLOGY Because English Renaissance government authorities—including the Master of the Revels, who regulated early modern plays and censored from them criticisms of the government—treated any dramatic denigration of past events as a negative comment upon current events, playwrights used “oblique communication” or “disguised discourse” to encode ideologies of the Tower that opposed the crown’s.41 English defamation law followed the mitior sensus (the milder sense) rule, by which ambiguous statements were presumed to have an innocent rather than defamatory meaning; thus, “the revelatory power” of the Tower’s dramatic representation was “predicated upon disguising” it as a mere setting or historical detail.42 Nevertheless, in early modern Londoners’ minds, the Tower’s onstage representations would have activated a cultural resonance with the contemporary Tower. This “implied analogy” provided opportunities for multiple interpretations of history plays, bringing into the drama a subtext of the repression under which many early modern Londoners lived (Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation 47). It enabled playwrights to disrupt the monolithic, self-promoting royal ideology of the Tower and expose it as a fiction while dramatizing chronicle history, thereby limiting their “authorial responsibility for the text” and avoiding the censor’s pen (57). In this way, the early modern theater exposed contemporary cultural contradictions (Montrose, The Purpose of Playing 209), the Tower plays epitomizing disparities between the crown’s ideology of the Tower and the reality of the Tower’s role in English culture. These plays offered the counter-discourse that the Tower was not merely a place of royal authority and magnificence but also a site of

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royal vulnerability and hypocrisy. And Elizabethan and early-Stuart eyes and ears were sharply tuned to detect hypocrisy, which many English reformers believed to be “the worst of all religious offenses”: in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England the sense of discrepancy between “inward disposition” and “outward appearance” seems unusually urgent and consequential for a very large number of people, who occupy virtually every position on the ideological spectrum [ . . . ]. It must be endlessly reiterated in prefaces, satires, sermons, advice literature, medical treatises, coney-catching pamphlets, doctrinal debates, antitheatrical tracts, speeches from the gallows, published reports of foreign and domestic turmoil, essays on the passions and on the soul.43

Katharine Eisaman Maus attributes this preoccupation with hypocrisy to the fact that, in twenty-three years, England’s national religion had changed four times, each change requiring religious dissidents to decide whether “to conceal their true allegiances from hostile authorities.”44 Nearly every latesixteenth-century English subject had, at some point, chosen between “selfdisplay and self-withholding.”45 Even Elizabeth had conformed to Catholic doctrine under Mary’s rule, particularly as a prisoner in the Tower, though “nobody had ever believed for a moment in her conversion.”46 Hypocrisy was thus a part of subjects’ personal histories as much as it was a part of their national history. And they recognized and condemned religious hypocrisy in others, such as the Earl of Essex, of whom contemporaries said in 1600, “In matters of religion, his dissimulation and hypocrisy are now disclosed” and “His religion was hypocrisy.”47 In the weeks that followed Essex’s revolt, numerous conspirators, citizens, and crown officials testified that Essex had led Catholics to believe that if they supported his coup, he would grant them toleration as their king,48 and that he had made similar promises to Protestants. As one James Knowde testified, “this shows how cunningly he has behaved himself so to bewitch the two factions in England, pretended reformers and Popish malcontents both so greatly honouring him, and expecting from him such contrary effects” (Calendar of State Papers, Domestic 567). While Essex denied at his execution that he had ever been “Atheist nor Papist,” several citizens and crown officials had testified that he was a Catholic or a Catholic supporter, perhaps because he “harbored Papists” or used priests as “intelligencers.”49 The priest Thomas Wright said that “he thought the Earl of Essex was a Catholic, but concealed it from policy, that so both Puritans and Protestants might be drawn to take his part” (568–69). These

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examples illustrate a facet of the English Renaissance cultural mindset that predisposed theatergoers to receive the Tower’s dramatic representations as comments upon their sovereigns’ hypocritical behaviors. On the surface, the Tower on the stage represented royal authority and magnificence as the actual Tower did. At the same time, however, as the York Commission of 1576 had stated about the representation of kings and queens, the Tower’s onstage representations undermined the actual Tower’s authority and majesty (Kastan 111–14). Similarly, Elizabeth stated in 1586, “we princes [ . . . ] are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world dulie obserued; the eies of manie behold our actions; a spot is soone spied in our garments; a blemish quickly noted in our doings.”50 And in Basilikon Doron James likewise acknowledged, “Kings being publike persons [ . . . ] are as it were set [ . . . ] vpon a publike stage, in the sight of all the people; where all the beholders eyes are attentiuely bent to looke and pry in the least circumstance of their secretest drifts” (5). These monarchs recognized that theatrical “visibility implies vulnerability,” a loss of control over the “royal image,” a demystification and destabilization of that image.51 This also held true for the Tower’s onstage representations: they demonstrated the Tower’s meanings to be inconsistent, out of royal control, and even opposed to the crown’s ideology. The Tower plays challenged the system of belief about the Tower that the monarchy had imposed upon its subjects, often by recasting historical events concerning the Tower or by presenting new scenarios that helped create for the Tower an identity of its own. In all twenty-four Tower plays, the Tower’s symbolic instability takes at least one of four forms. To illustrate this point, I will analyze the Tower’s emblematic instability in one play from each of the following categories and point to its instability in the other Tower plays. The Sovereign Loses Control of the Tower A number of Tower plays represent a king or queen who is dispossessed of the Tower, the symbol of royal authority. These plays destabilize the actual Tower’s royal meaning as the emblem of sovereign authority and recast it as an icon of royal helplessness. Not only does the ruler lose control of the emblem of his or her power, but someone else gains control of it, which is dangerous to the kingdom. As Hubbocke’s “Oration Gratvlatory” articulated, the Tower was the key to this early modern kingdom: whoever captured it and controlled its ideology also controlled the land. Losing control of the Tower in a play is, therefore, personally dangerous to the displaced monarch or prince, as it often leads to his or her imprisonment and death. In fact, each play in this group was most likely first performed during Elizabeth’s reign,

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reminding audiences, as the Tower tours did, of her 1554 imprisonment in the Tower. Unlike the Tower tours, however, the plays suggest that Elizabeth could be overruled through the Tower. This message wholly contradicted the meanings of the Tower that the crown promoted, impressing upon Londoners in the audience the radical notion that the Tower’s role in their culture was not completely under royal control. To illustrate, in Shakespeare’s 3H6 (c.1591),52 audiences witnessed England’s sovereign losing control of the Tower no less than three times. Henry twice loses control of the Tower as well as the throne, and both times that Edward IV deposes Henry, he takes control of the Tower and imprisons Henry there (3.2, 4.8). Likewise, during Henry’s release from the Tower and re-adeption, control of the Tower reverts to him (4.6). The Tower’s symbolic volatility peaks when Henry VI is killed in that structure which had stood for his rightful rule (5.6). Throughout the play, monarchical instability causes the Tower to be read as an unstable symbol without a secure association with either monarch, challenging the royal ideology that the Tower represented sovereign authority. Moreover, upon Edward’s second accession, the Tower impresses itself upon the audience not as a symbol of Edward’s authority but as the epitome of the deposed king’s loss of power. Edward deprives Henry not only of his kingdom but also of his freedom and his voice, ordering, “Hence with him to the Tower. Let him not speak” (4.8.57). These two imperatives announce that, while the Tower represents the former sovereign’s lost territory and power, it also represents his lost identity as a deposed king. Without the Tower Henry is powerless and voiceless, signifying that the power in England lies in the Tower and not in the king. Other Elizabethan history plays represent monarchs losing control of the Tower, suggesting to audiences that Elizabeth herself could be dispossessed of the Tower and thus of her royal authority. In Iacke Straw (1590–93), Richard II returns from Kent to learn that, in his absence, rebels besieged what he had called “our Towre of London,” where his mother had taken refuge.53 The play concludes with Richard retiring there for the night, once again in control of the castle, but his control is insecure as he requests that lords and noblemen “Accompany us to gard us to the Tower” (ll.1208–10). The ease with which the Tower falls into rebel hands causes even the king to question it as a symbol of royal authority, pushing audiences to reconsider the Tower’s crown-sponsored meanings. The other plays in this category represent monarchs not only losing control of the Tower but also being imprisoned there. In Edward the Second (1591–93)54 Marlowe ahistorically turns the Tower into a prison for the

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king’s mother, Queen Isabella, enabling the Tower to take on an identity of its own (5.6.78–80). According to Stow, only Mortimer was committed to the Tower; Edward III did not imprison Isabella but merely took her lands and reduced her income (Annales 230). It must have satisfied and excited citizens to see the Tower transcend chronicle history to control and repress a former queen rather than serve only as an instrument of royal control and repression. Similarly, Shakespeare’s R2 (1595) represents Richard’s deposition at Westminster Hall, not at the Tower, where, as a matter of record, it took place.55 By removing the deposition from the Tower, Shakespeare enables the usurper to conclude this scene with the order that Richard be conveyed to the Tower or, as Richard’s Queen terms it, “Julius Caesar’s ill-erected tower.”56 Thus, Bolingbroke usurps not only the throne but the Tower’s royal association with Caesar’s ancient legitimacy. When Richard, en route to the Tower, is diverted to Pomfret, he declares that Bolingbroke will be an “unrightful king” with a “usurpèd throne” (5.1.63, 65). It would have generated interest in London audiences to see that, as opposed to the royal ideology, the Tower’s association with Caesar was insufficient to legitimate the monarch, inviting Londoners to view the actual Tower with enlightened eyes thereafter. And in Dekker and Webster’s Wyat (1602), Iane Grey—Queen Elizabeth’s cousin—ascends England’s throne and stays at the Tower before her coronation (A3v). However, she is quickly overthrown and loses control of the Tower, which becomes her prison, demonstrating its mutability (C1r). The dramatization of a Tudor queen’s imprisonment in her own palace invited theatergoers to call into question the Tower’s meanings that Elizabeth endorsed, as well as her control of the Tower and the kingdom. The Tower Serves as a Power Base for Traitors to the Crown In some of these plays, one or more treasonous nobles or bishops seize the Tower to advance their power by controlling or tyrannizing the monarch. These plays take the crown-sponsored ideology of the Tower and turn it against the monarch, revealing that the Tower can be read as opposed to the crown. These Tower plays announced to theatergoers that their monarch was not the only one who could determine the Tower’s meaning; rather, the Tower could be used to defy the monarch as a symbol of another’s authority, possibly even theirs. For instance, in Shakespeare’s 1H6 (1590),57 the treasonous Bishop of Winchester, aiming to “sit at chiefest stern of public weal,” captures the Tower and forbids its wardens to open the gates to his rival, the protector, the Duke of Gloucester, who needs to inspect supplies in the arsenal for the

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war against France (1.1.177, 1.3). Besides successfully barring Gloucester from the Tower, Winchester uses the Tower as a power base from which to accuse Gloucester of being a “usurping proditor” and “a foe to citizens” who “seeks to overthrow religion.”58 Although Gloucester represents the king in his minority and has the kingdom’s best interests in mind, a traitor controls the Tower and uses its symbolic authority to undermine Gloucester’s credibility. This representation of the Tower refashions it as an icon of political and spiritual authority other than the king’s. The play contradicts the royal ideology of the Tower in two ways: it indicates that the Tower does not represent the king’s power, and it shows that the Tower can represent the power of a traitor. This scene—probably the earliest physical representation of the Tower on the public stage59—began to reshape theatergoers’ attitudes toward the Tower and, through it, the monarchy. Its defiance of the royal ideology toward the Tower must have been shocking to them. And yet London’s playgoers, knowing the Tower as a landmark of their city, and having frequently seen the Tower and possibly even stood within its walls, would have found this instability in the Tower’s meaning, and the prospect of appropriating its authority, to be interesting and exciting. Four more plays similarly represent the Tower as a power base for traitors. Munday, Drayton, Wilson, and Hathway’s Old-castle (1599) represents a prisoner deceiving the king’s officers at the Tower.60 In disguise, the Lollard Old-castle escapes from imprisonment in the Tower (ll.2031–85); thus, the Tower, unable to confine the king’s prisoner, becomes the oppressed English subject’s agent for resisting and hoodwinking the king. Moreover, as Donna B. Hamilton has recently argued, Munday’s religious views were at least moderately Catholic.61 Catholic playgoers, predisposed to identify with the royal persecution of this heretic at the Tower (Kastan 98–101), must have enjoyed Old-castle’s exploitation of the Tower, that crown-fashioned icon of royal authority. Cromwell (c.1599–1602) again represented a treasonous bishop, Gardiner, employing the Tower for personal revenge against Cromwell, thereby defying the king (4.5, 5.5). Even in the play’s final lines, when Henry VIII sends a reprieve for Cromwell, the king has no authority over the Tower, contradicting the image the crown authorized. In fact, the play’s demonstration that the Tower could be seized quickly, and secretly used against the monarch’s wishes, would have stirred some playgoers to consider how the actual Tower could be controlled for their purposes. In Rowley’s 1604 When You See Me, Woolsie assures Gardner that Anne Bullen’s beheading was the result of his labor, as the clergy control the king (C1r) and, by extension, the Tower. The treasonous Bishop Bonner then

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persuades Henry VIII that his wife, Katherine Parry, is a Lutheran and thus a traitor and heretic who should be sent to the Tower (I1v). Despite James’ 1604 proclamation banishing Jesuits and seminarians during the rise in recusancy that followed Elizabeth’s death, English Catholics expected “toleration if not an alteration of religion.”62 Catholic playgoers, then, were predisposed to enjoy seeing Henry, who “scorne[d] the Pope, and Romes religion” (C1r), being controlled, through the Tower, by his unreformed bishops. Because these prelates use the Tower to control the king, the Tower loses its crownsponsored meaning as an icon of royal spiritual authority, as it was publicized in Hubbocke’s oration to James at the Tower that very year. In c.1605–09 Woodstock again portrayed the castle as a royal fortress that double agents could capture and use against the kingdom. In a brief battle against Richard’s uncles and their army of oppressed Englishmen, traitor four times describes the “flattering, luxury-loving courtiers” on Richard’s council.63 With Richard’s consent, two of the favorites ahistorically decide to fortify the Tower,64 further developing the Tower’s identity independently of chronicle sources. The idea of traitors taking refuge in the Tower as a king would do, rather than being imprisoned in it, exemplified the Tower’s potential to be controlled by non-royalty. The Monarch/Protector Deploys the Tower for a Crime or a Questionable Purpose Another prevalent type of iconic instability uses the Tower to call into question the monarch or protector’s actions. In these plays Londoners openly oppose the ruler’s misuse of the Tower. Typically, either a popular figure who once enjoyed royal favor is recast, through the Tower, as a traitor, or the monarch or protector commits crimes, in addition to punishing them, at the Tower. These plays portray the sovereign as unworthy of the throne and underscore a hostile attitude toward the monarch, especially regarding the Tower’s use. Such representations would have generated anxiety in playgoers whose loyalty to the crown was unquestioned but also would have made them doubt the ideology that the Tower represented sovereign magnificence. For example, in Shakespeare’s 2H6 (c.1590),65 the king, influenced by the devious and domineering Queen Margaret, who wishes to overthrow the Duke of York, uses the Duke of Somerset’s spurious imprisonment in the Tower as a ruse to convince York to disperse his army.66 When York sees that Somerset is free and walking with the arrogant queen, and York is arrested and ahistorically ordered to the Tower,67 the deceptive monarchy is twice linked to the castle. This scene encouraged playgoers to identify with York and feel betrayed by the king’s use of the Tower, the icon of his supposed monarchical grandeur.

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English theatergoers, regardless of their religious beliefs, also would have identified with More in Anthony Munday et al.’s Sir Thomas More (originally composed c.1592–93).68 The beloved Lord Chancellor’s imprisonment and beheading for treason, over a matter not of religion but of “conscience,” epitomizes King Henry’s overuse and misuse of the Tower on morally questionable grounds.69 Henry, the “mild sovereign” (4.4.116), becomes a tyrannical executioner, undoing the crown-fashioned image of the Tower as a symbol of royal majesty. The Tower figures prominently in Thomas Heywood’s 1 If You Know Not Me (1604–05), in which Queen Mary’s use of the Tower falls short of the royal magnificence and spiritual authority disseminated in Hubbocke’s 1604 oration. The play presents conflicting attitudes about treating the Protestant Princess Elizabeth, imprisoned in the Tower, as a traitor or as royalty, illuminating the complexity of playgoers’ attitudes toward Elizabeth. Early modern Londoners being largely Protestant, many theatergoers, predisposed to worship their former queen, whose death in 1603 had sparked an “outburst of posthumous praise,”70 would have sympathized with Elizabeth in this play. Catholic playgoers, by contrast, were reminded of their oppression under Elizabeth’s recent rule, inclining them to take satisfaction in her suffering at the Tower. Despite Elizabeth’s Protestant gentleman servant Gage’s requests on her behalf for lenient treatment, the Constable of the Tower, employed by Mary, is determined to treat Elizabeth harshly “Cause she an alien is to vs Catholikes” (p.217). The abrasive Constable, convinced that Mary will commend his “diligent care” (p.214), represents the queen not as magnificent but as tyrannical, as when he and five councilors examine Elizabeth before she is committed to the Tower. Elizabeth having insisted upon her innocence, he pressures her to confess anyway: “Madam,/ The Queene must heare you sing another song,/ Before you part with vs” (p.207). Even when, in a dumb show, Sussex, Howard, and some of Elizabeth’s servants petition Mary to allow Elizabeth to have “all the liberty this place affords,” it is not the queen but her consort who embodies regal majesty by whispering to Sussex that the petition is granted (p.217, 216). The play provides opportunities for Mary to treat Elizabeth with royal dignity at the Tower, but the queen chooses instead to be a political and religious oppressor, using her bishops’ approval to excuse her spiteful actions (p.216). Sussex, Howard, Gage, Elizabeth’s other servants, and Elizabeth all disapprove of Mary’s misuse of the Tower, probably stimulating playgoers’ recognition of their monarch’s misuse of the Tower and its contradiction of the royal ideology.

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The Tower’s Contradictory Meanings Destabilize the Crown’s Ideology Another type of instability surrounding the Tower takes place when the castle is made to stand for two antithetical functions within a single play or even simultaneously. The Tower may stand for mercy and oppression, royal strength and royal weakness, or all four qualities at once. These contradictory representations destabilize the consistent image of the Tower as an emblem of sovereign authority and magnificence. Such Tower plays impressed the message upon their audiences that the royal ideology of the Tower as an icon of monarchical majesty and power was a fiction—and encouraged audience members to reconsider its meanings for themselves. In Peele’s Edward the First (1590–93), the Tower represents royal strength and weakness simultaneously. Lluellen, the last independent Prince of Wales, affirms the Tower as a symbol of English royal power when he recalls his father’s imprisonment there. However, the memory of his father’s death from a fall while trying to escape (p.40) brings to mind the Tower’s inability to confine its prisoner: a royal weakness. Playgoers may have recognized the contradiction and found its ambiguity to contradict the official royal ideology. Although the king’s use of the Tower in Heywood’s 1E4 (1592–99) is oppressive toward the imprisoned Henry VI and the rebels who wish to release him, the play concludes at the Tower with Edward’s mercy and joviality toward Hobs the Tanner, one of many citizens who has helped Edward prevail against the rebels (p.86–88). Considering that, earlier in the play, Henry VI dies in the Tower, probably at the hand of Edward’s brother (p.56), some playgoers would have viewed Edward’s “little sport” at the Tower as unseemly, adding the king’s inappropriate behavior to the Tower’s ideological instability. Consequently, this ahistorical scene, in which the disguised king hoodwinks a laborer at the Tower, helped refashion the Tower in laboring playgoers’ eyes as a site of royal hypocrisy. A later play by Heywood, 2 If You Know Not Me (1604–05), presents Queen Elizabeth’s wish to show mercy toward a Catholic subject, Doctor Parry, who has tried to assassinate her, as an actual Catholic subject, Dr. William Parry, had allegedly plotted in 1585.71 However, Lecester72 forces her to send Parry to the Tower to be executed, insisting upon her duty to punish him. Their dialogue casts doubt upon the Tower as an icon of royal temporal and spiritual authority: Leic.73 Good Queen, we know you are too mercifull To deale with traitours of this monstrous kinde.

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Away with him to the Tower, then to death.— A traitours death shall such a traitour haue, That seeks his soueraignes life that did him saue. Queen. Good Lecester. Lec.

Good Queen, you must be rul’d. (p.327)

This discourse demanded that Jacobean playgoers confront the anxiety they would have felt over the idea of the sovereign being “rul’d,” especially through the Tower. Theatergoers had to wonder whether it was the monarch or the Privy Council whose authority the Tower symbolized, and if the Tower merely represented the façade of royal power. This scene would have destabilized their beliefs about the monarchy and themselves in relation to it. Even James’ spiritual authority was questioned here, as it actually was in the months preceding the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, “the number of Papists in England [being] mightily increased, since his Maiesties comming” (Hamond B2r). Seeing Elizabeth, who had severely persecuted Catholics, represented as forgiving a Catholic assassin would have encouraged Catholics, who “were in a good hope of a Toleration,” despite James’ laws against Catholics.74 By contrast with the historically more consistent Elizabeth, this passage encouraged Catholics to feel less threatened by their king, who had pardoned an imprisoned “Seminarie Priest,” knighted recusants, and restored lords who favored or practiced “the Romish religion.”75 The scene would have made them question James’ laws and the Tower as an icon of his authority to enforce Protestantism by punishing Catholics there. Catholic playgoers, then, could see the Tower’s symbolic instability as the castle could stand for both royal strength and royal weakness. This same scene also represents a second set of the Tower’s contradictory meanings: royal mercy and royal oppression. Elizabeth’s excessive mercy exemplifies her unwillingness to protect herself from a would-be assassin, and her councilor must compel her—rule her—to use the Tower to bring Parry to justice through imprisonment and, as Lecester articulates, execution. Elizabeth’s unwarranted mercy can be seen, furthermore, as weakness, even foolishness, which, in a monarch, is neither authoritative nor magnificent. The play’s inconstant representations of the Tower as a spiritual and temporal royal symbol defied the royal ideology of the Tower, propagated in Hubbocke’s 1604 oration to James. In playgoers’ eyes, these contradictions would have cast doubt upon the Tower’s symbolic significance as the monarchs fashioned it, thereby casting doubt upon the monarchs themselves.

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In Shakespeare and Fletcher’s H8 (1613), once again the Tower represents the king’s mercy and oppression. Henry privately tells Cranmer that he is to stay at the Tower until the complaints against him can be tried, an oppressive act despite its gentle tone (5.1.103–06). However, at the council meeting, the king mercifully rescues Cranmer from his malicious councilors (5.2.130–59). Henry proves the Tower to be an unstable symbol as it inconsistently conveys both his oppressive authority and his mercy. Although theatergoers would have felt relief for Cranmer at this point in the play, the representation of the Tower’s ambiguous meaning would have stirred distrust of the Tower’s royal ideology. The Tower stands for royal strength and royal weakness in Drue’s The Life of the Dutches of Suffolke (1624). Stephen Gardner, the Catholic Bishop of Winchester, is conveyed to the Tower in the reign of Edward VI ([A3v]), a show of the Protestant king’s royal strength. However, when the sick young king nears death, Gardner is moved, ahistorically, to join his coreligionist, Bishop Bonner, in the Marshalsea (B3r). Rather than dramatize the historical record of Mary I releasing Gardiner and the other Tower prisoners with a kiss,76 Drue represents Gardner moving away from the Tower and gradually toward freedom—even joining forces with another imprisoned Catholic bishop—as the king becomes physically weaker. In Mary I’s reign, the restored Bonner and Gardner plot to have the Protestant Dutches of Suffolke imprisoned in the Tower ([B4v]), showing playgoers that the Tower’s meaning was less constant than official royal policy contended. Davenport’s Iohn and Matilda (c.1628–29)77 represents the king sending three of his councilors to the Tower merely for opposing his deference to the pope and his acceptance of his crown from the papal legate, Pandulph (2.4). Though the councilors plead with John for the sake of “[their] country’s cause” and “The kingdom’s ancient liberties, land, lives,” he sends them to the Tower as traitors, adding “and muzzle those fierce mastiffs/ That durst leap at the face of majesty” (2.4). While John acknowledges the Tower as the instrument of his authority and supposed majesty, his poor judgment in imprisoning his virtuous councilors is a royal weakness that parallels Charles I’s irresponsible decisions regarding his closest advisor, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. As John imprisons his councilors in the Tower for opposing his submission to Pandulph, so Charles had imprisoned two members of Parliament, Sir John Eliot and Sir Dudley Digges, in the Tower in 1626 for impeaching Buckingham in the House of Commons (Hulme 127–51). Like John’s councilors in the play, Eliot had expressed greater “loyalty to the nation” than to the king (138). As John orders further strictures upon his Tower prisoners for their perceived disrespect, so

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Charles had denied his Tower prisoner, Eliot—whose speech he had called “insolent” in Parliament in 1626, and whom he had committed to the Tower again in 1629—the usual privilege of exercise in daylight; limited his visitors; and restricted his use of candles.78 From the start of Charles’ reign, in fact, subjects resented his “tyrannical misrule,” especially his favoritism toward Buckingham, whom “a discontented army officer” assassinated in 1628.79 The affluent audience that witnessed Queen Henrietta’s Men’s performance at the enclosed and expensive Cockpit or Phoenix80 would have felt vindicated by the discrepancies between the Tower’s representation onstage and in official early-Stuart policy. The Tower also represents royal strength and weakness in Ford’s Perkin Warbeck (c.1625–34),81 likewise first performed at the Cockpit or Phoenix.82 Because of the threat posed by Warbeck, a pretender to the throne, Henry VII moves his lodging from Westminster to the Tower (1.1.135–39). As a fortress and royal residence, the Tower symbolizes royal strength; however, the need for such protection exemplifies Warbeck’s strength as a challenger and thus the weakness and insecurity of the king who seeks refuge there. As with Iohn and Matilda, the Cockpit or Phoenix’s affluent playgoers who were dissatisfied with Charles’ rule were predisposed to enjoy seeing England’s king seek protection in the Tower, his weakness being neither magnificent nor authoritative, as the early-Stuart Tower was proclaimed to be in Hubbocke’s 1604 oration. THE PREDOMINANT PLOT: RICHARD III AND THE PRINCES IN THE TOWER Although Legge’s Latin trilogy, Richardus Tertius (1579), may have been performed only at St. John’s College Hall, Cambridge, the production received “great applause” and was highly influential, not only in the development of English drama as “the first real history-play, or ‘Chronicle History’ written in England,”83 but also in the Tower’s development as an unstable cultural icon. The play’s multiple manuscripts, seven of which survive, attest to its popularity, and at least two other Tower playwrights are believed to have seen it performed or read it.84 In the 1590s the Tower’s instability as a royal emblem became a supremely popular theme in three more extant history plays about Richard III: True Tragedie R3 (1588–94), Shakespeare’s R3 (1591–92), and Heywood’s 2E4 (1592–99), most likely first produced, respectively, in 1591, 1592, and 1599.85 Set at a transitional and thus inherently unstable point in the monarchy, all four Richard III plays reveal the Tower’s emblematic instability

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by representing all four of the above types of instability surrounding the Tower. In each play the princes’ incarceration in the Tower embodies the monarch’s lost control over the castle and its conversion into a power base for Richard, a traitor to the lawful king.86 Also in each play the princes’ murders at Richard’s order underscore the monarch or protector’s use of the Tower for evil, representing at once Richard’s royal strength and the princes’ royal weakness, or the princes’ royal strength and weakness.87 More than any other plays that represented the Tower, then, these four encouraged audiences to read the castle as an emblem of unstable significances that opposed the crown’s Tower ideology. These Richard III plays became especially significant in fashioning the Tower’s dominant cultural meaning in the Renaissance. The demand for the latter three of these plays in London throughout the 1590s proved their popularity among the amphitheater and inn-yard audiences who patronized them. Shakespeare’s R3 was performed again in 1594 (Gurr, Shakespearean Stage 241), revealing a market, based on Alfred Harbage’s dates, for the live production of this story throughout the first half of the decade. All three of the Richard III plays performed in London were also in print by 1599, widening their influence even more, and not even the 1599 Bishops’ Ban, an order by “the official censors of the Elizabethan press,” John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London, “that noe Englishe historyes be printed excepte they bee allowed by some of her maiesties privie Counsell,”88 could end that influence. In fact, to their government’s chagrin, Londoners evidently took a heightened interest in visiting the Tower and its prisoners at the turn of the seventeenth century. In 1598 Elizabeth took measures to restrict excessive visitor access to Tower prisoners, “a thinge very inconvenient and not mete to be allowed for divers respects in a place of that speciall importaunce as the Towre of London,” as did James’ Council and Lieutenant of the Tower in 1603–05, wishing not “to convert that place of imprisonment to a place of ordinary compliment and visitation.”89 By the early seventeenth century, even in royal circles, the Richard III plays were refashioning the actual Tower’s cultural meanings. The account of Stettin-Pomerania’s 1602 visit to the Tower made the first known connection between the name of the Bloody Tower and the murder of Richard’s nephews, which allegedly had taken place there (Keay, Tower 38). The diarist called Richard “King Richardus,” as in Richardus Tertius, the first play to represent this plot, and presented as historical fact the story that all four plays represent: “the Bloody Tower, so named because of King Richardus having there most miserably put to death his two young cousins who were placed

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under his guardianship” (Gerschow 17). This passage apparently reports information that the guide presented as the duke’s party toured the Bloody Tower. Thus, as early as 1602, the warders who gave crown-sponsored tours of the Tower for foreign dignitaries were drawing upon the plot of these plays to fashion the Tower’s lore. If the Tower guides had been making the connection between the Bloody Tower and Richard III before 1602, then one of at least six known travel diaries of earlier visitors, three of which go into extensive detail about the Tower tour, could have been expected to mention this shocking tale, or other documentary evidence would have attested to the connection between the name Bloody Tower, which had been in use since the mid-1560s,90 and the legend of Richard III and the princes in the Tower. Instead, it appears that, due to these four plays’ popularity from 1579 to as late as 1599, the crown, losing control of the Tower’s ideological meanings to the playwrights, reappropriated the Richard III story to keep the Tower’s lore consistent with the Tudor Myth.91 Two years after Stettin-Pomerania’s Tower tour, Hubbocke’s “Oration Gratvlatory” likewise called attention to Richard III’s villainy in describing the Tower to the king himself—at the Tower—before the triumphal entry. Hubbocke created a vivid image of the royal murders, associating the Tower with evil and, repeatedly, with blood. His oration proclaimed, “This which is next, our elders tearmed the bloody Tower, for the bloodshed, as they say, of those Infant Princes of Edward the fourth, whom Richard the third of cursed memory [ . . . ] savagely killed two togither at one time” (B1v). Hubbocke and others in attendance at the Tower that day had had ample opportunities to see, hear, and read graphic images of this double murder in the Richard III plays performed in London, all of which specifically associate the princes’ deaths at the Tower with blood.92 In Heywood’s play, in fact, one of the murderers labels the killings as “cursed” (p.155), Hubbocke’s exact word to describe Richard’s memory with regard to these murders. Hubbocke’s oration was printed in 1604 to be sold in London, suggesting again that, in response to the Tower plays and especially the Richard III plays, the crown was heavily promoting the Tudor Myth in an attempt to regain control of the Tower’s emblematic meaning. Granted, the legend of Richard III was complimentary to the Tudor monarchs and thus, also to the Stuarts, James I being Henry VII’s great-greatgrandson. Sir Thomas More had composed his version of the story while seeking Henry VII’s patronage (King 22), and Shakespeare’s main sources for R3, the chroniclers Hall and Holinshed, followed More in developing the Tudor Myth. In fact, the expanded, rewritten, and government-censored

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1587 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles that Shakespeare used excluded the details of Richard II’s deposition because they suggested the controversial manner in which Henry Tudor had obtained Richard III’s throne.93 Like the chroniclers, the Richard III plays generally vilify Richard and exalt his conqueror, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond; however, they also employ the Tower as an unstable royal symbol, a representation the crown would not have endorsed. As the Tower plays show, even the Tudor Myth, partly built upon a Machiavellian version of Richard III, contradicted the official TudorStuart ideology of the Tower as an emblem of royal magnificence. In fact, Heywood’s 2E4, probably the final Richard III play of the 1590s, concludes with Richard’s coronation,94 thereby expunging Richmond, and thus the Tudors, from the story. Moreover, Stettin-Pomerania’s Tower tour guide and Hubbocke may have believed that, by telling the Richard III story at the Tower on crown-sponsored occasions, they were simply advancing the Tudor Myth. Yet at least one of the presenters, Hubbocke, like Heywood, told only the first half of the story, omitting Henry Tudor’s all-important rescue of England from Richard’s tyranny. The crown was apparently attempting to reclaim the Richard III story from the playwrights. As stated, the crown’s prolific dissemination of the Tudor Myth in the early seventeenth century may have been a reaction against the Tower plays produced in London in the 1590s, and especially the Richard III plays, whose popularity was refashioning the Tower in ways that opposed the crown’s Tower ideology. This was, however, an ineffective strategy, for without Henry Tudor, the Tudor Myth was little more than a retelling of the Richard III story. And any Richard III story told in London after the 1590s necessarily evoked the Richard III plays and thus the Tower as a volatile emblem that further destabilized the royal ideology. By 1602 the first sixteen Tower plays95 had destabilized the Tower’s ideological meaning to the extent that the crown could not recover control of it. There was no basis for censoring the Tower from the plays, as its role could be interpreted as dramatizing government-approved chronicle history.96 The crown had no choice but, in Hubbocke’s words, to struggle to “claspe and as it were gripe in [its] hand” (B1r) the Tower’s ideological meanings. It was no coincidence that the Tower warders, as the castle’s only approved tour guides, elaborated the Tower’s Julius Caesar lore, divulged the pitiful details of Elizabeth’s Tower imprisonment, and apparently standardized the Tower tours and narratives, fashioning a more controlled representation of the Tower throughout the 1590s, when history plays were competing with the crown’s Tower ideology. It was no coincidence that the crown took a heightened interest in presenting the Tower as a royal castle

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in that decade, refurbishing the Tower Wharf for the controlled reception of foreign dignitaries, many of whom also attended the theaters while in London (Howard, Theater of a City 16). And it was no coincidence that history plays came under strict censure by the end of the decade, when the crown had restricted the growing numbers of unwarranted visits to Tower prisoners. But the Tower plays kept coming and kept influencing playgoers’ perceptions, not only that the Tower’s meaning as an icon of royal authority and magnificence was a fiction, but also that the Tower was not solely the crown’s territory. These realizations empowered playgoers to perceive the Tower as an icon whose meanings they could influence and to take an active role in shaping it as an emblem of their own ideologies and Englishness, as the next two chapters will demonstrate.

Chapter Four

The Tower of London Dramatic Emblem of Opposition

While many English Renaissance theatergoers’ personal histories would have predisposed them to receive the represented Tower as an emblem of royal hypocrisy, some Londoners evidently responded to a more intense, contingent interpretation. For these playgoers, the Tower’s portrayal onstage emblematized and encouraged resistance to the crown. In fact, several times during the years of Tower play production, repressed social groups, whose members attended plays, resisted their repression at the actual Tower of London. I propose in this chapter to establish that, in response to social and religious repression affecting apprentices, Catholics, and certain members of the nobility, the Tower’s onstage representations cultivated opposition to the crown among playgoers from these groups. At the apex of Tower play production, members of these social groups were empowered to stage major disorders involving the Tower, sometimes at the Tower itself. Representations of the Tower in other cultural texts produced at the height of the Tower plays were also oppositional, demonstrating that the Tower’s emergent meaning as an early modern national icon was located not in the monarch but in the populace and that its significance as an oppositional emblem was becoming widespread. TOWER OF NONROYAL POWER: DRAMATIZING OPPOSITION TO THE CROWN By the 1590s playgoing apprentices, Catholics, and disaffected nobles were poised to respond to an oppositional stimulus like the Tower plays, and all twenty-four plays that represented the Tower from 1579 to c.1634, especially those produced in London from about 1590 to 1613, represented the Tower being taken out of the monarch’s control and placed into the custody of subjects who use it to control the monarch. More than one-third of these 78

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twenty-four plays portray the imprisonment of a king or queen in the Tower.1 Nearly two-thirds represent the escape, release, or diversion of the sovereign’s prisoners from the Tower.2 Over 70% of the plays portray the monarch’s use of the Tower as a warrant for rebellion or revenge by the people.3 More than 80% portray councilors, clerics, or commoners dictating the sovereign’s use of the Tower.4 And nearly 90% of the plays represent the Tower’s role in a rebellion against the sovereign.5 Moreover, all but two of the Tower plays produced after 1595—the year of an apprentice riot on Tower Hill—represent the Tower’s role in a rebellion against the crown.6 Imprisonment of a King or Queen in the Tower More than a third of the twenty-four plays portray a king or queen’s imprisonment in the Tower, and except for one, all were Elizabethan. Whether the imprisoned sovereign is a future king as in the four plays that represent Richard III’s imprisonment of the uncrowned Edward V,7 a reigning king as in the two plays that represent Edward IV’s imprisonment of Henry VI and Henry’s murder in the Tower,8 a queen dowager as in Marlowe’s Edward the Second, or a deposed queen as in Dekker and Webster’s Wyat, these plays embodied certain Elizabethan playgoers’ desire to limit the queen’s power over them through the instrument of that power, the Tower of London. Seeing kings and queens imprisoned in the Tower, a structure that had traditionally stood for royal authority, showed discontented apprentices the possibility of seizing control of the Tower. A year or two after Elizabeth’s death, Heywood’s 1 If You Know Not Me dramatized the imprisonment of a future queen, Princess Elizabeth, in 1554. That Elizabeth was, in 1604–05, a former queen who had deployed the Tower to imprison and torture many Catholic subjects, predisposed Catholic playgoers to find her imprisonment in the Tower, by the Catholic Mary Tudor, to be satisfying and vindicating. They would have enjoyed Elizabeth’s fear and anxiety when the Catholic Bishop of Winchester declares, Winch.

It is the pleasure of her maiesty, That you be straight committed to the Tower,

Eliz.

The Tower! For what? [...] She kneels. Oh, God, my heart! A prisoner in the Tower? Speake to the Queene, my lords, that some other place May lodge her sister; thats too vile too base.

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For the queens sentence is definitiue, And we must see’t performed.

Eliz.

Then, to our chamber, comfortlesse and sad: To-morrow to the Tower—that fatall place, Where I shall nere behold the sunnes bright face. (p.208–09)

Catholic playgoers also must have relished the imprisonment scenes set at the Tower, especially as the Catholic Constable denies Elizabeth’s requests for preferential treatment. He begins by forcing her to land at the watergate of St. Thomas’s Tower, fashioning her as a traitor: Eliz.

Land traitor like! My foots wet in the flood; So shall my heart ere long be drencht in blood. [...]

Const.

And I receiue my prisoner.—Come, will you go?

Eliz.

Wither, my lord? vnto a grate of iron, Where griefe and care my poore heart shall enuiron? I am not well.

Suss.

A chair for the Princesse!

Const.

Heres no chair for prisoners. Come, will you see your chamber?

Eliz.

Then, on this stone, this cold stone, I will sit. (p.213)

Catholics would have appreciated Elizabeth’s fearful question about her Protestant cousin’s execution just weeks earlier: “Is yet the scaffold standing on Tower Hill,/ Whereon young Guilford and the Lady Jane/ Did suffer death?” (p.221). Since Catholics were hoping for toleration from James in 1604, it must have encouraged them to see a representation of the future queen, who had persecuted them, imprisoned and mistreated essentially for her Protestant faith. The Tower in this play actually symbolizes Catholic religiosity, reversing Elizabethan and Jacobean imagery: Const.

She is my prisoner; and if I durst, But that my warrant is not yet so strict, Ide lay her in a dungeon where her eyes

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Should not haue light to read her prayer-booke. So would I danger both her soul and body, Cause she an alien is to vs Catholikes: Her bed should be all snakes, her rest despaire; Torture should make her curse her faithlesse prayer. (p.217)

In fact, the suggestion of torturing James’ predecessor might have incited more militant Catholic playgoers to consider harming James or worse, to kill him, as Guy Fawkes and his fellow Catholic conspirators attempted to do in November 1605. Escape, Release, or Diversion of the Sovereign’s Prisoners from the Tower The stage repeatedly represented another type of freedom from the Tower: escape from imprisonment there. Starting most probably with Shakespeare’s 2H6, nearly two-thirds of these plays represent the escape, release, or diversion of the crown’s prisoners from the Tower.9 The first scene to represent it in this play, in fact, does so twice: Not only does the Queen “boldly” flaunt “Somerset at liberty,” his imprisonment in the Tower having been a trick to disperse York’s army, but York also refuses to be imprisoned in the Tower: “He is arrested, but will not obey.”10 These displays of freedom from incarceration announced to English playgoers a weakness in the monarch’s ability to dominate them through the Tower. Apprentices, whose disturbances in the 1590s challenged authority, likely found this scene to be especially empowering. This sentiment was still strong at the end of the decade for apprentices and Catholics. In Munday, Drayton, et al.’s Old-castle, the imprisoned Lollard, Sir John Old-castle, dresses in the Bishop of Rochester’s cloak and, in disguise, escapes from the Tower with his own servant, Harpoole. The bishop is told that he “Must be a meanes to help [Old-castle] escape” (l.2046). Bish.

What meanes? thou heretike? [...]

Harp.

Nothing but to borrow your upper garments a little; not a word more, for if you do, you die: (ll.2047, 2050–51)

Old-castle’s escape likely encouraged apprentices, who often resisted authority by attempting to free prisoners from the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark (R. Manning, Village Revolts 200–01). It also would have inspired Catholic playgoers, for whom the Tower represented religious persecution; in fact, this

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scene would have resonated with the 1597 escape from the Tower of the Jesuit John Gerard, who similarly used an agent of the crown, his warden, to facilitate his breakout.11 The memory of Gerard’s successful escape just two years earlier must have intensified the experience of this play for Catholics, fueling their will to resist their oppression. The authors then represent another kind of liberation from this emblem of royal authority, to which all London playgoers could relate. Harpoole pretends to harass the crown’s agent, “the Bishop of Rochester” in disguise, provoking the actual bishop’s servants (Servants 1, 2, and 3) outside the Tower to fight with him, thereby facilitating Old-castle’s escape. Harp.

Nay my good lord of Rochester, ile bring you to S. Albons through the woods, I warrant you.

Old-ca.

Villaine away.

Harp.

Nay since I am past the Towers libertie, thou part’st not so. he drawes.

Old-ca.

Clubbes, clubs, clubs.

1. 2. 3.

Murther, murther, murther. Downe with him. they fight. A villaine traitor.

Harp.

You cowardly rogues.

sir John escapes.12

London’s Liberties, as stated, were areas outside city officials’ jurisdiction, where, for instance, monasteries had been built in the Middle Ages and playhouses were built in the Renaissance to avoid being controlled by the sheriffs of London. The Tower complex and the land surrounding it were likewise a Liberty, “part of the ancient demesne of the Crown,” and thus exempt from the city’s jurisdiction.13 Nevertheless, both crown and city claimed jurisdiction over this area.14 Disputes over the Tower Liberty caused tension between Tower officials and the Corporation of the City of London, not only from jurisdictional conflicts but also because the Liberty’s very boundaries, “the point at which royal and civic authority met,” had been disputed since the early thirteenth century.15 Edward IV had recognized Tower Hill as city territory; nevertheless, at least throughout the years in which the first twenty-two Tower plays were composed, both the Lord Mayor and Tower authorities struggled to assert control over the Tower Liberty.16 And in the late 1590s, at the height of the Tower plays, “the debate over ownership of the Liberty was more controversial and explosive than ever” (Keay, Tower 8–9).

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In 1597 Sir John Peyton, the new Lieutenant of the Tower, commissioned a major visual representation of the Tower and its first measured survey, further illustrating the crown’s maneuvering in the struggle for the Tower and desire to control its subjects through the Tower’s representation.17 The “True and Exact Draught of the TOWER LIBERTIES, Survey’d in the Year 1597 by GULIELMUS HAIWARD AND J. GASCOYNE” reproduced the first known demarcation of the Liberty’s bounds, set forth by a 1536 leet jury, and included, “crammed into boxes in blank areas and intermingled with the landscape and buildings themselves,” evidence supporting that demarcation.18 Additionally, Anna Keay has studied three versions of a 1597–98 report on the state of the castle by Peyton, addressed to the queen and originally meant to accompany the survey (Tower 9–11). According to this report, in October 1597 the most pressing concern to be addressed at the Tower was that “The cittye of London did and doth pretend Title, unto yor Ma:ties soyle of Tower hill, (and Eastsmithfield) even unto the ditch of the Tower [ . . . ] , The possession wherof, hath allwayes been in yor Ma:tie.”19 Having stressed the need to assert royal jurisdiction over Tower Hill, Peyton urged Elizabeth not to “suffer this pretended Intrusion and incroachment upon the Auntient Lybertyes of yor Maties Castell Royall.”20 By October 1597 Elizabeth had appointed a commission to determine the boundaries of the Tower Liberty (11). The revisions to Peyton’s report in its later versions, and the survey’s emphasis on the “Liberties,” suggest to Keay that Peyton then revised the survey’s purpose to support the commission’s work (11). The later versions expand a section recommending “the establishment of royal control over the Tower Liberties” and refer to Elizabeth’s commission, to which Peyton had “delivered apparant proofes for your Highnes title,” including the survey citing the 1536 precedent set by Henry VIII, whose authority over the Tower was unquestioned.21 The survey did not, however, settle the dispute,22 and two years later, Munday, Drayton, et al. dramatically represented the conflict through Harpoole, just outside the Tower Liberty, taunting Old-castle disguised as the king’s churchly delegate. The Lieutenant of the Tower reinforces the tension by asking, “Who is so bold as dare to draw a sword,/ So neare unto the entrance of the Tower?” (ll.2085–86). While some Renaissance Londoners, including Stow in 1598, recognized the city’s authority within the Tower Liberty,23 Harpoole’s taunt, as he stands just beyond the Liberty, acknowledges the crown’s authority but emphasizes that royal power ends at the Liberty’s boundary. The scene reminded playgoers that whatever royal authority over the Tower existed, it had a limit. Those who attended the play may have pictured this scene whenever they passed

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by the boundaries of the Tower Liberty thereafter, and especially during the “Acension Daie” procession “about the circuits and limittes of the Tower”—already a tradition by 1597—in which stones marking the Tower boundaries were inspected.24 The Tower as a Warrant for Rebellion or Revenge against the Monarch Over 70% of the Tower plays portray the monarch’s use of the Tower as a warrant for subjects’ rebellion or revenge.25 The three Richard III plays in which Richard is king at the time of his nephews’ murders in the Tower, and Sir Thomas More, underscore the monarch’s use of the Tower to persecute English laborers and Catholics, an act that, to some, warranted revenge. From May 1568 until her execution in February 1587, Mary Stuart was Elizabeth’s semi-captive, though not at the Tower, and the central figure of five Catholic plots to place her on England’s throne.26 English Catholics seeking to vilify Elizabeth to justify rebellions and plots on her life—so they could enthrone her cousin and royal semi-prisoner, whom they considered to be Elizabeth’s heir—probably found additional incitement in the Richard III plays.27 Legge’s Latin trilogy, Richardus Tertius (1579), was produced during Mary Stuart’s imprisonment, and Shakespeare’s R3 (1591–92), after her execution; thus, each play’s original production fostered parallels between Mary and the princes in the Tower. Since Mary Stuart was never at the Tower, the connection was sufficiently indirect to keep the plays from being banned for representing Elizabeth’s oppression of her cousin.28 In these two plays Richard’s tyranny, especially his imprisonment and execution of his “cousins” (Shakespeare, R3 5.3.151) in the Tower, incites revenge in the form of a rebellion by Buckingham, Richmond, and Stanley. And in each play the noblemen’s language of revenge with regard to the Tower instructs the audience. Catholics at the production of Richardus Tertius at St. John’s College, Cambridge—where “religious malpractices” had attracted negative government attention in 1578 (Trimble 91)—may have seen their cause and Mary’s against Elizabeth in the noblemen’s desire for revenge against Richard for oppressing the princes. Regarding Richard’s murder of his imprisoned nephews, Buckingham declares, “My sorrow scarcely admits a bridle, it seeks revenge,”29 encouraging Catholics to seek retribution against Elizabeth for imprisoning Mary Stuart. Three addresses by rebel noblemen to their soldiers, each invoking Richard’s cruelty against the princes in the Tower, also could be read as inciting Catholic rebellion against Elizabeth for Mary Stuart’s imprisonment. Buckingham tells his soldiers, “I am coming, Richard—but to your harm. Hostile, I shall appear as an avenger, your

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enemy, the author of peace for the poor English [ . . . ] . Let this harsh butcher of his own kin pay the penalty” (Legge p.249, 251). Earl Henry addresses his troops, “Oh avengers of evil, Englishmen who follow my standard, dream no idle terrors [ . . . ] . In his evildoing Richard [ . . . ] has killed his own nephews” (p.313). And Lord Stanley encourages his soldiers, “Hurry, free our country of tyranny [ . . . ] . If you conquer, our country will be free of the tyrant” (p.315). Even more transparent, when Dr. Lewis addresses Edward IV’s widowed queen, he seems to incite Mary Stuart herself, whose husband was murdered in 1567, to rebel: “Let your grief for the killing of your kinsmen and the slander of your husband provoke you.”30 These words, like Queen Elizabeth’s comment in the play that “Roman walls were drenched with fraternal blood,” also may have provoked Catholic playgoers, who placed their hopes for England’s return to the Roman Church in Mary Stuart and identified themselves with her, to rebel against Elizabeth.31 Mary Stuart’s connection to the princes in the Tower was stronger after Elizabeth had had Mary executed. Moreover, the London amphitheater audiences of True Tragedie R3 (1588–94) and Shakespeare’s R3 (1591– 92) were larger and more diverse than the elite audience of Richardus Tertius and thus included a wider range of social groups with more reasons to desire revenge against Elizabeth. Shakespeare’s R3 was produced in or just after 1591, the year that “stands out as second only to 1588 for its high number of executions of Catholics.”32 And True Tragedie R3 encouraged the vengeance of oppressed Catholics as well as laborers. Because ghosts resonated with the Catholic conception of Purgatory, Catholics would have been drawn into True Tragedie R3 from its opening lines, in which the Ghost of Clarence, recently murdered in the Tower, stirs others to revenge in Latin, the defiant language of the Roman Church.33 The Ghost repeats the Latin phrases and lets fall A shield conteining this, in full effect, Blood sprinkled, springs: blood spilt, craues due reuenge: Whereupon he writes, Cresse cruor, Sanguis satietur, sanguine cresse, Quod spero scitio: O scitio scitio, vendicta.34

Richard’s Page reiterates the Ghost’s connection of “blood” with “revenge” (p.31), conditioning Catholic playgoers to associate their religious repression, epitomized in Mary Stuart’s execution, with Richard’s executions of his kinsmen in the Tower. This Richard III play, perhaps the first of the

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three performed in London’s public playhouses, as little as one year after Mary Stuart’s beheading, would have prompted Catholic playgoers to seek revenge against Elizabeth, not only for executing their hopes in her imprisoned Catholic cousin but also for imprisoning and executing Catholics, especially at the Tower, during her long reign. Apprentices and laborers in the audience, in addition to Catholics, may have seen themselves in the representation of two commoners, Lodowicke and Morton, both of whom question Richard’s claim to the throne. Lodowicke entices Catholics and commoners alike to seek revenge against Elizabeth when he says his heart “hardly bewailes the losse of the yoong King, by the outrage of [ . . . ] Richard the third. The Commons murmure at it greatly, that the yoong King and his brother should be imprisoned” (p.36). Catholics, who had hoped their next monarch would be the recently executed Mary Stuart, could have seen Elizabeth in the usurping and murderous Richard III. And apprentices and laborers would have seen themselves in the “Commons” Lodowicke describes, having complained when their fellows were imprisoned for defending their rights. Laborers also would have identified with Morton, a serving man, who conveys the attitudes of oppressed Catholics in the audience, still grieving for Mary Stuart: “the young Princes they are in the Tower, nay some saies more, they are murthered. [ . . . ] the Duke of Buckingham is rid downe to Breaknock-Castle in Wales, and there he meanes to raise vp a power to pull down the usurper” (p.39). These scenes locate both social groups’ opposition to Elizabeth at the Tower and invite them to seek revenge. The scenes that follow, and recall the murders of the princes in the Tower, epitomize an escalating warrant for vengeance for the murders and the tyranny that has led to them, especially from Catholic playgoers’ perspective. Because “the lawfull heires were smothered in the Tower,” Buckingham curses his sovereign, “Let vengeance, mischiefes, tortures, light on thee and thine” (p.46). Richmond likewise attributes his desire for revenge to the monarch’s tyranny, specifically the murders in the Tower: And Richard but vsurps in my authoritie, For in his tyrannie he slaughtered those That would not succour him in his attempts, Whose guiltlesse blood craues daily at Gods hands, Reuenge for outrage done to their harmelesse liues: (p.54)

Richard even evokes Purgatory through the ghosts who haunt his conscience seeking revenge, specifically his victims at the Tower—Clarence, his nephews, and the beheaded peer, Hastings:

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And horror of my bloodie practice past, Strikes such a terror to my wounded conscience, That sleepe I, wake I, or whatsoeuer I do, Meethinkes their ghoasts comes gaping for reuenge, Whom I have slaine in reaching for a Crowne. Clarence complaines, and crieth for reuenge. My Nephues bloods, Reuenge, reuenge, doth crie. The headlesse Peeres comes preasing for reuenge. (p.61)

For his misdeeds at the Tower, Richard acknowledges, “euery one cries, let the tyrant die” (p.61). He then pronounces “reuenge” eleven times in the next eleven lines (p.61–62), training Catholics in the audience to see the Tower as a site where revenge for royal tyranny is due. With the rampant imprisonment and punishment of Catholics in Elizabethan England, eventually the crown’s use of the Tower touched the family of a future playwright who was probably raised as a Catholic and would later represent the Tower onstage.35 In 1583 John Somerville, a Catholic who had married Shakespeare’s second cousin, Margaret, was arrested for plotting to kill Elizabeth.36 Somerville was the son-in-law of Edward Arden, one of Warwickshire’s foremost Catholics and “the head of Shakespeare’s mother’s family.”37 Arden was also a friend of the nearby Catholic Throgmorton family that had initiated an alleged plot on the queen’s life on Mary Stuart’s behalf.38 As a result of Somerville’s plot, Arden, Somerville, several of their relatives and members of the Throgmorton family, and Arden’s priest, Hugh Hall, were arrested and imprisoned in the Tower.39 There, Arden and Hall were questioned and racked (Wood 92). Arden, his wife Mary, Hall, and Somerville were tried and sentenced to death (92–93). Mary Arden was pardoned, but her husband and Somerville were moved to Newgate to be executed (93). Somerville was later found dead in his cell, and Arden was hanged, disembowelled, and quartered at Smithfield.40 Both men’s heads were displayed on London Bridge, and Arden’s quarters were set on the city gates (Holinshed 4:510). Warwickshire’s Catholic community insisted for decades that Arden had been framed (Wood 93). Even before his career as a dramatist began, then, Shakespeare, who later “evolved [ . . . ] the English chronicle history” play, had a personal, oppositional connection to the Tower and “retain[ed] his indignation in his heart.”41 And, although the Tower had been mentioned in one extant play long before 1590, and brought to the stage for a private performance in 1579, Shakespeare was, most likely, the first playwright to represent the Tower spatially on the public stage,42 transforming Londoners’

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perceptions both of the castle and of themselves in relation to it. Perhaps with his relatives in mind, from his first known play,43 Shakespeare often represented the Tower as a place where the monarch’s actions warranted revenge, and many playwrights followed his lead. Shakespeare is also one of four dramatists believed to have co-authored or revised Munday et al.’s Sir Thomas More, composed by a Catholic, about the monarch’s abuse of Catholics at the Tower and subjects’ need to avenge the royal tyranny it represented.44 In fact, the contribution to the manuscript known as “Hand D,” traditionally attributed to Shakespeare, dramatizes a riot scene that the Master of the Revels censored and uses the censored term strangers seven times in three pages, suggesting that Hand D “wrote so long after [Edmund] Tilney’s censorship that he could disregard it, or he wrote before Tilney’s censorship” (McMillin 138). Though the censor—either earlier or later—deleted apprentices from the scene, Hand D also features apprentices and portrays an originally civilized crowd degenerating “into a fickle and foolish mob.”45 Scott McMillin concluded that Hand D “did not know (or did not care) what Tilney wrote on the original manuscript” (142). Was Shakespeare here defiantly representing Catholic and apprentice opposition to the crown? Though the Hand D writing does not involve the Tower, McMillin argued, “Hand D participated more extensively in the original play than the three pages in his hand would indicate” (144–45). And much of the play’s action occurs at the Tower. Perhaps to incite both Catholics and other playgoers to desire revenge against the royal use of the Tower, the play’s religious premise is understated while More’s victimization at the Tower remains central. For refusing to subscribe to certain “articles” of Henry VIII (4.1.70), More is imprisoned there. The injustice is apparent when, at the Tower gate, warders discuss the crowds who have come to see the virtuous More, beloved as “the best friend that the poor e’er had” (5.1.43). In addition, More’s scaffold scene (5.4) draws attention to the Tower as a space that represents the imprisonment and executions of many English Catholics and commoners, which—if the play was performed—would have invited vengeance against the monarch. Councilors, Clerics, or Commoners Dictating the Sovereign’s Use of the Tower More than 80% of these twenty-four plays portray councilors, clerics, or commoners dictating the sovereign’s use of the Tower,46 suggesting many possibilities for controlling the monarch through the castle. Apprentices were probably the most receptive, for they were already staging disorders protesting their mistreatment. In fact, after 1580, “when the proportion of appren-

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tices in the total population was two or three times that of normal times,” popular disorders began to pose serious difficulty for London authorities and “were usually attributed to ‘apprentices’” (R. Manning, Village Revolts 191). When Elizabethan apprentices attended plays that represented opposition to the crown at the Tower, these scenes tapped into apprentices’ collective memory, encouraging them to think of the Tower as both the emblem of tyranny that Tudor monarchs had been fashioning since the Reformation began and—as medieval Londoners had fashioned it—a weapon that subjects could wield against the crown. In Marlowe’s Edward the Second (1591–93),47 for instance, the wishes of the populace dictate the king’s use of the Tower against a rebellious subject: King Edward:

The younger Mortimer is grown so brave, That to my face he threatens civil wars.

Gaveston:

Why do you not commit him to the Tower?

King Edward:

I dare not, for the people love him well. (2.2.232–35)

Apprentices in Marlowe’s audience probably felt empowered to hear a king declare that his subjects exerted such influence over him that he could not use the Tower against their will, for apprentices’ interactions with crown officials normally emphasized their powerlessness (R. Manning, Village Revolts 201). To illustrate, over two-thirds of the London area’s “35 outbreaks of popular disorder” in 1581–1602 “were protests against harsh punishments imposed by city magistrates at the Crown’s insistence.”48 Considering the harsh and partial justice that apprentices faced in London (219), this representation of the Tower—a royal prison and torture and execution site—out of royal control suggested the strength the Tower could afford them. The same passage indicated that even a perfidious act, such as threatening the monarch with civil war, might not result in a treason sentence at the Tower if “the people” conveyed solidarity in their opposition. London’s apprentices and journeymen were already adept at staging shows of their unity throughout the city; in fact, in the decades that led to the civil war, 1592— the year Edward the Second was most probably first produced on the public stage—and 1595–96 saw London’s most serious disorders.49 In June 1592, for example, feltmakers’ servants led “great multitudes of people” to attempt to rescue one of their fellows, imprisoned unjustly in the Marshalsea. Prison officials, however, assaulted the approaching crowd “with cudgels and daggers,” and several deaths resulted.50 The Privy Council, having intelligence of plans for further disorders that summer, issued orders “to close the theatres,

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impose a curfew, and mount a watch” (R. Manning, Village Revolts 207), demonstrating the plays’ perceived role in inciting popular disturbances. Yet by 1592 many apprentices most probably already had witnessed this scene in Edward the Second, not to mention Mortimer’s escape from the Tower to lead a rebellion against the king in the same play, and they may have seen rebellions involving the Tower in as many as nine other history plays over the previous two years.51 Disorders continued throughout 1592. “One man declared about this time that if only the apprentices had a leader all the commons would rise for they all disliked the state and government” (P. Clark, “Crisis” 53). Later that year there were enclosure riots in St. Martin’s, a riot in Holborn “at the execution of a man who had killed a city officer,” and a plot by “two or three hundred discontented sailors” to march from St. Paul’s to the court “with their grievances” (53). It was, perhaps, only a matter of time before a rebellion would take place at the Tower. The Tower’s Role in a Rebellion against the Sovereign Nearly 90% of the Tower plays represent the Tower’s role in events surrounding an uprising against the monarch.52 Even two of the three Tower plays that do not represent the Tower’s role in a revolt invoke the Tower concerning a rebellion that is central to the action of the play: traitors plan to use the Tower against the kingdom’s best interests, or the people lament the king’s use of the Tower against the character credited with peacefully quelling the Evil May Day riot of 1517.53 Even more indicative of the Tower plays’ fashioning the Tower as oppositional, after 1595, the year that witnessed some of London’s worst disorders before the civil war (P. Clark, “Crisis” 54), all but two of the eleven to thirteen plays that represented the Tower54 connected it to a rebellion against the monarch. Shakespeare represents the Tower as a target for laborers’ rebellion in 2H6 when Jack Cade stirs his followers, “go and set London-bridge on fire, and, if you can,/ burn down the Tower too” (4.6.14–15). Indirectly noting that the Tower contains “all the records of the realm,” Cade seeks to claim the record of sovereign oppression and the architecture that houses it and stands for royal tyranny, only to burn them both (4.7.13, 14). In fact, the Tower’s deployment corroborates Chris Fitter’s view of the Cade sequence as Shakespeare’s “debut [ . . . ] as a nuanced and powerful protest playwright” (“Your Captain” 211). Rather than openly valorize Cade, Shakespeare treats his rebel leader as a comic figure with ridiculous social ideals; however, this comedy— which “hilariously delegitimate[s]” Cade, enabling the rebellion scenes to evade censorship—thinly veils a systematic attack upon Elizabethan “social

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injustice,” designed to incite playgoers to rebel, even at the Tower.55 The first Cade scene begins with one laborer telling another, “it was never merry world in England since gentlemen came up,” evidently alluding to a rallying cry of contemporary English rebels with which Shakespeare’s audience was likely familiar, thereby preparing them to read this scene as having distinct contemporary relevance.56 Initially Cade “vows reformation,” cultivating opposition against Elizabeth by attacking late-Elizabethan high food prices, food shortages, enclosures, economic system, and social degrees (4.2.63–73). Next he agrees to “break open the jails and let out the prisoners,” a typical act of rebellion by late-Elizabethan apprentices, and orders the destruction of London’s sites of royal and noble oppression: John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace, the Inns of Court, and the Tower—all sites of destruction in the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt rather than Cade’s actual 1450 rebellion.57 In fact, Shakespeare ahistorically represents Londoners below the rank of citizen joining forces with Cade just before the Tower is assaulted.58 Cade then expresses laborer resistance to oppressive late-Elizabethan politics in his wishes to replace Parliament, behead a lord for the excessive taxation of the poor, and “sweep the court clean of such filth.”59 Finally, he mocks the corrupt legal system that unjustly privileges the literate—those who, in Tudor England, could claim “benefit of clergy” to avoid the harshest sentences—and punishes the laboring poor, most of whom, in Shakespeare’s England, were illiterate.60 Cade “transform[s] his political subjection into something amounting to our modern sense of class-based resistance,” encouraging underprivileged playgoers, whose hearts “Cade conquers,” to resist their oppression61 and target the Tower. Evidently, Shakespeare also structured the Cade sequence to provoke hardworking playgoers. He emphasized what his sources called the “diuerse idle and vagrant persons” who joined the Kentish rebels as they traveled to London, adding to Cade’s actual following “a multitude of rusticall people.”62 He then drew attention to his rebels’ rustic background through labels such as “hinds” and “peasants” and Cade’s repeated promises that “all things shall be in common,” common signifying “free from enclosure.”63 By representing all of Cade’s rebels—a historically socially heterogeneous group—as rustics, Shakespeare apparently connected with those playgoers originally from the countryside, who were among the hardest hit by London’s escalating social problems. These playgoers, driven to poverty by circumstances beyond their control, would have been offended to hear that “Virtue is not regarded in handicraftsmen” and to see characters resembling their oppressed countrymen in London being scorned by royal messengers as “a ragged multitude/ Of hinds and peasants, rude” and “rascal people.”64 And it would have inflamed

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them to see the king’s delegate, Sir Humphrey Stafford, insult these rustics as “Rebellious hinds, the filth and scum of Kent” (4.2.118). While there is no evidence that Cade’s men actually attempted to attack the Tower, they did somehow capture the Lord Saye, whom the king had placed in the Tower for protection,65 as well as Saye’s son-in-law, Crowmer; behead them both; and process through the city with their heads on staves as Shakespeare dramatized.66 Greenblatt has noted the similarities between the father- and son-in-law beheaded in this scene and Edward Arden and John Somerville, both of whom were beheaded, their severed heads displayed on poles on London Bridge.67 And Shakespeare, whose relatives Elizabeth’s officers had imprisoned and tortured in the Tower before their deaths in 1583, ahistorically fashioned the Tower as a target of his rebels’ outrage, not to capture Lord Saye, who is not even sent to the Tower in the play, but merely to “have essayed to win the Tower.”68 Walking upon the Tower, Lord Scales, the Governor of the Tower, tells the citizens, “I am troubled here with [the rebels] myself.”69 Thus, without explicitly dramatizing an uprising at the Tower, Shakespeare suggested the Tower as a site for his freshly insulted, underprivileged playgoers, many of whom, like Arden, Somerville, and himself, were from the largely Catholic countryside, to proclaim their grievances against the crown. AN APPRENTICE RIOT AT THE TOWER OF LONDON Disorders involving apprentices were most frequent in the 1590s, when social conditions were at their worst, and when as many as thirteen Tower plays were staged in London.70 From as early as 1588 to 1595, as London’s social conditions worsened, between nine and eleven Tower plays, two of which were revived in 1594, represented rebellions against the crown, involving the Tower, on London’s stages.71 Not surprisingly, 1595 was an especially strong year for playgoing in London and an exceptionally profitable period for at least one playing company that performed the amphitheater repertory.72 By 1595 these plays apparently had revived the solidarity among apprentices. In Renaissance England “both the timing and the geography of riots were shaped by the extent to which [ . . . ] rights were threatened at particular times and in particular places” (Wrightson 175). And in 1595, on Tower Hill, apprentices staged London’s largest uprising in seventy-eight years. In general, the apprentice uprisings of 1595 were exceptionally numerous, vigorous, and directed against government authority. Even that year’s customary Shrove Tuesday riots in March, “a traditional time of ‘apprentice misrule,’” had produced five arrests.73 In fact,

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The London riots and rebellions of 1595 constituted the most dangerous and prolonged urban uprising in England between the accession of the Tudor dynasty and the beginning of the Long Parliament. There were at least 13 insurrections, riots, and unlawful assemblies that year in a dozen different parts of London and Southwark, of which 12 took place between 6 and 29 June. It was not merely the number and duration of the disorders that made this uprising so dangerous, but also the explicit attack upon the authority of the lord mayor.74

Throughout June 1595 citizens and apprentices criticized the Lord Mayor’s government, circulated “seditious libels,” rescued prisoners, held anti-alien riots, attempted to rescue arrested rioters, and enforced fair prices of butter and fish at riots in Southwark.75 Then, joining forces with discharged soldiers, some apprentices conspired to kill the Lord Mayor, who was known for his cruelty and “insatiable avarice.”76 The government responded forcefully, trying the food rioters in the Court of Star Chamber (204–05). They were publicly whipped and set in the pillory, instigating a larger riot involving a crowd eighteen hundred strong, in which pillories were torn down and a gallows was erected in front of the door of the Lord Mayor, Sir John Spencer, or “Rich” Spencer, “as he was called for his great wealth.”77 Two days later, Tower Hill became the site of the period’s most notorious riot, “perhaps the most dangerous urban uprising of the century,” as four citizens were seriously injured.78 The crowd of one thousand who gathered on Tower Hill that Sunday afternoon, June 29, “included shoemakers, girdlers, silk-weavers, and husbandmen, besides the apprentices, discharged soldiers, and vagrants.”79 When the watch of Tower Street Ward attempted to disperse them, the rioters “crossed [the line] between riot and rebellion” by engaging in two “acts associated since the late middle ages with the levying of war”: they displayed a banner and were “hartened thereunto by sounding of a Trumpet [ . . . ] the trumpetter hauing beene a souldier.”80 The rioters, carrying “halberds, bills, goonnes, daggs, manie pikes, pollaxes, swordes, daggers, staves and such lyke,” stoned the guards, driving them to Tower Street.81 Though the rioters did not explicitly state their purpose, it is evident that fear of dearth and the violence against apprentices gave rise to the rebellion; in fact, crown proceedings claimed that the rioters, “beinge for the most part of the basest and pooreste condicion,” had planned “to robbe, steale, pill and spoile the welthy and well disposed citizens and inhabitaunts of the saide cytye; and to take the sworde of aucthorytye from the magistrats and governours lawfully aucthorised.”82

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The apprentices, however, were not alone in their opposition to the crown: Even the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Michael Blount, and his Tower garrison supported the riot. In fact, when the Lord Mayor and sheriffs arrived on Tower Hill that evening to make arrests and read a proclamation ordering the rioters to disperse, the Lord Mayor’s sword of justice was held before him, symbolizing his authority and thus violating the Tower Liberty.83 Blount, along with one hundred of his servants and Tower guards, “who all the while had refused to lend assistance in suppressing the rebellion, objected to the mayor’s sword of justice being borne up within the Liberty of the Tower, and assaulted and beat the sword-bearer and the mayor’s servants.”84 Other guards released rioters whom the Lord Mayor’s officers had arrested (Stow, Annales 769). Blount himself had confided to a Catholic, who had conspired to kill the queen, that upon Elizabeth’s death he would hold the Tower against the Privy Council.85 This riot was unusual, not only for its location at the Tower and the size of the crowd but also for its direct criticism of the elite, the rare exhibition of violence against people, and the severe punishment of the rioters.86 On July 24, five apprentices involved in the riot were convicted of treason and hanged, drawn, and quartered on Tower Hill.87 The rare use of this space next to the Tower—traditionally reserved for beheading nobles—to execute apprentices emphasized the convicts’ low social status. It also linked the scenes of the apprentices’ crime and punishment, probably with the government’s hope of preventing future disturbances by apprentices and other hardworking Londoners at the Tower. The riot motivated government officials to take additional preventive measures against future insurrections. In September the Lord Mayor and aldermen requested that the Privy Council suppress stage plays, which, they claimed, had “infect[ed]” or incited “the late stirr & mutinous attempt of those fiew apprentices and other servants” and were “the cause of the increase of crime within the City.”88 Theaters were blamed as the riot’s “cheef cause.”89 Moreover, it was only after this riot that the Privy Council began to organize the commission to investigate the boundaries between the city and the Tower in 1596 (Keay, Tower 9). In Peyton’s 1597 report, the Lieutenant of the Tower recommended that the Tower be fortified, lest [ . . . ] The Cittyzens of London should have power to make their Muster even at the Tower ditch, and allso their disordered Mulltytudes of Artificers, Journeymen, and Prentyzes, (by whose Insolencyes in former tymes, offence unto the peace of the state hath been often offered) might at their pleasure assemble uppon the counterscarpe of the ditch,

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from whence they may passe (wth Little impeachment) to the walles of the Tower, The ditch beeing at this present in many parts decayed and passable, and the walles in some places easye to bee mounted. (57)

And in the 1598 version of his report, Peyton advised Elizabeth, “Yor Matie hath in paye divers officers & artificers belonginge unto the ordennce; and also 140 Gunners and 20 laborers all wch ought to watch and warde in the Tower” (Peyton, 1598 61). The riot was “the last of London’s serious disorders in the 1590s,” Elizabeth having placed the city under martial law through that summer.90 It was not, however, the last serious disorder of Elizabeth’s reign nor the last disorder on Tower Hill during the years of Tower play production, as I will demonstrate. Nor did the authorities’ reactions dissuade playwrights from representing rebellions involving the Tower or even the apprentice riot itself. Shakespeare and Fletcher’s H8 does just that, oblique though the representation is. On Princess Elizabeth’s christening day, a Porter and his Man attempt to control the unruly crowd of onlookers in the palace yard, with many parallels to the apprentice riot and a direct reference to Tower Hill. Apprentices in the 1613 audience would have identified with this scene’s onlookers and their mistreatment by the Porter and his Man. Laborers, who may have participated in the Tower Hill riot a generation earlier as apprentices, would have recognized themselves in the scene’s onlookers—and the watch of Tower Street Ward in the Porter and his Man—and recalled the urgency of their cause. The Porter calls to mind the apprentices’ punishment on Tower Hill, telling a larder’s servant in the crowd, “Belong to the gallows, and be hanged, ye rogue!” (5.4.5). He evokes the weapons the rioters carried and the violence that occurred there: “Fetch me a dozen crab-tree staves, and strong ones; these are but switches to ’em.— I’ll scratch your heads” (5.4 .6–8). Likewise, when he reprimands his Man for not suppressing the crowd, and the Man insists that he has not “spared any/ That had a head to hit, either young or old,” the Porter commands more violence: “What should you do, but knock ’em down by the dozens?” (5.4.22–23, 31–32). The Man describes the futility of trying to disperse this crowd, “We may as well push against Paul’s as stir ’em,” or to prevent disorderly crowds in general (5.4.15, 16–17). The Porter makes the same point to his superior, the Lord Chamberlain, an official much closer to the crown, with an allusion to the watch of Tower Street Ward, who had tried to disperse the Tower Hill rioters: “We are but men; and what so many may do,/ Not being torn a-pieces, we have done./ An army cannot rule ’em” (5.4.74–76).

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When the Man injures an onlooker, the reaction of the “boys”—a term closely associated with apprentices91—exemplifies the rioters’ solidarity and also represents the apprentices’ pelting stones at the watch of Tower Street Ward, driving them back, in 1595: Man:

There is a fellow somewhat near the door [ . . . ] . That firedrake did I hit three times on the head [ . . . ] he stands there, like a mortar-piece to blow us. There was a haberdasher’s wife of small wit near him [ . . . ] . I missed the meteor once, and hit that woman, who cried out “Clubs!” when I might see from far some forty truncheoners draw to her succour [ . . . ] where she was quartered. They fell on; I made good my place; at length they came to the broomstaff to me; I defied ’em still, when suddenly a file of boys behind ’em, loose shot, delivered such a shower of pebbles, that I was fain to draw mine honour in, and let ’em win the work. (5.4.38–57)

Evoking the five executed Tower Hill rioters’ punishment, the Porter recasts this crowd of young and old into “youths” more fit to serve as onlookers at Tower Hill executions than in the palace yard or a playhouse: “These are the youths that thunder at a playhouse [ . . . ] that no audience, but the Tribulation of Tower Hill [ . . . ] are able to endure” (5.4.23, 58–62). The contemporary term playhouse, spoken within a post-1576 playhouse, underscores the scene’s topicality. Another level of interpretation builds a critical mass of subconscious echoes of the Tower Hill riot. The Porter’s question, “How got they in, and be hanged?” and his Man’s response, “Alas, I know not; how gets the tide in?” (5.4.16–17) invoke Tower Hill, where the rioters were hanged, drawn, and quartered, adjacent to the Tower moat that was filled with the tide of the Thames. The term quartered, indicating the woman’s location (5.4.52), likewise resonates with the rioters’ executions. Even the soldier who rallied the rioters by sounding his trumpet is represented when the procession returns from the christening, and, at the sound of a trumpet, the Lord Chamberlain calls attention to it: “Hark, the trumpets sound” (5.4.81–82). This indirect representation of the Tower Hill apprentice riot supported resistance to the crown’s oppressive authority at the Tower and encouraged playgoers to use the Tower for their purposes, thereby participating in the social construction of the Tower space and, through it, their empowered identity. For apprentices, the cumulative effect of the Tower plays’ representations of rebellion was, it seems, to foster social revolution. To illustrate, the

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rate and severity of their disturbances tended to parallel the frequency of Tower play production. Only twenty-two riots involving apprentices, mainly “festive misrule” rather than “popular disturbances,” took place from 1606 to 1623 (R. Manning, Village Revolts 211, 192), corresponding to the dearth of new Tower plays (only H8 in 1613) between c.1605–09 and 1624. But in 1617–18, after Queen Anne’s Men had revived Marlowe’s Edward the Second at the Red Bull in c.1617, Shrovetide riots were larger, more severe,92 and oriented again toward protest against social discrimination. One riot in 1617 involved three or four thousand apprentices, who leveled four houses, “defaced many others,” and broke the head of a justice of the peace “with a brick bat” (Cook 252). And in 1618 apprentices met at the Fortune theater to pull down the Red Bull, which had closed, and the private Cockpit or Phoenix, to which the Red Bull’s company had moved and which was too expensive for them to attend.93 As another example, in Iohn and Matilda, first performed in c.1628– 29, King John foolishly commits his good councilors to the Tower (2.4). And on June 7, 1628, when Charles agreed to the Petition of Right, bells rang and bonfires blazed in London “upon a misprision” that his hated advisor, Buckingham, “either was or should be sent to the Tower.”94 That night a group of “boys” assembled on Tower Hill, tore down the scaffold, and burned it, saying “they would have a new one built for the Duke of Bucks” (Mead 362). Not only did the Tower plays evidently encourage apprentice rebellion, but Tower Hill had become, for London’s “boys” or apprentices, with their “growing political awareness” (R. Manning, Village Revolts 193, 214), a stage for opposing royal repression. NOBLES AND CATHOLICS: THE ESSEX REVOLT AND EMERGENT REPRESENTATIONS OF THE TOWER Like apprentices and other disadvantaged playgoers, Catholics and some gentry and nobles in the audiences apparently embraced the Tower plays’ oppositional tone and sought each other’s support when they acted upon it. The Essex faction specifically included “a strong Catholic element” (James 435–36) and many nobles who opposed Elizabeth. For instance, by 1600 Essex was believed “to be holding a rival and hostile court” at his mansion, Essex House, where “the Earls of Worcester, Sussex, Rutland, Bedford, [and] Southampton,” and many others were frequent visitors.95 In addition to Southampton, who had married Essex’s cousin against the queen’s will, Essex’s “principal confidants” were Sir Ferdinando Gorges and four Catholics: John Littleton, Sir Charles Danvers, Sir Christopher Blount, and Sir John

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Davies of Oxford—an officer of the Tower.96 Essex found further support in “Lords Sandys, Cromwell, and Chandos, with numerous knights and gentlemen of family.”97 In fact, Essex had handwritten “a list of 120 noblemen, knights and gentlemen” whom he expected to support his revolt (Akrigg 111). Conspirators who attended a Tower play with a revolutionary theme on the eve of the revolt included Sir William Constable; Captain Thomas Lea; Sir Gilly Merrick; William Parker, fourth Baron Monteagle; and Sir Charles Percy.98 A number of these peers and those in Essex’s “wider following” were Catholics or Catholic sympathizers, so in this uprising, as in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, the rebels enlisted the support of “conspiratorial Catholics,” noblemen, and gentry.99 Although at his trial Essex claimed to be a Protestant, he had obtained the support of some of England’s most severely oppressed people: Catholics.100 Indeed, he had “appealed to all the discontented elements, military men, irresponsible young peers, both Puritans and Papists, against the Queen and the central pillars of the state” (Rowse, Tower 114), all of whom had had access to the previous decade’s Tower plays. At least the nobles and Catholics who supported the Essex faction, then, apparently identified with opposition to the sovereign in the Tower plays. In this respect, of the eleven to thirteen Tower plays that were first staged after 1595, all but two of which represent the Tower’s role in a rebellion against the monarch, Heywood’s 1E4, most probably first performed in 1599, is exemplary.101 The rebellious Thomas Neuille, Lord Falconbridge, and his troops aim to free Henry VI from the Tower, though Henry is a prisoner of King Edward (p.14–15). Falconbridge, like certain Elizabethan nobles, wishes to depose his sovereign. If victorious, he tells the English, “We will be Masters of the Mint ourselues,/ And set our own stamp on the golden coin,” as he aspires not merely to control the Mint but to impress the nation’s coinage with his likenesses as England’s king.102 He repeats to his troops that if they succeed, “The Mint is ours”; and to claim the only Mint in late-Elizabethan England,103 a royal institution within the Tower complex, the rebels must claim the Tower itself. As Falconbridge addresses the populace or “the malcontented commons” (p.7), he also appeals to victims of repression in Heywood’s audience: Dear countrymen, I publickly proclaime, If any wronged discontented English, Toucht with true feeling of King Henry’s wrongs, Henry the Sixt, the lawfull king of England, Who, by that tyrant Edward, the vsurper, Is held a wretched prisoner in the Tower.

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If any man that faine would be enfranchis’d From the sad yoke of Yorkish seruitude, Vnder which we toil like naked galley-slaues, Know he that Thomas Neuille, the Lord Falconbridge [...] Takes vp just armes against the house of Yorke, And does proclaime our ancient liberty. (p.8–9)

Falconbridge similarly aims to agitate discontented nobles, including those in the playhouse, by arguing that his nobility elevates his uprising above the Peasants’ Revolt and Cade’s Rebellion, both of which were represented in Tower plays earlier that decade:104 We do not rise like Tyler, Cade, and Straw, Bluebeard, and other of that rascal rout, [...] But in the true and antient lawfull right Of the redoubted house of Lancaster. Our blood is noble, by our birth a Neuille, And by our lawful line, Lord Falconbridge. (p.9)

Citizens and apprentices remain loyal to the king and help the Lord Mayor defend the city (p.17–18), emphasizing, by contrast, the rebel leader’s higher social status. As the rebels approach the city, a captain directs the gaze of his troops—and of the audience—to the Tower, which spurs them to rebel against King Edward: “Looke how the Tower doth tice vs to come on,/ To take out Henry the Sixt, there prisoner” (p.10). Heywood thus personifies the Tower itself as a rebel and even a proponent of rebellion, inciting playgoers “to come on” and rise up at the Tower against their repressive monarch. Although Falconbridge condemns the king’s oppression at all levels of society, his rebellion is also self-serving, and some noble playgoers would have found his specific grievances all too familiar. He addresses his troops: But he that keeps your Soueraign in the Tower Hath seized my land, and robbed me of my right. I am a gentleman as well as hee. What he hath got, he holds by tyranny. (p.25)

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Falconbridge’s plot to seize the Tower and gain his birthright—his claim to the throne—was also plotted the following year by an actual nobleman with a similar claim.105 On February 8, 1600, Essex and his faction attempted to deploy a plot which, just five days earlier, had been threefold: “first, to seize upon the Court; second, to seize the Tower; third, to seize the City.”106 The conspirators had carefully considered whether to take over the court and the Tower together or separately, whether to seize the Tower at all, and the plan for capturing the Tower.107 The Essex conspirators believed in the power of historical drama to stir people to action (Montrose, The Purpose of Playing 71). Essex was a great patron of the literary and dramatic arts who had written on the benefits of reading histories (May 18–19). In fact, John Hayward’s bestselling book, The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII (1599)—which describes Richard II’s deposition at the Tower and had been banned, its author imprisoned in the Tower for several years and interrogated, “the Richard-Bolingbroke story [being] widely identified by 1599 as a sensitive one”—was dedicated to Essex, who apparently had read the book and thought of himself as another Henry IV.108 Additionally, Essex’s fellow conspirator and “closest follower” was the Earl of Southampton, who, as Shakespeare’s patron, was closely connected to the theater and its historical drama.109 On October 11, 1599, in fact, Rowland Whyte commented, “My Lord Southhampton, and Lord Rutland, came not to the Court; [ . . . ] they pass away the Tyme in London merely in going to Plaies euery Day.”110 To raise support for the scheme, Essex’s co-conspirators bribed the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to perform “the play of the deposyng and kyllyng of Kyng Rychard the second,” most likely Shakespeare’s R2,111 at the Globe on the eve of the revolt, before eleven of Essex’s followers and possibly thousands of other playgoers.112 Evidently, the Master of the Revels had recognized the potential of this play’s deposition scene: Because the scene does not appear in any Elizabethan quartos, it is believed to have been performed but, being considered dangerous to the civic order, censored from print until 1608.113 The similarities between this scene and the revolt were not lost on contemporary Londoners. Many conspirators, citizens, and government officials associated the Essex revolt with the Richard II story in the weeks that followed the uprising, comparing Essex to Henry IV.114 Like Essex, “Elizabeth herself understood the allegory perfectly”: Later that year, when William Lambarde, Keeper of the Records in the Tower of London, presented her with a catalog of the records, she noticed the section on Richard II and declared, “I am Richard II. Know ye not that?”115 This event epitomized the perceived power of the theater.116 Essex, having seen subjects fight to capture

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the Tower, often seizing it from kings, in as many as twelve Tower plays of the 1590s,117 apparently had become convinced of a subject’s ability to capture the Tower. On February 8, having assembled a large crowd at his house for the rebellion, Essex panicked when Elizabeth summoned him, and he rode into the city, shouting that his actions were for her good and trying to raise support that never came. He was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. Having been tried and sentenced to a traitor’s death, he later confessed and requested a private execution there.118 Although Essex had committed high treason, Elizabeth agonized over whether to execute her favorite.119 The day after she signed the warrant for his beheading, “the most sensational event in the Elizabethan life of the Tower” and the only execution within the Tower walls during her reign, it took place before a crowd of over one hundred spectators.120 Essex, “the darling of the Londoners” and “well loved, especially by the nobility,” had been a tremendously popular courtier whose hardships drew supporters and fostered opposition to the queen.121 In 1599 he had departed for his mission in Ireland “to the encouragement of crowds lining the streets to cheer their hero” (John J. Manning 22). That year Shakespeare lauded Essex, “the General of our gracious Empress,” by comparing him to Henry V and declaring how eagerly Londoners anticipated Essex’s homecoming “from Ireland.”122 The following year, when Essex spoke at the hearing for his insubordination to Elizabeth as a soldier in Ireland, many who heard it wept.123 Even after his rebellion he had a following that conspired to commit violence against the queen, “thereby to deliver the Earl out of the Tower, and to place him on the Throne” (Calendar of State Papers, Domestic 568, 569). His popularity was such that four guard-houses were built at the Tower for the many guards required to prevent his rescue from prison.124 One eyewitness reported that, as Essex concluded his prayers on that scaffold with the Lord’s Prayer, “all the Asembly ioyned with him in tounge and voice as before they had done in heart. All I thinke present sheddinge abundante teares and castinge out lowd sobbs and wofull cries.”125 After his execution “The spectators lingered a while, gazing on the headless carcase sprawled in the straw” before silently exiting the Tower complex, and even then, they enacted their opposition to the crown: “The crowd fell on the headsman as he came out of the Tower, and he would have been killed had not the sheriffs rescued him.”126 “A Lamentable Ditty Composed upon the Death of Robert Lord Devereux [ . . . ]” Elizabeth, aware of Essex’s popularity, had the Lord Chamberlain’s Men—the company that had performed on the eve of the revolt—perform again on the

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eve of Essex’s execution, both “to deny any appearance of anticipatory court mourning for the death of a traitor”127 and, it seems, to reassert her authority over the acting company that had supported him. Nevertheless, by this time, perhaps because of Essex’s popularity and the prominence of the Tower plays, other modes of representation were beginning to shape the Tower’s cultural meaning. To illustrate, the description of Essex’s execution site by Frederic Gerschow, Stettin-Pomerania’s secretary who authored the duke’s travel diary in 1602, alludes to the Tower as an oppositional emblem, Essex’s celebrity, and a non-dramatic text that reinforced both ideas: On descending to the courtyard, the spot was shown to us where the brave hero the Earl of Essex was beheaded, and lay buried in the chapel close by. How beloved and admired this Earl was [ . . . ] may be judged from the circumstance that his song, in which he takes leave of the Queen and the whole country, and in which also he shows the reason of his unlucky fate, is sung and played on musical instruments all over the country. (Gerschow 15)

Gerschow most likely referred to the song that became a popular broadside ballad about Essex, which was in print and for sale in London by 1603 with at least six subsequent seventeenth-century editions including “A Lamentable Ditty, Composed upon the Death of Robert Lord Devereux, Late Earle of Essex, Who Was Beheaded in the Tower of London, on Ash-wednesday in the Morning, 1600. To the Tune of Welladay,” c.1640–65, Wood 401 (75), Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (Figure 1).128 This “first important ballad sung to ‘Welladay’” existed “within two days after Essex’s execution” and evidently was sung before Gerschow and the Stettin-Pomerania party at court at least a year later, a testament to the song’s popularity.129 The twenty-five-stanza broadside ballad, beginning, “Sweet Englands pride is gone,/ [ . . . ] Which makes her sigh and groane/ evermore still,” defies the queen’s levelheaded attitude toward Essex’s death, openly mourning him, and dramatizes his imprisonment in the Tower and execution, subtly yet consistently rejecting the view that justice has been done. Essex’s epithet in the opening line, “Englands pride,” obliquely slights the queen. By emphasizing Essex’s service to both Elizabeth and her underprivileged subjects in the early lines “He did her fame advance/ in Ireland, Spaine, and France,” and “He alwaies helpt the poore,” and by claiming, “He “néere did deed of ill;/ well it is knowne,” the ballad recasts his execution as unjustifiable. In fact, the next lines blame Essex’s demise upon mere “envie,” remaining ambiguous about whose envy it was: his of Elizabeth’s sovereignty or hers of Essex’s popularity.

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Figure 1. Detail from “A Lamentable Ditty, Composed upon the Death of Robert Lord Devereux, Late Earle of Essex, Who Was Beheaded in the Tower of London, on Ash-wednesday in the Morning, 1600. To the Tune of Welladay,” c.1640-65, Wood 401 (75). Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

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The sixth stanza recognizes that Essex “was condemn’d to die,/ for Treason certainly,” yet undermines the treason charge, concluding, “But God, that sits on high,/ knoweth all things.” This judgment not only treats the sentence as unjust but also suggests that the queen, who ordered the execution, will be judged by God for it. In fact, despite acknowledging Essex’s arrival in London “with all his Troop./ That first began the strife,/ and caus’d him lose his life,” the lyrics ignore the plot and rebellion behind Essex’s actions. Besides minimizing Essex’s treason, the song diminishes his role as the rebel leader, for “others did the like/ as well as he.” It sardonically contrasts Essex’s harsh punishment with his supporters’ pardons: Yet her Princely Majesty graciously, graciously, Hath pardon given free/ to many of them :

This stanza, then, fashions Elizabeth as lacking graciousness or mercy. For this reason, the lines that follow, “They did pray, day and night,/ God to defend her,” suggest that she needed prayers for mercy, having shown Essex none. The remaining seventeen stanzas set the action at the Tower, where Essex engages in dialogue with “The Lieutenant of the Tower” and a “Guard” as he prepares to die and then addresses the “witnesse[s]” from the “Scaffold [ . . . ] set up/ within the Tower.” His last dying speech, dramatically composed in the first person amid descriptions of his actions—not unlike stage directions—gives this executed traitor a voice and vitality from beyond his grave in the Tower’s Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula. Elizabeth had executed but not silenced Essex, for in the ballad the Tower becomes the stage for his immortal representation as her victim. The concluding stanza asserts, Then the headsman did his partly [sic] cruelly, cruelly. He was not séene to start, for all the blowes :

The Tower’s association with this sympathetic version of the life and death of Essex, whose “Soule [ . . . ] is at rest,/ in heaven among the blest,” reinforced the plays’ representation of the Tower as an oppositional symbol: here, a place where traitors were executed but also mourned and celebrated.

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The decline in Elizabeth’s popularity near the end of her reign was due, in part, to Essex’s execution (Smith 251), and the ballad demonstrates the negative popular reaction to his beheading as well as opposition to Elizabeth. This artistic representation of the Tower further exemplifies the appropriation of the Tower to announce opposition to the crown. And the fact that even a foreign visitor to the court noted the prevalence of this song that celebrates a traitor underscores that the Tower’s new cultural meaning was becoming popular. Portrait of Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton Similarly, Shakespeare’s patron, Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, whose role in the Essex conspiracy had led to his imprisonment in the Tower, “had a portrait of himself in the Tower painted as a memento” by John de Critz, the Elder, after his release in 1603, when Southampton was restored to his title with James’ royal favor (Figure 2).130 After the Essex uprising, Southampton had been “full of discontent and emphatic in his statements about the wrongs that had been done to his friend” (Akrigg 109). He had fully participated in the planning and implementation of Essex’s plot, remaining loyal to Essex throughout the entire twelve-hour revolt; their subsequent trial, at which they were both originally sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered; and their imprisonment in the Tower.131 Though Southampton had denied being “one of a group of Catholic malcontents” at the trial, he also had been personally displeased with Elizabeth, who “had [ . . . ] relentlessly maintained her dislike of Southampton, denying him access to her Court, and refusing him first the generalship of the horse in Ireland and then the governorship of Connaught.”132 By the time the portrait was painted, Southampton’s opposition to Elizabeth evidently remained strong, for as a Tower prisoner he “was receiving visits [ . . . ] from his old friends of the Essex faction, the ‘Octavians’ as they were now known in consequence of the events of the ill-starred February 8th” (132). Southampton’s resistance can be read in the portrait. The background depicts a window; furnishings consistent with a comfortable apartment of at least two spacious chambers next to the Queen’s gallery, where Southampton was lodged in the Tower at a cost of £9 a week; and the cat that famously accompanied him there.133 The cat, by 1595 a symbol of the feline nature “to be extremely desirous of liberty, and most impatient of imprisonment,” has been read in this portrait as “an iconographical symbol saying ‘Give me back my freedom.’”134 Southampton’s doublet and cloak, like the cat’s fur, are mainly black with white trim, an indication of his catlike desire for liberty and his mourning for Essex (Sill 29). These details exemplify that—despite the fever that caused swelling in his limbs, apparently including his left arm

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Figure 2. Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, 1603, attributed to John de Critz, the Elder. Boughton House, Kettering, Northamptonshire. Reproduced by kind permission of His Grace The Duke of Buccleuch & Queensberry, KT.

which hangs, as if in a sling, in the fold of his cloak135—his imprisonment in the Tower was less than punishing, a visual statement of defiance to Elizabeth’s government. He even holds his left glove in his gloved right hand, flaunting, on his left hand, a ring, symbolizing authority (J. Hall 264). He also appears to be firm in his religious convictions. Sitting or standing in this position, with his left arm hanging at a nearly perpendicular angle to his torso, his body resembles a cross and, along with his apparent physical suffering and the large red stone in his ring, Christ’s wounds or Crucifixion.136 Other details in the portrait are specifically Catholic. A second piece of red jewelry defiantly displayed on Southampton’s hand is a beaded bracelet or rosary wrapped around his wrist. In front of the cat is a substantial book, the red cover of which is embossed with an earl’s coronet over the Wriothesley arms, coats of arms having been a common form of decoration on sixteenthand seventeenth-century English prayer books.137 The book—a symbolic attribute of Saint Peter—is perhaps a Bible or the heavily annotated Catholic

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New Testament of 1582 and 1600, another source of power and comfort to Southampton, “a Catholic to the end of Elizabeth’s reign,” who was also “from a Catholic dynasty.”138 A ribbon dangling from the book seems to curl into the shape of a key, evoking freedom from imprisonment, the emblem of Saint Peter, and thus the Catholic interpretation of Matt. 16:18–19: And I say to thee, That thou art Peter: and vpon this Rocke wil I build my Church, and the gates of hel shal not preuaile against it. And I wil giue to thee the keies of the kingdom of heauen. And whatsoeuer thou shalt binde vpon earth, it shal be bound also in the heauens: and whatsoeuer thou shalt loose in earth, it shal be loosed also in the heauens.139

Indeed, the theme of this scripture “was extremely popular in the art of the Counter-Reformation, for it proclaimed the papacy itself and the Pope to be the successor of Peter.”140 The keys symbolize the Church’s power to loose (i.e., absolve) or bind sins (i.e., excommunicate), a reminder that in 1570 the pope had “excommunicat[ed] Elizabeth and order[ed] her subjects ‘that they presume not to obey her, or her monitions, Mandates, and Lawes,’ under pain of similar excommunication.”141 In fact, in 1571–73 Southampton’s father had spent eighteen months imprisoned in the Tower for seeking advice from a Catholic bishop on “whether he should or should not continue to serve his Queen” (Akrigg 9–10). Southampton’s Catholic background; his father’s history as a Catholic prisoner in the Tower; his close relationship to his “truest friend,” the “intensely religious” Essex (Akrigg 96, 125); and his own imprisonment for his role in an uprising supported by Catholics would make this representation of a Catholic text in the Tower a political symbol of defiance. Supporting this reading, in the upper right corner of the portrait is inset a miniature of the Tower’s exterior, beneath which is inscribed in Latin—the language of Elizabethan Catholic resistance—“IN VINCVLIS INVICTVS,” or “In chains unsubdued.”142 Southampton, like the Tower playwrights, evidently wanted the portrait’s beholders, like the Tower play audiences, to recognize the Tower as an emblem of the crown’s declining power over its subjects, perhaps especially Catholic subjects. As a reminder of Southampton’s active opposition to the crown, the portrait’s inscription also includes the date of the Essex revolt: “FEBRVA: 8: 1600” (Goulding 53 n.2). The London Plate The Tower plays, Essex’s story, and these two artistic representations of the Tower also support my reading of the London Plate (1600),143 another early

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Figure 3. The London Plate, 1600, Tin-glazed Delftware Plate. Reproduced by permission of the Museum of London, © Museum of London.

and oppositional representation of the Tower as fine art (Figure 3).144 This tin-enameled plate or “Charger” at the Museum of London, “the earliest dated and commemorative piece of English delftware, and the earliest known with an English inscription,” is attributed, through its date, to London’s Aldgate pottery, established in 1571 by two Dutch potters.145 Though it may appear that the plate was produced by these Protestant emigrants, who were loyal to Elizabeth, by 1600 the Aldgate pottery was run by others.146 The plate’s bluedashed edge identifies it as an early example of the blue dash chargers, a series of earthenware or maiolica plates studied by Edward Andrews Downman.147 Downman’s research is useful for historicizing the London Plate. Blue dash chargers were meant to be displayed, “and not for domestic use,” as most have

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no scratches, wear, or stains, and “the rim on the reverse side was so made as to uphold the piece if hung with wire or string” (Downman 17–18). Indeed, the London Plate’s footrim is “pierced twice,” evidently for just such a purpose (Britton 105). Also like other blue dash chargers, the London Plate incorporates “the whole range of maiolica colours—blue, purple, green, orange, and yellow.”148 While the Museum of London dates the plate to 1600, Downman adds that dates inscribed on the early chargers do not necessarily indicate their manufacture dates “but rather [ . . . ] some date of interest, either in connection with the subject pictured, or to the person for whom the piece was perhaps specially made.”149 Since, according to the old-style dating, Essex’s February 25th execution, an event of great interest in the Tower’s history, took place within the last weeks of 1600, and the plate is inscribed “1600” with three present-tense references to Elizabeth, the plate was apparently created after the execution and before the queen’s death in 1603. The plate depicts a stylized image of the Tower surrounded by the verse, “The rose is red the leaves are grene God save Elizabeth ovr Queene.” While most blue dash chargers lack verses alongside their images, this exceptional couplet resonates with the praises Essex composed in his poems for and about Elizabeth.150 Like this era’s courtly literature and painting, in which “the gap between idea and reality was truly enormous,” such as Marcus Gheeraerts’ 1600 Rainbow Portrait that compliments Elizabeth as a youthful “sun-queen,” the verse flatters and praises Elizabeth, the Tudor Rose,151 who, at the age of sixty-seven, was long past the greenness of youth. In fact, by the 1590s “she could barely ride, she wore a wig, her teeth were bad, and she placed a perfumed silk handkerchief in her mouth before receiving visitors.”152 However, for several reasons, a representation of the Tower is an odd choice to celebrate Elizabeth’s reign. First, at the age of fifteen, having been molested by her stepmother’s husband, the Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour, Elizabeth had to undertake the mortifying task of dispelling court gossip that she was pregnant and hiding in the Tower.153 She wrote in a letter to the Lord Protector, “there goeth rumors abroad [ . . . ] that I am in the Tower and with child by my Lord Admiral.”154 Second, the image celebrates the Tower’s function as a prison, which would have resonated negatively for Elizabeth. Its central figure is the Tower’s high, crenellated, stone inner curtain wall, set off in orange-red, alluding to the legend that the Tower walls were “tempered with the blood of beasts” (Fitzstephen 502). The foreground features the watergate of St. Thomas’s Tower, later known as Traitors’ Gate, where contemporaries believed Elizabeth had entered the Tower as a prisoner in 1554.155 Just before Elizabeth’s imprisonment, in a letter to Queen Mary, she called the Tower “a place more wonted for a

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false traitor than a true subject.”156 During her imprisonment Elizabeth had endured severe psychological anguish, being interrogated by privy councilors as a suspected traitor and even fearing for her life,157 her Protestant cousin, Jane Grey, having been executed just weeks earlier within the Tower walls. Third, the Tower had been Elizabeth’s mother’s prison and the site of her trial, execution, and burial.158 According to Carol Levin, Elizabeth was sensitive about any references to what her father had done to her mother. When in late 1586 James VI tried to convince Elizabeth not to execute his mother, he had his envoy William Keith tell Elizabeth that “King Henry VIII’s reputation was never prejudged but in the beheading of his bedfellow.” Elizabeth was furious that James would imply a parallel between Mary Stuart and Anne Boleyn, and would raise a subject she considered taboo. Keith told James that Elizabeth took such “chafe as ye would wonder.”159

Finally, the Tower was the prison, execution site, and gravesite of her favorite, Essex, whose beheading within the Tower walls she had recently ordered.160 Elizabeth had little fondness for the Tower; indeed, in her forty-five-year reign she is only known to have visited the Tower once after her coronation, commemorating a new building at the Mint for a few hours in 1561 (Nichols, Elizabeth 91). The plate evidently criticizes Elizabeth for the persecution, at the Tower, of Catholics such as Campion, Arden, and Somerville, and for the execution of Essex, whom many believed to be a Catholic or Catholic sympathizer. Other details in the design substantiate this reading. Between the verse and the blue dashes around the plate’s edge is a band of arabesques and foliage with a strap-work border, a convention from Italian maiolica that was considered the Antwerp style.161 Although conventional, when read alongside the Tower they resemble bodiless heads, heads that have been severed on Tower Hill and within the Tower walls, including those of Essex and even a former queen and parent of Elizabeth. Additionally, while Elizabeth was “both the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster [ . . . ] the double Tudor rose epitomizing in her person [ . . . ] the union of the two houses,” the rose most associated with her in contemporary literature, and at court in her later years, was the white rose, which had also honored the Virgin Mary in medieval religious art.162 However, the London Plate metaphorically refers to Elizabeth as the red rose, a conventional allusion to the Lancastrians, whose Catholic faith Elizabeth of York’s descendants, especially Henry VIII and Elizabeth, had reformed and—like the red book, ring, and rosary in the

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Southampton portrait—the Catholic Church, “with its red vestments and red-lettered prayer books” and the blood of its martyrs.163 In fact, in 1574 the recusant priest Richard Bristow had likened Catholic martyrs’ blood to purple roses in contrast to white lilies ([**4r]). Juxtaposed with the Tower’s image, this metaphor, “The rose is red,” resonates with Essex’s blood that was spilt there, in the year inscribed on the plate, at Elizabeth’s order, as well as the blood of her Catholic Tower victims. The border’s leafy foliage also corresponds to the next phrase in the verse: “the leaves are grene.” The trope of green leaves was evidently an established oblique reference to the revival of Catholicism. In Christian symbolism, trees denote “the cycle of life, death, and resurrection in the fullness of the four seasons,” and in Christian art the Tree of Life, believed to have been used for Christ’s cross, “was depicted as filled with green leaves and flowers.”164 Furthermore, in The Censure of a Loyall Subiect, a Protestant account of the executions of fourteen Catholics who participated in the 1586 Babington Plot to kill Elizabeth and place Mary Stuart on the throne, George Whetstone invokes the 1572 Saint Bartholomew’s Massacre, in which Catholics murdered thousands of Huguenots in Paris.165 Whetstone writes, “as a token that Gods word should florish in despite of their crueltie: a withered tree bare greene leues in the churchyard, that receiued many a murthered carcasse” ([D4v]). Catholics, however, “applied this prophising example, to the second flourishing of their Romish church” ([D4v]). Because The Censure of a Loyall Subiect was dedicated to Elizabeth’s chief advisor and paraphrased her own written reaction to the Babington Plot,166 she was likely familiar with it, as she would have been with the elegy of one of the conspirators, Chidiock Tichborne,167 “an extremely popular poem of the period, being set to music many times,” though it was censored from the second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles.168 While imprisoned in the Tower in 1586, Tichborne is believed to have written his elegy on the eve of his execution.169 One version of the eighteen-line poem includes the metaphor: “The fruit is dead and yet the leaves are green.”170 On one level, Tichborne is writing about himself; in each of the seventeen other lines, in one version of the elegy, he makes a self-referential statement using I or my. This unique, third-person line, however, could be interpreted in at least three ways. It could refer to Tichborne himself, a man about to die, though at the age of about eighteen, he was youthful or “green.”171 It could refer to the fruit of his labor to dethrone and murder the queen, in which case Elizabeth, the “leaves” he would have killed, continued to live; other contemporary vegetation metaphors for Elizabeth, involving Tichborne and Essex, support this analysis.172 Or it could refer to the Babington Plot’s demise, a setback for the cause of

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the Church he hoped would flourish: “and yet the leaves are green.” All three interpretations support a reading of the verse in the London Plate as oppositional to Elizabeth from the standpoint of oppressed Catholic subjects. Accordingly, the last part of the plate’s verse, “God save Elizabeth ovr Queene,” though conventional, may be read ironically, as a subtle disguise for oppositional attitudes, like playwrights’ claim that they were merely dramatizing history, or as other Elizabethans may have used this phrase. John Stubbs, though not a Catholic, made much of these words in 1579. Seconds after publicly lamenting Elizabeth’s lack of mercy toward him and having his right hand dismembered, he shouted, “God Save the Queen!”—a quotation he repeated in recounting this punishment in two letters composed during his subsequent imprisonment in the Tower.173 Similarly, the Catholic Edward Abington, one of the Babington plotters, said on the scaffold, “God saue good Q. Elisabeth,” a convention that could obscure a double, oppositional meaning to spectators; and Essex’s executioner, having carried out the queen’s unpopular will by beheading the earl, “lifted up the head, saying ‘God save the Queen.’”174 Because Elizabeth had executed so many faithful Catholic subjects, the plate could be read as representing Catholics warning her through the Tower, as the end of her life drew near, that she would face judgment for these deaths, lest God “save” her, or show her more mercy than she had shown Essex and her Catholic subjects. Although “God save the king [or queen]” was a conventional exclamation of “popular consensus and celebration, of national enthusiasm,” the plate’s verse shows “God save the Queen” to have an ambiguous or oppositional meaning, as when Essex, riding into London on the morning of his uprising, had cried, “for the Queene, for the Queene” or “God save the queen,”175 when his true intention was to depose her. These three non-dramatic representations of the Tower epitomize that, by the end of Elizabeth’s reign, the Tower’s oppositional dramatic meanings were influencing cultural texts in other artistic media. And the year 1600 in the title or inscriptions of these texts connects them to Essex’s revolt and thus to the Tower’s oppositional meaning at that time.176 Once the dramatists had dislodged the Tower from the monarch’s absolute control, others began to refashion it, enlarging the body of cultural texts that represented opposition through the Tower. In fact, early-seventeenth-century non-dramatic poetry and prose repeatedly features the Tower, a testament to its cultural popularity by the later years of Tower play production.177 Moreover, as I have attempted to demonstrate in this chapter, the Tower as an oppositional emblem evolved with the production of Tower plays. And just as 1595 marked a shift, after which nearly every Tower play

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portrayed the Tower’s role in a rebellion, 1599 marked another transition. In the 1590s playwrights, especially Shakespeare and Heywood, occasionally personified the Tower, associated it with ghosts, and represented it as Julius Caesar’s Tower; starting in 1599, however, these modes of representation ceased. And every Tower play from that point on juxtaposed the Tower with bodies, body parts, and/or death, and, with one exception, connected the Tower to religion, especially the English Reformation. As early as 1600 the Tower’s representation in the London Plate, through its corporeal associations with beheadings and blood, its religious undertones as a prison for Catholic traitors, and its ambiguous use of God, exemplified that the Tower’s evolving meaning was wider than the scope of the plays. This evolution also shows that the Tower, as an oppositional emblem in the early seventeenth century, drew Londoners in the audience more intimately into its role on the stage, standing as it did for their physical and spiritual identity.

Chapter Five

Reading English Nationhood in the Dramatic Tower of London

During the English Renaissance, as scientific discoveries and other cultural advances were refining the ideas of human identity and English nationhood, several prominent English people defined themselves and Englishness through architectural structures, a process that, in turn, humanized the buildings by identifying them with humans and the history of the English people. Playwrights epitomized this phenomenon by humanizing the Tower, dramatically representing English history, English bodies, and English Protestant nationhood through the castle. In this chapter I argue for this additional, concurrent reading of the Tower plays—that, as a symbol of opposition to the crown, the Tower’s role onstage united theatergoers with one another and with the Tower itself as an English icon. Each Tower play audience being a community of largely English playgoers, seeing and hearing the Tower represented in historical drama would have reminded theatergoers, especially Londoners, of their communal past. The Tower playwrights apparently tapped into this idea by representing historic executions at the Tower in ways that privileged condemned English characters as victims worthy of audience sympathy and solidarity, often at the monarchy’s expense. Based upon spectators’ reactions at actual early modern executions, especially those following the 1586 Babington Plot, such representations in historical drama probably would have elicited intense audience compassion for the condemned characters, uniting playgoers emotionally as they gazed at the Tower onstage. In the 1590s playwrights further humanized the Tower through three dramatic conventions: personifying it, introducing ghosts—human spirits— into the Tower’s lore, and associating the castle with the life of Julius Caesar.1 However, as shown in Chapters Three and Four, the struggle for the Tower intensified at the turn of the seventeenth century: Apprentices rioted on Tower Hill in 1595; powerful English bishops banned the printing of history 114

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plays in 1599; the crown subsequently reappropriated the Richard III story in an attempt to reclaim the Tower’s evolving cultural meanings; and opposition to the crown through the Tower was spreading from the theater to other cultural forms. Within the years 1595–99, playwrights, evidently engaged in the contest for the Tower, again reshaped its iconic meanings not only to oppose the monarch but also to be embraced by theatergoers as an empowering emblem of non-royal English national identity. Between the first productions of Shakespeare’s R2 in 1595 and Munday, Drayton, et al.’s Old-castle in 1599,2 playwrights ceased to personify the Tower or associate it with ghosts or, as the crown did, with Caesar. Instead, they further exposed the royal ideology of the Tower as a fiction by fashioning the Tower not as a symbol of royal spiritual authority but as an icon of the English people, humanized through images of body parts, physical violence, death, and the Tower’s bloody role in forming England’s Protestant nationhood. IDENTITIES AND BODIES IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH CULTURE A distinct shift took place in the early modern “intellectual, social, psychological, and aesthetic structures that govern the generation of identities,” heightening consciousness about “the fashioning of human identity” and “the crafting of a public role.”3 Many early modern Europeans, besides reconsidering their personal selves, expanded their understandings of their collective national selves (K. Hall 27). Increased exploration, particularly of Africa and its cultures, enabled Europeans to define their own identities more precisely by contrasting their physical, geographical, and cultural characteristics with others’ (27). In fact, “Elizabethan England was extremely conscious of its developing power and identity. As an illustration, the cult of Elizabeth [ . . . ] fostered an identification of the queen’s person with the English national identity” (126), leading to popular demand for Elizabeth’s physical image. Physical images themselves changed throughout this period. Early-fifteenth-century Flemish artists had been the first to use optics—mirrors and lenses—to project the human image and create “far more modern, ‘photographic-looking’” portraits,4 which fueled the demand for royal portraiture. According to a 1563 draft proclamation, “all sorts of subjects and people, both noble and mean,” wanted to obtain and display Elizabeth’s portrait in their houses (Strong, Portraits 5, 10). Demand rose sharply in the years following her excommunication, when this practice became “a pledge of loyalty,” increasing portrait production in England (8). Another bodily image

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that had evolved through technology was northern Europe’s most popular motif “of the early modern crisis of death,” the danse macabre or Dance of Death (Neill 51). Icons of Death leading people of all walks of life in “the grim dance to the grave” continued the late-medieval tradition of vanitas and memento mori.5 Whereas Death had often been represented as a cadaver or a skull, in the mid-sixteenth century the emerging academic study of anatomy facilitated “the drawing of the human form and skeleton.”6 Accordingly, representations of the Dance appear in all sorts of early modern texts,7 including skeletons in the border “that framed the entire second half of the much reprinted ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Prayerbook,’ first published in 1569” (Neill 53–54). Elizabeth connected the physical with the spiritual in terms of her identity when she adopted the medieval “legal fiction of ‘the King’s Two Bodies.’”8 In 1558 she proclaimed, “I am but one body naturally considered, though by [God’s] permission a body politic to govern.”9 Upon becoming queen, her “very being was profoundly altered; in her mortal ‘Body natural’ was incarnated the immortal and infallible ‘Body politic’” (Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning 166). This mystical notion evoked the Christian belief that the immortal soul was joined with the physical body in life and separated from it in death (Neill 73). Although early modern philosophies of the relationship between body and soul were inconsistent, many people evidently believed in a “close relationship [ . . . ] between spiritual and physical health.”10 Fasting was believed to cleanse the body and soul, and eating, particularly Holy Communion, was thought to nourish both (Schoenfeldt 122, 96–130). Early modern people specifically believed in a close relationship between bodily fluids and the soul: “the four humoral fluids produced by the various stages of digestion—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile [ . . . ] are then dispersed throughout the body by spirits, mediators between the soul and body.”11 Similarly, “A proper death entails the loss of blood; blood is the soul, the life, it belongs to God.”12 These technological, cultural, metaphorical, juridical, and theological developments in early modern thinking about the body coincided with the scientific emergence of anatomy texts and public dissections. The notion of the spectacular body began to flourish in the early modern period, especially in Italy (Saunders and O’Malley 12). The first illustrated printed medical book, Fasciculus Medicinae, was published in Venice in 1491; Leonardo da Vinci created anatomical drawings of dissected humans; and the earliest printed anatomical treatises with illustrations drawn from dissections appeared between 1518 and 1545.13 In 1543

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Andreas Vesalius, teaching in Padua, published the first copiously illustrated anatomy, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, revolutionizing the “reading [of ] the spectacle of dissection” by the 1590s.14 In the sixteenth century anatomies were staged in the Netherlands, France, Scotland, Oxford, and Cambridge, and several public dissections of criminals’ bodies were performed annually in London.15 Bearing striking resemblances to popular drama, these shows involved ticket sales, advertisements that drew large audiences to the events, and permanent, purpose-built amphitheaters that could hold hundreds of spectators, such as the Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, where, on a stage, “the anatomist acted a drama of the human encounter with death.”16 As a site of exploration and discovery, the early modern body was compared to the universe in an archetypal microcosm/macrocosm analogy, and to another contemporary site of exploration and discovery: land.17 In the same year that Vesalius’ anatomy text mapped the human body, Copernicus published De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, displacing Ptolemy’s astronomical theory of the geocentric universe (Heckscher 52–53). In “the new spirit of direct investigation” that was “skeptical, democratic, and Protestant,” these scientific groundbreakers “helped to establish entirely new sets of gauges and devices by which macrocosm and microcosm respectively could be defined and charted.”18 In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, people generally identified the body, particularly the dissected body, with space, especially geography, cartography,19 landscapes, and even built structures: Where the dissected body was commonly visualised in the foreground of a contextualising landscape, in geographical illustrations the “body of the map” was often framed with personifications of the continents or images of inhabitants depicted in their regional costumes. [ . . . ] a reciprocity between body and space clearly appears to have affected the development of both anatomical and cartographic representations [ . . . ]. (Albano 89–90)

Because the body-space metaphor “relat[ed] the whole to its parts,” the microcosm and macrocosm “[could] indeed be conceived of as edifices—a space and a body constituted of different parts” (Albano 91, 92). Thus, the body related metaphorically to other worlds and structures, such as the kingdom, the nation, or a castle, as in the title of one of the Renaissance’s “most popular health manuals,” Thomas Elyot’s 1541 The Castel of Helth.20 Conversely, in 1624 Sir Henry Wotton compared architectural features of a building to bones and nerves (Sawday 87).

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The body was also made “culturally visible” (Albano 98) in the Tower’s dramatic representations. Like the bodies illustrated in the foregrounds of landscapes and architectural structures in sixteenth-century anatomical treatises, “so assimilated [was] the figure into the space which contain[ed] it,” corporeality was “seen both as integral to, and evocative of ”21 the Tower in the plays. In fact, the Tower’s onstage representations not only incorporated the bodies of English characters but also reflected their identities as English people, as did other architectural structures of Tudor-Stuart England. FASHIONING EARLY MODERN IDENTITIES THROUGH ARCHITECTURAL STRUCTURES In the Renaissance a strong nexus existed between the representation—the “sight, spectatorship, and display”—of architectural structures and human identity (Friedman 42–43). According to Alan G. R. Smith, “the late Elizabethan and early Stuart periods were the time of a great building and rebuilding throughout much of England of the houses of yeomen and those above them on the social scale,” whether rebuilding or updating houses through reconstruction or adding “more, and more elaborate, furniture and domestic fittings [ . . . ], including such luxuries as cushions and wall-hangings” (213). Theatergoers, especially the nobility and gentry, many of whom “built vast mansions” between 1580 and 1620, were therefore aware of cultural changes that were reshaping architectural design and room functions in country houses.22 They even may have known of the radically innovative design of Hardwick Hall, a country house built in the 1590s by Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury, or “Bess of Hardwick,” the wealthiest woman in England after the queen.23 Bess downgraded the prestige of the great hall—the symbolic center of authority in traditional households—by grouping it with serving spaces, and she placed her state rooms on the second floor, “completely removed from the orbit of the hall.”24 By rearranging the traditional layout of the “great hall, state chambers, and service areas,” then, Bess used Hardwick as a medium for representing herself as the head of her household.25 Likewise, nearly all English Renaissance playgoers would have known of Sir Thomas More and Sir Walter Ralegh, who were identified—and identified themselves—with their respective estates, Chelsea and Sherborne.26 Contemporaries also associated More and Ralegh with the architectural structure of their imprisonment, the Tower, for these prisoners had helped reshape its cultural meanings through their writing and the spectacles of their corporeal experiences there. More’s incarceration and 1535 execution on Tower Hill comprise two acts of Munday et al.’s Sir Thomas More, and

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his prose work, The History of King Richard III (c.1513), features some of the darkest events in Tower history: the deaths of Clarence, Hastings, and the two young princes.27 Similarly, in 1605 the Lieutenant of the Tower complained that Ralegh, a Tower prisoner, “shows himself upon the wall in his garden to the view of the people, who gaze upon him, and he stares at them, which he does in his cunning humour,” as a visual argument of his innocence (Calendar of the Manuscripts [ . . . ] Salisbury 17:548). And the Preface to Ralegh’s The History of the World (1614), written during his second Tower confinement,28 documents a litany of Tower imprisonments and executions in a discourse on England’s kings. Unlike the mid-sixteenth-century English chronicler Edward Hall, whose work begins at the reign of Henry IV, or the fifteenth-century chronicler Iohn Hardyng, the sixteenth-century chroniclers Polydore Vergil and Richard Grafton, and Ralegh’s contemporary antiquaries—Stow, Foxe, Camden, and Holinshed—whose histories begin with the Roman occupation or earlier,29 Ralegh’s history begins with “the violence of the Norman Conquest,” a reference to William the Conqueror, in whose reign the Tower’s construction began. Ralegh, Like More, describes the deaths of Richard III’s Tower victims—Henry VI and the two princes, as well as Clarence, Hastings, and others—though, in a brief history of the monarchy, imprisonments and executions of non-royalty would be superfluous unless the author aimed to emphasize royal misdeeds at the Tower (Ralegh 55–56, 59). This history of “the trumperies and cruelties of our owne Kings” at the Tower was, in fact, Ralegh’s self-fashioning as James’ Tower victim, eager for his freedom, though he was not released but beheaded in 1618, to become “the most revered prisoner the Tower ever held.”30 The Tower’s cultural image was undergoing radical shifts at the times of More’s and Ralegh’s imprisonments. More was imprisoned just after Henry VIII’s break with Rome, when the Tower was evolving, in terms of its dominant function, from a royal residence into a state prison for recusants and an execution site. During Ralegh’s imprisonment, by contrast, it was evolving as a tourist attraction, drawing visitors who paid to see the castle and its contents as a royal show. By contextualizing the Tower’s role in English history at these critical historical moments through their writing, More and Ralegh helped fashion the Tower as an emblem of English national identity. As these early modern English people encoded built structures with new significance, that significance, in turn, contributed to the larger selfconstruction of the English people and the construction of England’s nationhood. Even more specifically, early modern architecture was fashioning England’s Protestant national identity, as Don Wayne has read Penshurst, the fourteenth-century family estate of another famous Elizabethan courtier,

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Sir Philip Sidney (Wayne 58). Ben Jonson’s poem “To Penshurst” (1616) refashions Penshurst as not merely a house but, for the first time in the history of the English language, as a home in the modern sense, by focusing upon the dining area of the great hall and the abundance of food and fertility within Penshurst.31 “The [poem’s] final word, ‘dwells,’ [ . . . ] connotes a home, a family, the bearing and rearing of children, a natural community governed by natural law and natural rulers, and the fundamental unit of a natural social order in the state at large” (120). To Sidney’s father, Sir Henry Sidney, this natural social order included the noble Sidney family, their glorified genealogy, and “connotations of rightful inheritance” (104, 140), a Protestant ideal. Sir Henry Sidney evidently reinvigorated his family’s declining social status—in fact, refashioned the family’s identity—by refashioning Penshurst. Though the Sidneys were not wealthy in the 1580s, Sidney saved money “by maintaining the Gothic style of the original building,” thereby following the medievalist trend toward a Gothic revival in architecture and promoting his son’s image as an icon of medieval chivalry (86–88). By 1616 the Sidneys’ status and financial condition had improved (120). Moreover, Sidney reinterpreted Penshurst’s original, Gothic appearance to represent his family as emblematic of the English Protestant nation (88). Because many Elizabethans paradoxically associated their “appreciation of the Gothic” with “the nationalist character of Protestantism in England,” Penshurst, as “To Penshurst” exemplifies, celebrates “the English home, and the English family within—a Protestant family.”32 Even features of English Renaissance houses that were meant to remain concealed represented the identities and beliefs of those who occupied them. Richard Wilson tells us that Shakespeare “grew up in the labyrinth of priestholes, attic chapels and underground passages that honeycombed houses of the Warwickshire gentry” where, throughout Elizabeth’s reign and into James,’ Jesuits built “hideaways [ . . . ] to conceal priests or conspirators” (23). Recusants, forbidden from practicing their faith openly, adapted their religious traditions and their built structures in opposition to the national religion and the crown. Thus, the representation of early modern English architectural structures, in turn, refashioned early modern selves and contributed to building the nation’s complex identity. Like Elizabeth Talbot at Hardwick Hall, Sir Thomas More at Chelsea, Sir Walter Ralegh at Sherborne, More and Ralegh at the Tower, and the Sidneys at Penshurst, England’s recusants exemplified the power of built structures in early modern self-fashioning and English nation-building. This connection between the representation of built structures and human identity was, in fact, recursive, refashioning personal identities and breathing life and personality into the architecture itself.

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AUDIENCE REACTIONS TO MURDER AND EXECUTION SCENES IN THE TOWER PLAYS In the same way, the Tower plays represent English nationhood and humanize the Tower, especially in murder and execution scenes set at the Tower. But how were early modern theatergoers likely to have responded to these scenes? Spectator reactions to actual executions in Renaissance England are the best available source for extrapolating playgoer responses to such dramatizations. Tower playwrights may have composed execution scenes from personal experience, having witnessed these spectacles in London as a form of popular entertainment and seen the severed heads of traitors displayed upon London Bridge’s Great Stone Gate as “a major tourist attraction.”33 Even if they did not attend public executions, authors such as Shakespeare and Heywood must have read about them in the English chronicles and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, “the popular sixteenth-century encyclopedia of torture, persecution, and violent death” (Cunningham 213), as their plays graphically represent the legendary deaths of English kings, princes, and nobles at the Tower. Literary critics and historians have compared execution scaffolds to anatomy amphitheaters and playhouses, each exhibiting “textual, architectural, and performative dimensions.”34 A successful execution, anatomy, or play “depended largely on the size and on the sympathetic response of its audience” (Heckscher 28). Tudor-Stuart executions were indeed theatrical, employing the scaffold as a stage of public spectacle that usually followed an established sequence of rituals designed to assert and strengthen the monarch’s power over subjects’ bodies and discourage criminal activity by spectators.35 Like plays, executions were “performed in public places, often on raised platforms for all to see,” and like playgoers, “participants on both sides of these juridical dramas were profoundly aware of their public function.”36 The Tudor government stage-managed every aspect of trials and execution ceremonies, from the construction of death penalty charges, to trial records, to the spectacles’ locations, to the final words and actions of the condemned.37 Similarly, condemned individuals often “dramatized” their own executions, being “conscious of playing a part” (Rowse, The Cultural Achievement 1). Though recusants sometimes delivered “martyrological performance[s],” from the time of the English Reformation, in most cases for which evidence exists, condemned people accepted their assigned role, confessing their transgressions at great length in conventional “last dying speeches.”38 Spectators too performed a scripted role in execution ceremonies, officials encouraging them “to share a common gratification in the admiration of justice.”39 Spectator responses included “derision, silent sympathy, gasps of horror, cheers,

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[and] applause—at appropriate moments” (Owens 121). Early modern England’s preoccupation with the human body was nowhere more tangible than at public executions, which enacted violence upon, fragmented, and dissected criminalized bodies within the gaze of attentive crowds—crowds that included many playgoers.40 Thousands of death sentences took place in sixteenth-century England—roughly 72,000 in the reign of Henry VIII alone—and forty-six were staged on Tower Hill, where execution spectator crowds of thousands were probably largest.41 Even so, accounts of the fourteen Babington plotters’ executions in 1586 in Holborn (Holinshed 4:916) provide the clearest evidence of crowds’ reactions to executions near the time of the Tower plays’ original performances. These narratives emphasize the event’s dramatic nature and the spectators’ role in the production. On September 20 the first seven conspirators were “drawne from the [ . . . ] tower through the streets of London” to “a scaffold [ . . . ] and a paire of gallows of extraordinarie hight,” the “obiects of terror [ . . . ] in euerie beholders eie.” A horde of people “of each sex and age” had crowded into London to view the “publike spectacle” of these important executions “with earnest eie [ . . . ] and purposing to tarrie out the verie last act.” In fact, “the waies were pestered with people so multiplied, and they thronged and ouerran one another for hast, contending to the place of death for the aduantage of the ground where to stand, see, and heare what was said and done” (914–16). And their experience was intensely graphic, epitomized in the description of the first execution: Ballard the preest [ . . . ] was the first that was hanged, who being cut downe [ . . . ] was dismembred, his bellie ript up, his bowels and traitorous heart taken out and throwne into the fire, his head also (seuered from his shoulders) was set on a short stake vpon the top of the gallows, and the trunke of his body quartered and imbrued in his owne bloud, wherewith the executioners hands were bathed, and some of the standers by (but to their great loathing, as not able for their liues to avoid it, such was the throng) besprinkled. (916)

Despite the gory spectacle, the crowd watched all seven executions in their entirety, and even afterwards, women and children apparently gazed at the horrific scene with satisfaction: the fields were frequented all that daie of the weaker sex, as womenkind, with the yoonger and tenderer sort: who albeit they could not with

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wished opportunitie see the execution of these traitors, when it was at the quickest: yet they satisfied their eies with beholding the fier wherein their bowels were burned, and the scaffold stained with the tincture of their bloud, [ . . . ] but all giuing God thanks, that the commonwealth was discharged of such putrified members. (917–18)

This account exemplifies that, despite the spectators’ compassion for the convicted, especially during Tichborne’s last dying speech (Holinshed 4:917), many took pleasure in viewing the dispensation of justice as they considered the executions to fit the crime. The crowd observed: their traitorous harts burned, and their bodilesse heads aduanced, to the view and comfort of manie thousands of people: a happie sight for the quietnesse and safetie of hir highnesse, a generall comfort to all good subiects, and a fearefull example to all conspirators. [ . . . ] the odiousnesse of their treasons was so settled in euerie mans heart, as there appeared no sadnesse or alteration among the people, at the mangling and quartering of their bodies. Yea the whole assemblie without anie signe of lamentation stedfastlie beheld the spectacle. (915–16)

George Whetstone’s The Censure of a Loyall Subject (1587), drawing heavily on the above account in Holinshed’s Chronicles by the eye-witness chronicler Abraham Fleming, similarly conveys only affirmative reactions to the violent sights: “the whole multitude [ . . . ] greedylye behelde the spectacle.”42 Nevertheless, both Fleming and Whetstone indicate that the second group of seven conspirators, put to death the following day, were executed with more empathy than the first group: “The first seuen were [ . . . ] drawne to the place of execution, there to be hanged till they were halfe dead, their bowels to be burnt before their faces, &c. [ . . . ] but the other seuen were so fauorablie vsed, as they hoong vntill they were euen altogether dead, before they suffered the rest of their iudgement.”43 Whetstone attributes this commuted sentence to the queen and state’s compassion (A3v). Juliet Wightman conversely has argued that some spectators must have expressed disgust at the carnage of the first seven executions, for “in response to public reaction, the second seven were treated less severely” (60). Considering that the crowd probably included Catholics who were horrified by the executions of a priest and as many as thirteen other coreligionists, and considering the Tudor state’s censorship of Holinshed44 and the Protestant bias in Fleming’s rhetoric, Wightman’s analysis is compelling. Why did some spectators find these killings to be gruesome while others contentedly witnessed the executions of “most heinous malefactors,” whose

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deaths they considered to be “deserued” (Holinshed 4:919–20)? When the condemned individuals were Catholics, Protestant spectators’ satisfaction stemmed, in part, from the “equivalence of popery with treason,” which a traitor’s death by hanging, drawing, and quartering implied (Lake and Questier 72). In such cases the execution was primarily “a call to carnival, [ . . . ] a festival. [ . . . ] Seldom did the spectators record revulsion” (Cunningham 213). However, at executions and most probably also at plays, condemned figures who inspired spectators to identify with them as “one of us” suggested “alternative ways of viewing their deaths and destroy[ed] the sense of difference needed to justify their torture.”45 HUMANIZING THE TOWER THROUGH THE BODY Accordingly, the Tower plays that represent murders and executions within the Tower walls develop the characters marked for death in ways that would have fostered audience sympathy for them. Rather than reproducing the bloodbaths that early modern playgoers could see at executions on Tower Hill or at Tyburn, Smithfield, or Holborn, playwrights fashioned condemned characters as victims and developed them as people whom audiences came to know and with whom they could empathize. Moreover, because theatrical and other artistic representation “diminishes and weakens the authority of what is represented,” driving Elizabeth, for instance, to regulate her portraiture as well as popular drama, “the modes of representation in the Elizabethan [and earlyStuart] popular theater refuse[d] to privilege what [was] represented” (Kastan 112–16, 119). Instead, execution scenes set at the Tower privileged the victims’ viewpoints, uniting audiences in compassion for them. This compassion, it seems, extended beyond empathy for the victims, to commiseration, as the Tower playwrights graphically represented images of physical violence, body parts, and bodily functions—especially the act of seeing, which engaged spectators in these scenes and even heightened their awareness of their own bodies during the performances. These images rarely if ever shed positive light on the monarch; rather, they appealed to audiences to identify with the victims and thus to oppose the monarch or future monarch behind the executions. This is the case for all of the Tower murders and executions represented in the Richard III plays, as well as Henry VI’s murder in Shakespeare’s 3H6. In fact, Shakespeare was the only known playwright to dramatize the killings of Henry VI and George, Duke of Clarence, and his is the most graphic treatment of Hastings’ offstage beheading, perhaps because in the early 1590s Shakespeare was strongly motivated to expose royal oppression at the Tower as his relatives had experienced it.46

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When Richard, Duke of Gloucester, enters the Tower to kill Henry VI in 3H6, their conversation about Richard’s earlier murder of Henry’s adolescent son evokes audience pathos for the victim and brings physical violence to the forefront (5.6.1–58), as does the sight of Henry’s murder. For the play’s original audiences who beheld the stabbing of this childlike character, whom they had come to know through the course of three plays, the situation must have engendered a communal sense of compassion for the victim. Gloucester’s ruthlessness and religious metaphors are foils to Henry’s sincere piety: Gloucester:

I’ll hear no more. Die, prophet, in thy speech. Stabs him. For this, amongst the rest, was I ordained.

King Henry: Ay, and for much more slaughter after this. O, God forgive my sins, and pardon thee! Dies. (5.6.57–60)

Additional aspects of this murder that emphasize the victim’s body and call for audience sympathy are Richard’s speech about his victim’s blood on the ground and on his sword; his words to Henry’s corpse, “Down, down to hell, and say I sent thee thither,” as he stabs the body again; his rant about his own unnatural body, Machiavellian mind, and disconnection from society; his apostrophic words to his next four victims; and his mistreatment of his victim’s body and rejoicing in his death: “I’ll throw thy body in another room/ And triumph, Henry, in thy day of doom. Exit [with the body].”47 Playgoers must have experienced the intense sympathy this scene generates for Henry as if they were at the Tower itself, where the scene takes place. Londoners surely realized that the stage represented a fraction of the Tower’s size, a fact Gloucester emphasizes in his reference to “another room.” Playgoers also may have recognized that the expanse of the open-air theater was not unlike the Tower complex with its sprawling outdoor spaces. Associating the playhouse with the Tower would have enabled theatergoers to transfer their empathy for Henry from the stage to the actual Tower. Playgoers’ feelings of sympathy and compassion—as though at the Tower, represented onstage—thus softened the Tower’s image and made that refashioned, humanized castle, situated within an English history play, a similarly refashioned part of their experience of England’s heritage. Shakespeare’s R3 evokes so much sympathy for George, Duke of Clarence, that his death scene in the Tower mocks the actual execution rituals of its time. In fact, although the First Quarto’s stage directions label Clarence’s two executioners as “murtherers,” both the character tags and Richard’s soliloquy identify them as “executioners.”48 Clarence’s

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confession of his sins to his Keeper as he recounts his dream, his last dying speech and prayer, and his long conversation with his executioners (1.4.1–270) demonstrate the conventions of early modern executions, with which playgoers would have been familiar. And yet, as the play’s original theatergoers viewed this scene, they came to know Clarence and the tenuous facts of the case against him, and would have developed empathy for him, leading them to judge his execution as an unjustifiable murder. While the scene encouraged audiences to view the execution as unjust, as entertainment it also must have pleased them, and the combination of these affective experiences with a visual and spatial representation of the Tower onstage likewise humanized the actual Tower. Seeing and hearing Clarence’s dramatized stabbing, moreover, would have strengthened the affective community of playgoers and their sense of personal connection with the Tower, for it afforded them the privilege of witnessing a famously secret execution that had taken place, according to the chronicles, in the privacy of a building within the castle. By the 1590s it had been about forty years since any execution had taken place within the Tower walls, so beholding this historical moment, even in a play, was a novel experience for most theatergoers. And visualizing the event on the stage—this window into England’s past—at the Tower, a familiar structure that had witnessed, sheltered, and concealed the actual event, united each audience in the shared experience and represented the Tower to them as an emblem of their collective history. The representation of Clarence’s execution inside the Tower was a fresh experience even for playgoers who remembered seeing or hearing about Lady Jane Grey’s 1554 execution or earlier ones in the relative privacy of the Tower’s curtain walls.49 The first of those historic executions takes place offstage in this play, with a similarly humanizing effect on the Tower. Hastings’ loyalty to King Edward’s sons, his satisfaction over his enemies’ executions, and the injustice of his entrapment during the Tower council meeting and his premeditated slaughter develop his humanity.50 In the light of the compassion his death evokes, seeing his dismembered head brought onto the stage (3.5.22–23) must have been disturbing even for playgoers who had attended actual beheadings. By humanizing execution victims at the Tower and connecting the Tower with their mutilated bodies, Shakespeare humanized the Tower itself, refashioning it to embody the English people whose lives had been cut short there. These experiences familiarized English history and its characters through their connection to a familiar landmark named for the city that most of London’s playgoers called home.

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Although P. E. Curnow laments that the history of the Bloody Tower, where the princes’ murder traditionally took place, dominates the popular perception of the Tower of London to this day,51 the dramatic passages of greatest interest for defining the Tower’s humanized identity are those surrounding the princes’ murders in the four Richard III plays and a later dramatic reworking of the princes’ story. These passages often draw playgoers’ attention to their own bodies while strongly associating the princes, as royal historical figures and actual English people, with the Tower, which would have invited the play’s first theatergoers to identify not only with the princes but also with the Tower. In Richardus Tertius Tyrell describes the offstage murders as they take place and shares with Brackenbury, the Lieutenant of the Tower, Richard’s intense physical reactions upon hearing that Brackenbury has refused to kill the princes (Legge p.213, 215). Dighton’s confirmation of the princes’ death would have raised playgoers’ awareness of their own breathing: “Both lifeless boys are smothered. [ . . . ] After their faces were covered by feather pillows and their windways blocked by mattresses, soon both were deprived of air and smothered since they could not breathe” (p.217, 219). And if early theatergoers were not yet breathless, the sight of the dead princes’ bodies would have made them so: “See, both are dead and stretched out on the bed. [A curtain is briefly opened to reveal the dead boys.]” (p.219). Brackenbury bemoans the injustice of their murders in bodily terms with emphasis on the eyes, drawing attention to the object of the audience’s gaze: “Do I see the princes’ livid bodies? Now, alas, this bed is made a funeral-couch by this infanticide. What harsh man can restrain his tears in the face of such evils?” (p.219). At Tyrell’s order the princes’ bodies are to be buried in the Tower, not in a chapel but within the architecture itself, becoming a part of the Tower’s fabric: “Bury them under the lowest stair of this gloomy dungeon. Let a sufficiently deep-dug grave hide the brothers, then let them quickly be covered with a heap of rocks” (p.219). While More and Edward Hall wrote that a priest later moved the bodies and had them interred at an unknown location, in this play the princes’ bodies remain at the Tower, its walls now “tempered” not merely “with the blood of beasts”52 but with the bodies of English royalty. True Tragedie R3 accords the Tower the prominence that its role in the play demands, emphasizing the connection between the princes and the Tower to the extent that both—and specifically the murders—are named in the play’s subtitle: Wherein Is Showne [ . . . ] the Smothering of the Two Yooung Princes in the Tower [ . . . ]. As that scene approaches, suspense builds. Londoners state their expectation of the murders; Terrill discourses graphically with the murderers about whether it is best to shoot the princes, take

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them by the heels and beat their brains against the walls, cut their throats, or smother them; the princes express to Myles Forest, a conspirator, their fear of being killed in the Tower; and Iack Denten reveals his misgivings about the murder he is about to commit.53 The princes go to sleep, and the “bloodie deed” takes place onstage, appealing to playgoers’ senses of sight, hearing, and touch: For.

I heare they sleep, and sleepe sweet Princes, neuer wake no more, for you haue seene the last light in this world.

Iack.

Come presse them downe [ . . . ]. But maister Forest now they are dead what shall we do with them? (True Tragedie R3 p.44)

The murderers’ dialogue indicates that, in this play, the killings occur onstage. Renaissance theatergoers may have felt physically and emotionally close to the Tower as they witnessed these represented deaths and reacted with pity and grief for the helpless princes, whose English bodies again become part of the Tower itself, being buried “at the heape of stones at the staire foote.”54 This conflation of sensations and emotions with images of bodies and architectural features—“foote” resonating as a part of the Tower’s structure as well as a human body part—may have moved playgoers to think of the Tower as alive. Additionally, this scene, like Clarence’s execution scene, enabled playgoers to witness an episode of their nation’s history that purportedly had taken place within the extreme privacy of a building within the Tower complex. Experiencing this unique dramatization of the princes’ murders would have given audiences a sense of having eye-witnessed one of English history’s most legendary events at the Tower, as if in real time. Like the subtitle of True Tragedie R3, the First Quarto title of Shakespeare’s R3 emphasizes the significance of the murders in the Tower: The Tragedy of King Richard the third. Containing, His treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittiefull murther of his iunocent nephews [ . . . ]. In this play Tyrrel’s description of “the tyrannous and bloody act” treats the princes’ murder as a defining moment in English history: “The most arch deed of piteous massacre/ That ever yet this land was guilty of ” (4.3.1, 2–3). It intermingles emotionally evocative images of violent death or “ruthless butchery” with body parts or bodily fluids, specifically blood and tears, in passages such as “fleshed villains, bloody dogs” and “Wept like to children in their deaths’ sad story”; and against the foil of the loving murder victims [ . . . ] girdling one another Within their alabaster innocent arms.

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Their lips were four red roses on a stalk, Which in their summer beauty kissed each other.55

To early modern playgoers, references to blood and tears connoted physical pain and the sadness of weeping eyes as well as the physiological theory of the humors. Tyrrel again invokes the eyes, drawing playgoers into the scene, when he assures the king that he has seen the princes dead. His final detail, that the chaplain of the Tower has buried the princes (4.3.29–30), suggests that their bodies may still be buried—incorporated—within the Tower itself. Each of these plays develops the princes’ characters more fully than the last, inviting audiences to know and pity the boys more upon their murder, and Heywood’s 2E4 outdoes them all.56 Just before the princes are killed, they appear onstage in the Tower “in their gowns and caps, unbuttond, and untrust” or untied, undressed, symbolizing their vulnerable bodies and the nakedness of death.57 The princes’ appearance in their nightgowns emphasizes their humanity, inviting playgoers to feel as close to these royal characters as to the children in their own households. This intimate scene, in which Prince Edward cares for his younger brother’s physical well-being, epitomizes the princes’ love for each other, their pious innocence, and their frightful premonition of death, and viewing it would have stirred Renaissance playgoers’ compassion: Ed.

[ . . . ] You told me your head aked.

Ric.

Indeed it does, my Lord feele with your hands How hot it is. He laies his hand on his brothers head.

Ed.

Indeed you haue caught cold, With sitting yesternight to heare me read. I pray thee go to bed, sweet Dick, poore little heart. [...] For you are sick; and so am not I.

Ric.

Oh, lord, methinks this going to our bed, How like it is to going to our graue.

Ed.

I pray thee, do not speake of graues sweet heart. Indeed thou frightest me.

Ric.

Why, my lord brother, did not our tutor teach vs, That when at night we went vnto our bed,

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The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama We still should think we went vnto our graue. Ed.

Yes, that’s true, That we should do as eu’ry Christian ought, To be prepared to die at euery hour, (p.153–54)

The princes, “heauy” with sleepiness, kneel in prayer as “solemn musicke” is played, intensifying playgoers’ sensory experience and arousing their pity: Thomas Wright explained in 1604, “such is the nature of our soules, as musicke hath a certaine proportionate sympathie with them.”58 Richard notices that Edward has bled “two drops,” blood being a bodily sign of Christian redemption, and the boys read a Bible verse about death before exiting to go to sleep.59 These passages therefore appealed to Christian playgoers’ religious sensibilities, drawing audience compassion for the princes on multiple levels, especially physically, as the acts of kneeling, bleeding, reading, dying, and sleeping all emphasize the princes’ physical humanity at the Tower. The double murder takes place offstage while Tirill’s soliloquy deems it “the foulest murder/ That euer was committed since the world”; describing it with abundant body imagery that personifies the Tower, probably for the last time in the Tower plays; and connects the scene not only to the princes’ and conspirators’ bodies but also to visual and auditory images (p.154), subtly involving theatergoers in the scene. Again pushing playgoers to associate the Tower with the human form, the two murderers enter at separate doors, each with the body of a dead prince under his arm, and leave the corpses onstage to be buried by “the priest here in the Tower” (p.155). The powerful emotions and physical sensations this scene would have evoked in the play’s original audiences must have been coupled with a feeling of owning their national history, having attended a representation of the event, as if at the Tower, making the event and its location a part of their personal histories and thereby connecting the Tower’s history with the history of the English people. The last Tower play, Ford’s Perkin Warbeck (c.1625–34), re-emphasizes the Tower’s connection to the human body and develops the Tower’s lore through the legend of the princes. Although, in “a most bloody purchase,” Richard III was believed to have “Forced [the princes] to a violent grave,” Perkin Warbeck, a pretender to the throne fourteen years later, claims to be “The new-revivèd York, Edward’s second son,/ Murdered long since i’ th’ Tower—he lives again.”60 Warbeck describes the murder to James IV of Scotland, his language rife with visceral imagery:

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Edward the Fifth, our brother, in his tragedy Quenched their hot thirst of blood, whose hire to murder Paid them their wages of despair and horror; The softness of my childhood smiled upon The roughness of their task, and robbed them farther Of hearts to dare or hands to execute. Great king, they spared my life, the butchers spared it; Returned the tyrant, my unnatural uncle, A truth of my dispatch; I was conveyed With secrecy and speed to Tournay; (2.1.55–68)

As these bodily images, inscribed into the princes’ story, would have humanized the Tower for this later audience, so would Henry VII’s order that his prisoners be conveyed to the Tower. By contrast with Henry’s rough order that the traitor Audley “Be drawn upon an hurdle from the Newgate/ To Tower Hill in his own coat of arms/ Painted on paper, with the arms reversed,/ Defaced and torn; there [ . . . to] lose his head” (3.1.95–98), it is with care for Warbeck and his men’s bodies that Henry orders them conveyed to the Tower, reinforcing the physical connection between the Tower and English physical selves: Urswick, command the dukeling and these fellows To Digby, the lieutenant of the Tower: With safety let them be conveyed to London. It is our pleasure no uncivil outrage, Taunts or abuse be suffered to their persons; They shall meet fairer law than they deserve. (5.2.120–25)

Warbeck, never wavering from his act or belief that he is the Duke of York, refers to his prison as “The Tower—/ Our childhood’s dreadful nursery!” (5.2.128–29), identifying personally with the Tower’s history. Earlier Richard III plays strongly identify the Tower with the princes’ and playgoers’ bodies, similarly humanizing the castle. And, drama being “the most social of all the arts” because it takes place “in or around a community” (Mullaney 7), the Tower’s representation in Perkin Warbeck, onstage at the enclosed Cockpit or Phoenix, surrounded by a relatively small community of London playgoers, humanized the Tower yet again. In fact, all twenty-four Tower plays represent the Tower alongside or through the human body.61 The first known play to represent the Tower spatially onstage, Legge’s Richardus Tertius, and two subsequent Richard III

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plays, Shakespeare’s R3 and Heywood’s 2E4, evoke body parts, bodily functions, violence, and death, roughly one hundred times each, all in scenes set at the Tower, in verbal representations of the Tower, or in allusions to murders and executions represented there.62 Similarly, Sir Thomas More, a play that culminates in an execution on Tower Hill, packs about fifty such references into just the final two acts.63 For example, during More’s imprisonment in the Tower, the steward, Catesby, foreshadows his master’s violent execution with five corporeal and deathly references: Now we are masterless, though he may live So long as please the king. But law hath made him A dead man to the world, and given the axe his head, But his sweet soul to live among the saints. (5.2.35–38, emphasis added)

Early-seventeenth-century Tower plays likewise surround the castle with bodily imagery. Elizabeth’s history, the Tower’s history, and the history of the English people coalesce in Heywood’s 1 If You Know Not Me, which represents the human body about seventy-five times in scenes concerning Elizabeth’s Tower imprisonment.64 And the last Tower play, Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, contains over one hundred corporeal images in passages involving the Tower.65 Although the early modern English population was divided into a hierarchy of social degrees, when they came together as theatergoers (Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London 58), they blended, in several ways, into affective communities. First, playgoers of lowly status sat among their social betters who had paid the same admission price (Orgel 8–11), blurring the hierarchy that differentiated them. Second, all English theatergoers shared their nation’s past as well as geography, which the Tower plays represented, so for Londoners, for whom the Tower was a major landmark and a prominent feature of their city’s topography and history, the Tower’s onstage representations would have registered an even stronger sense of community with their fellow playgoers. Third, many playgoers likely experienced strong affective responses to the representation of murders and unjustified executions, especially when the victims were children and rightful heirs to the English throne. And fourth, every theatergoer had a mortal body that was susceptible to physical pain and the “irresistibly common fate” of death (Neill 67), which the Tower plays also represented. Death being “at once personal and common,” plays that represented murders and executions at the Tower embodied “the universal leveling of mortality” that “strip[ped theatergoers] of identity” (85) and simultaneously offered them a collective national identity embodied in the Tower.

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HUMANIZING THE TOWER IN THE 1590s: PERSONIFICATION, GHOSTS, AND JULIUS CAESAR Representing executions at the Tower was only the Tower playwrights’ most obvious strategy for humanizing the castle. The Richard III plays that were produced in London, which predominantly shaped the Tower’s cultural meaning in the 1590s, exemplify the subtler dramatic conventions that humanized the Tower in that decade: personification, the identification of the Tower with ghosts, and the association of the Tower with the life of Julius Caesar. Shakespeare and Heywood, who collectively wrote or revised nearly two-thirds of the thirteen Tower plays of the 1590s,66 were the only playwrights whose staged Tower plays personified the Tower.67 For instance, in Shakespeare’s R3, near the beginning of the decade, Queen Elizabeth, whose sons are imprisoned in the Tower, stands before the Tower and addresses it apostrophically: Stay, yet look back with me unto the Tower. Pity, you ancient stones, those tender babes Whom envy hath immured within your walls— Rough cradle for such little pretty ones! Rude ragged nurse, old sullen playfellow For tender princes, use my babies well! So foolish sorrows bids your stones farewell. (4.1.97–103)

Similarly, most probably at the decade’s end, in Heywood’s 2E4 Tirill personifies the Tower after the princes’ murder, going so far as to represent the Tower’s horrified reaction to the event: The very senseless stones here in the walles Breake out in teares but to behold the fact. [...] Methinks the Towre should rent down from the toppe, To let the heauen look on this monstrous deede.68

Further humanizing the Tower, the Richard III plays by Shakespeare, Heywood, and an unknown author were the only Tower plays to connect the castle with ghosts. These plays, in fact, introduced the ghosts of Tower victims into the Richard III legend, for ghosts—not devils or “furies” but spirits of deceased people—first appear in these three plays and not in previ-

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ous histories of Richard III.69 And in English Renaissance culture, “There [was] a huge difference between the spirits of departed humans [ . . . ] and immortal spirits [ . . . ]. The term ‘ghost’ refers here to the dead that return from their graves to bring perplexing messages to the living.”70 As shown in Chapter Four, in True Tragedie R3 a ghost requests revenge for the Tower murders, and Richard dreams of his Tower victims’ ghosts “gaping for reuenge” (p.3, 61). Additionally, Shakespeare situates Clarence’s ghost in the Tower in R3: York:

I shall not sleep in quiet at the Tower.

Richard: Why, what should you fear? York:

Marry, my uncle Clarence’ angry ghost. My grandam told me he was murdered there. (3.1.42–45)

Shakespeare also develops Richard’s five Tower victims’ ghosts as characters—on All Souls Night.71 Heywood’s 2E4 most probably closed the decade with Tirill’s implication that corpses, buried within the Tower walls, would avenge the princes: “Methinkes the bodies lying dead in graues,/ Should rise and cry against vs.”72 And in the same play Heywood dramatizes Frier Anselme’s ghost blaming Doctor Shaw for his knowledge that could have prevented “How many mischiefes [ . . . ]/ First, wronged Clarence drowned in the Tower;/ Next Edwards children murder’d in the Tower” (p.163). Throughout the 1590s, again with Shakespeare and Heywood leading the way and especially in the Richard III plays, the Tower’s anachronistic representations as Julius Caesar’s Tower connected the built structure with Caesar’s life, although Elizabethans knew the Tower had been constructed in William the Conqueror’s reign.73 For instance, in Shakespeare’s R3, when Prince Edward is told he will lodge there, he asks Buckingham to confirm that Julius Caesar built the Tower (3.1.68–78). The prince then describes Caesar’s fame in life and death (3.1.84–88), humanizing the castle through Caesar’s vitality. Other Tower plays of the 1590s continued this trend,74 probably concluding with Heywood’s 2E4, in which Gloster claims that Caesar built the Tower and kept his court there.75 By associating the Tower with Caesar, however, playwrights implicitly promoted the royal ideology that the Tower symbolized royal power and authority, even if the passages were critical of the crown. The mere mention of Caesar celebrated England’s Roman heritage, as when Legge compared Gloucester to Claudius, the Roman emperor who conquered Britain.76 Identifying Caesar’s name with the Tower, then, evoked

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England’s connection to Roman Britain and the English monarch’s connection—through the Tower—to the emperor whose name was synonymous with state power. In fact, the Queen in Shakespeare’s R2 calls the Tower not only “Julius Caesar’s” but also “the model where old Troy did stand,” reaching even deeper into “historical legend [ . . . ] to the mythical foundation of Britain by Brutus,” thereby representing the Tower as “a product of the heroic patriarchal past.”77 HUMANIZING THE TOWER AFTER 1599: THE HUMAN BODY AND THE ENGLISH REFORMATION All twenty-four Tower plays represent the Tower/body relationship; however, after 1595–99, a shift emerged in the ways the playwrights humanized the Tower. Playwrights, perhaps realizing that the crown was appropriating their dramatic conventions for fashioning the Tower, abruptly changed the course of the castle’s onstage representations. After 1595–99 no new Tower play personified the Tower or identified it with ghosts or Caesar, though even the last Tower play to represent the castle in these residual ways, Heywood’s 2E4, incorporated all three devices.78 And when those fantastic representations of the Tower were stripped away, what remained were images of the Tower and English nationhood that were grounded in playgoers’ reality—in English blood, English bodies, and the history of the English Reformation. Eighteen of the Tower plays, or 75% of them, connect the Tower and English spirituality.79 In some cases, general religiosity is represented with regard to the castle, especially allusions to the belief in the immortal soul and other broad, Christian references to the afterlife (J. Clark 4). For instance, in Sir Thomas More, the Bishop of Rochester discourses on his soul as he is imprisoned in the Tower, though the political nature of the charge against him is not addressed (4.3). Similarly, as More’s execution on Tower Hill approaches, Catesby says More’s soul will “live among the saints”; More says he has never entered the Tower with a clearer conscience; and the Lieutenant of the Tower tells More, “God and his blessed angels be about ye.”80 Though Renaissance playgoers would have known More and Fisher to be Catholics, the characters’ legendary Catholicity is minimized, their beheadings not dramatized, and their severed heads not exhibited, most likely to avoid representing their Catholic martyrdom (Owens 138) and to accentuate their humanity and thus their relevance for all English theatergoers. In other cases, conflict between the church and state is represented at the Tower.81 To illustrate, in 1H6 the Bishop of Winchester, aiming to “sit at chiefest stern

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of public weal,” holds the Tower against the protector and keeps him from surveying the Tower’s artillery.82 All eight of the Tower plays that fall into these two sub-categories were originally composed and/or first performed between 1579 and c.1599, representing just over half of the fourteen Tower plays dated within these two decades.83 Thus, until c.1599, Tower plays represented the castle’s connection to religion in English culture about as often as not, and when it did, the connection had little, if anything, to do with the Reformation. But from 1599 to c.1628–29, nearly all of the Tower plays connect the Tower to religion, specifically the Reformation,84 strengthening the bond between English playgoers’ personal identities and the Tower and thereby further humanizing the actual Tower independently of the crown. For instance, at productions of Munday, Drayton, et al.’s Old-castle (1599), which was revived at the Rose in 1602, Protestant playgoers, who considered Sir John Oldcastle to be a martyr, would have identified with Old-castle, “a chiefe” of those fifteenth-century English who anachronistically “give themselves the name of Protestants.”85 These lines precede a passage that ties Old-castle’s Protestant identity—and his name—to the Tower. Here, before Old-castle’s imprisonment and escape from the Tower, the Catholic Sir John, Parson of Wrotham, points out the name’s aptness: Old-castle, he says, is “like a castle” that “encompasse[s]” the Protestant people “within his walls” (ll.180–82). And in the play, the castle that later encompasses Oldcastle within its walls is the Tower, that symbol of Elizabethan Protestantism. This extended metaphor, therefore, epitomizes the recursiveness of the Tower’s relationship to the English people: Rather than personify the Tower, the parson dehumanizes Old-castle into an architectural structure, and a castle at that. “But till that castle be subverted quite,” the parson continues, “We ne’re shall be at quiet in the realme” (ll.183–84). As the parson argues that Oldcastle must be stopped in order to quiet his Protestant followers, the original audience’s many Protestants, victors of the Reformation, having just been linked through Old-castle to the Tower itself, could have read the Tower as a castle that Catholics wished to subvert and thus felt protective of it as an icon of their Protestant national identity.86 Four early-seventeenth-century Tower plays epitomize the integration of English corporeal and Protestant identity into the Tower’s popular cultural meaning—and epitomize the humanizing effect of that identity upon the castle itself. In Cromwell (c.1599–1602), a play that “depends on Cromwell’s death” (4.Chorus) in plot and title, the Tower, the site where English Catholicism and Protestantism clash, embodies Cromwell’s physical and spiritual—specifically Protestant—identity. Bishop Gardiner, determined to

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punish Cromwell for abolishing the monasteries, plots with another Catholic, Norfolk, to arrest Cromwell and send him to the Tower, where Gardiner, in his own words, will “shake [Cromwell’s] head” (4.5). In a room in the Tower, Cromwell entreats both his Son and—through multiple appeals to the sense of sight—the audience to watch his execution, which he frames in bodily expressions as a martyrdom: Crom.

I die for treason, boy, and never knew it. Yet let thy faith as spotless be as mine, And Cromwell’s virtues in thy face shall shine: Come, go along, and see me leave my breath, And I’ll leave thee upon the floor of death.

Son.

O father, I shall die to see that wound, Your blood being spilt will make my heart to swound.

Crom.

How, boy! not dare to look upon the axe? How shall I do then to have my head struck off? Come on, my child, and see the end of all; And after say, that Gardiner was my fall. (5.5)

In this humanizing scene that must have evoked considerable audience pathos, Cromwell invites Protestant playgoers to see his beheading and thus to witness the Tower’s role in England’s bloody struggle to become a Protestant nation. Act Five contains many other references to human physiology and Protestantism that relate to the Tower.87 To illustrate, the language of death blends with the language of medicine, both physical and spiritual, in Cromwell’s reply to the Executioner or “death’s-man,” who has requested his forgiveness: “Even with my soul. Why man, thou art my doctor,/ And brings me precious physic for my soul” (5.5). Physiological and spiritual metaphors continue even as Cromwell is beheaded. An officer brings Cromwell’s severed head onstage, announcing, “Here is the head of the deceased Cromwell”; and Cromwell’s burial is discussed: “Pray thee go hence, and bear his head away/ Unto his body; inter them both in clay” (5.5). Even Sir Ralph Sadler’s ahistorical entry with a reprieve from King Henry combines corporeality and spirituality: Sad. Bed. Sad.

How now my lords? What, is lord Cromwell dead? Lord Cromwell’s body now doth want a head. O God, a little speed had sav’d his life.

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My conscience now tells me this deed was ill. Would Christ that Cromwell were alive again!

Nor.

Come let us to the king, who, well I know, Will grieve for Cromwell, that his death was so. (5.5)

Although relations between England’s Protestants and Catholics had grown more heated throughout the 1590s (Collinson, “Ecclesiastical Vitriol” 154), these Catholic characters’ heartache for their executed Protestant victim may have drawn sympathy even from Catholic playgoers, urging them to join their Protestant counterparts in sympathy for the martyred Cromwell and uniting an audience of disparate faiths into one body of English people who shared a common history and national identity. Here, at the play’s conclusion, the symbol of that identity—the Tower—is represented spatially onstage, and it likewise would have been visible to many playgoers as they walked home from the Globe,88 viewing the actual Tower from across the Thames or from London Bridge. The sight of the Tower after such a performance must have been striking, and playgoers may have recalled the play, and the emotions it evoked, whenever they saw the Tower thereafter. Catholic characters again behead Protestant ones at the Tower in Dekker and Webster’s 1602 Wyat. When Iane Grey and Guilford Dudley learn that they are to lodge at the Tower as royalty, they evoke the Dance of Death, “leading the [others] towards their common end amid the heap of indistinguishable skulls”89 in “A dead march, and passe round the stage”: [Gui.90] The Towre will be a place of ample state, Some lodgings in it, will like dead mens sculls, Remember vs of frailty. Gui. We are led with pompe to prison, O propheticke soule, Lo we ascend into our chaires of State, Like funeral Coffins, in some funeral Pompe descending to their graues. ([A4r])

When their palace becomes their prison, Iane and Guilford view, through a grate in their cell, the multitude on Tower Hill after the Protestant Northumberland’s execution (D2v-3r). The couple’s frequent references to sight would have alerted the gazing playgoers to their own physical involvement in the scene and invited them to see the role the Tower had played in

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their nation’s Protestant formation. Considering Guilford’s allusion to people watching a “Tragedie,” thereby associating the Tower with the playhouse and the playgoers within, the actors may have looked out at the audience here, incorporating theatergoers into the scene on Tower Hill as viewed from the stage. This practice would have created the illusion that the playgoers were not in an amphitheater but on Tower Hill, witnessing England’s Protestant identity—and, for most playgoers, their Protestant identity—taking shape. Thus, the Tower onstage constructed “both its own image and that of the spectator” (Friedman 42–43): Iane.

Out of this firme grate, you may perceiue the Tower Hill Thronged with store of people, As if they gap’d for some strange Noueltie. [...]

Guil.

And see you how the people stand in heapes, Each man sad, looking on his aposed obiect, As if a generall passion possest them? Their eyes doe seeme, as dropping as the Moone, As if prepared for a Tragedie. For neuer swarmes of people there doe tread, But to rob life, and to inrich the dead And shewe they wept. (D2v, D3r)

The Lieutenant of the Tower assures Guilford that the crowd did weep (D3r)—again, a bodily function, a reference to the eyes, and a connection to physiology and the humors. And only when Guilford asks, “Who was it yonder, that tendered vp his life/ To natures death,” does he learn it was his father “that this day lost his head” (D3r). Guilford’s response combines spirituality, physicality, and death: “Peace rest his soule, his sinnes be buried in his graue,/ And not remembred in his Epitaph” (D3r). Throughout this play, most of which is set at the Tower, bodily images, often evoking vision and death, similarly intertwine with spiritual images, especially references to death and Protestant souls.91 The Catholic Bishop of Winchester taunts the Tower’s Protestant prisoners, “you shall loose your heads/ Vpon the Tower-Hill,” or physically escorts them to their executions, as he does to Wyat, while calling himself “a Piller of the Mother Church” (F3r, F3v-[4r]). To Wyat, though, Catholicism is hypocrisy: “I haue no Bishoppes Rochet to declare my innocencie,/ This is my crosse, that causelesse/ I must suffer my heads losse” ([F4r]). Winchester spitefully carries out his

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office with gruesome images of death: “We come to bring you to your execution,/ You must be hang’d and quartered instantly”; nevertheless, Wyat defiantly asserts his—and most of the play’s original theatergoers’—Protestant faith: “When that houre comes, wherein my blood is spilt,/ My crosse will looke as bright as yours twice guilt” ([F4r]). Iane and Guilford’s discourse focuses upon death and physicality, especially vision, involving the audience. These scenes being set at the Tower, the object of the audience’s gaze included the represented Tower, which the characters’ emotions humanized: Guil:

Our office is to die, yours to looke on: We are beholding vnto such beholders, The time was Lords, when you did flock amaine, To see her crownd, but now to kill my Iane, [...] Our office is to die, yours but to gaze. ([F4v])

This treatment of the couple’s final minutes of life in the Tower emphasizes Iane’s body and fashions her as an ideal Protestant martyr, forgiving the Headsman and remaining calm at her hour of death. Guilford’s distress foils her calmness as he harasses the Headsman, who has requested Iane’s forgiveness: Guilf:92 Ha? hast thou the heart to kill a face so faire. Win:

It is her Heades-man.

Guil:

And demaundes a pardon, Onely of her, for taking off her head?

Iane:

I gentle Guilford, and I pardon him.

Guil:

But ile not pardon him, thou art my wife. And he shall aske me pardon for thy life. (G1v)

These lines stress the Reformation ideal of marriage, as opposed to the Catholic, “medieval ideal of celibacy,” and specifically the English “patriarchal model for marriage, based upon biblical authority, which emphasized the necessity of wives’ voluntary submission to their husbands’ authority.”93 The couple also epitomizes the Protestant belief in “mutual affection between spouses” (Lucas 224): Iane:

I thanke her Highnesse,

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That I shall first depart this haplesse world, And not Suruiue to see my deere loue dead. Guilfo:94 She dying first, I three times loose my head. (G1v)

This humanizing scene portrayed Iane and Guilford, executed nearly half a century earlier, as English people with whom early-seventeenth-century audiences could relate and empathize. Most of the play’s original London playgoers, being Protestant, would have recognized this couple’s idealized Protestantism and associated that Protestantism with the Tower, the setting of Iane and Guilford’s suffering. Drawing further attention to his body, Guilford ahistorically falls into a trance as Iane is led to the block.95 Although Norfolk mercifully orders, “Wake him not, vntill hee wake himselfe,/ O happie Guilford if thou die in this,/ Thy soule will be the first in heauenly blisse,” as the Headsman enters with Iane’s head, Winchester announces the gruesome sight, maliciously awakening Guilford (G2r-v). Besides accentuating Guilford’s spirituality and his bodily functions of waking and dying, this discourse privileges Protestant kindness over Catholic cruelty at the Tower, associating the Tower with triumphant Protestantism and Protestant martyrdom. Again, the dialogue and Guilford’s blason on Iane’s decapitated head (Owens 132) center on spirituality, death, and the body, particularly the act of seeing: Win:

Heare coms the Heads-man with the head of Iane:

Guil:

Who spake of Iane? who namde my louely Iane?

Win.

Behold her head.

Gui:

96

O I shall faint againe! Yet let me beare this sight vnto my graue My sweete Ianes head: Looke Norfolke, Arundell, Winchester, Doe malefactors, looke: Thus when they die, a ruddie lippe, A cleere reflecting eye, Cheekes purer then the Maiden oreant pearle, That sprinckles bashfulness through the clowdes Her innocence, has giuen her this looke: [...] And my faire Ianes white soule, wil be In heauen before me

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The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama If I doe stay: stay gentle wife, Thy Guilford followes thee, [...] Our soules shall knock together at heauens gate. (G2v-[3r])

The play celebrates Protestantism, especially as these Protestant spouses are martyred at the Tower by the Catholic queen’s officers. It probably would have been difficult for even Catholic playgoers not to feel compassion for this Protestant couple since, like Iane and Guilford, Catholics had been oppressed and martyred at the Tower for seven decades, excluding Mary I’s reign, by the time this play was produced. These first two plays, Cromwell and Wyat, which represent Protestants losing control of the Tower to Catholic oppressors, would have appealed to Protestant English playgoers in at least three ways. First, in each play’s final scene a Protestant hero is beheaded offstage, and the decapitated head is brought onstage for spectators to view. Since beheadings were associated with Christian saints and martyrs, and Christians venerated blood as a symbol of redemption, these plays employ the “hagiographic convention” of displaying severed heads to frame Cromwell and Iane as Protestant martyrs (Owens 124–37). Second, as Susan Zimmerman has recently argued, “representations of the corpse on the English stage resonate[d] unavoidably with the Reformation controversy over idolatry” (24). Although Christian theology centers upon the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ’s body, England’s sixteenth-century Protestant reformers “repudiate[d] Catholicism’s persistent foregounding of the body and its images in ritual practices” as idolatrous.97 These two martyrdom scenes thus evoke the debate and Protestant theology without representing objectionable Catholic images or doctrines such as the cult of the saints (48). Third, beheadings, being “reserved exclusively for the aristocracy,” affirmed and constructed the victims’ individuality in English society (Owens 123, 127). Protestant playgoers, then, who identified with Cromwell and Iane, saw their own English Protestant individuality affirmed and constructed at the Tower onstage. By contrast, a second pair of plays, Rowley’s When You See Me (1604) and Shakespeare and Fletcher’s H8 (1613), represent devious Catholics scheming to reappropriate the Tower from Protestants, only to be overpowered by the founder of the English Reformation himself. Of these four plays in which “This Land [ . . . ] stands wavering in her Faith,/ Betwixt the Papists and the Protestants” (Rowley [G4v]), only the first two, in which the Catholics are in power, represent unwarranted or unnecessary executions at

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the Tower. In the next two plays, in which English reformed Catholics or Protestants ultimately control the Tower and “scorne the Pope and Romes supremacie” ([I4v]), unjustified imprisonments and executions at the Tower are threatened but not carried out. In fact, all four of these plays represent English Protestantism as more merciful, more forgiving, and thus more Christian, than Catholicism, an ideology that would have pleased English Protestant playgoers; and this ideology is represented, in all four plays, through the Tower of London. Rowley’s When You See Me verbally represents the Tower in the context of threats of beheading in several passages;98 and in several other passages, the beheading of a queen at the Tower is identified with the English Reformation. For instance, the Catholic bishops Gardiner and Woolsie recall that, although Henry VIII “scorne[d] the Pope, and Romes religion,/ When Queene Anne Bullen wore the diadem,” it was Woolsie who “wrought such means shee lost her head” (C1r). Catholic prelates attempt to repeat that performance with Henry’s sixth wife, conspiring in the name of “Holy Saint Peter” to keep Katherine Parry, “the hope of Luthers heresie,” from advancing Protestantism in England (F2r). To the king’s amusement, his bishops and queen dispute what “Luther writ against the Catholiques,/ And superstitions against the Church of Roome” (H3v-[4v]). Bishops Bonner and Gardiner convince Henry that the queen, as one of the “Lutherans,/ [ . . . ] Seeking by tumults to subvert the state,” must be sent to the Tower, tried for treason, and beheaded ([H4v]-I1v). The rhetoric of the king’s temporary capitulation to these Catholic bishops connects the Tower to body parts, death, and England’s Reformed Catholic heritage, Henry’s frequent interjections still alluding to the Virgin Mary: King.

Let it be so, go get a warrant drawne, And with a strong guard beare her to the Towre. Our hand shall signe your large Commission, [...] Mother a God, shall I be baffeld thus, By traitors, rebels, and false heretickes: Get Articles for her arraignement readie, If she of treason be convict, I sweare, Her head goes off, were she my Kingdomes heire. (I1v)

This speech and others like it99 reinforce the Tower as a site where English national identity, both physical and spiritual, has been formed.

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In the final scene, the king’s attitude toward his wife reverses from “Body a me, is she not rested yet./ Why doe they not conuay her to the Tower,” to “That’s my good Kate, but bith marie God, Queene/ [ . . . ] but for [Prince Edward] th’adst gone toth Tower I swere” (K1r, K2r). Between these converse expressions representing the Tower, the royal couple’s discourse refers many times to body parts, physical violence, death, and religion, concluding with the Protestant models of devoted spouses, the husband in control of his wife, and—with Prince Edward—the family,100 further integrating Protestant themes into the Tower’s emblematic meaning. The same passage likewise includes thirteen repetitions of traitor or its variant forms (K1r-2r), terms which, by 1604, were almost synonymous with the Tower, in reference to the queen’s Lutheran beliefs. This connection reminded seventeenth-century theatergoers that, in the English Reformation’s early days, the Tower was a threat not only to unreformed Catholics but also to Protestants whose faith was considered too far reformed. The play thus embodies the Tower’s integral role in English national identity, both physical and spiritual. Shakespeare and Fletcher’s H8 likewise celebrates the Tower’s spiritual and corporeal connection to English physical selves through the monarch most closely associated with both the English Reformation and the Tower as an execution site. Besides emphasizing the Tower as a locale of English death sentences, the play’s religious plot and puns on execution discourse and body parts exemplify the Tower’s historical bond with English souls and bodies. In fact, three characters epitomize this connection: the Duke of Buckingham, Anne Bullen, and Thomas Cranmer.101 Buckingham’s arrest and procession to the Tower following his trial reinforce the Tower’s bodily and spiritual connection to the English. The arrest scene, in which Buckingham is sent to the Tower through Cardinal Wolsey’s machination, incorporates such deadly terms as “execute it”; “I shall perish”; “These are the limbs o’ the plot”; and “My life is spann’d already,” as well as repetitions of the Christian expression, “The will of heaven/ Be done.”102 Likewise, as the convicted Buckingham returns from his trial to the Tower in “the ceremony/ Of bringing back the prisoner” (2.1.4–5), his speech to the spectators foreshadows his impending execution on Tower Hill and presents his Christian faith against the foil of Wolsey’s hypocrisy. Here, playgoers serve as the scene’s spectators, witnessing Buckingham’s last dying speech as he stands near the symbol of his condemnation—“the ax with the edge towards him”: I have this day received a traitor’s judgment, And by that name must die. Yet, heaven bear witness,

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And if I have a conscience, let it sink me, Even as the ax falls, if I be not faithful! The law I bear no malice for my death; ’T has done, upon the premises, but justice; But those that sought it I could wish more Christians. Be what they will, I heartily forgive ’em. [...] And as the long divorce of steel falls on me Make of your prayers one sweet sacrifice, And lift my soul to heaven. Lead on, i’ God’s name!103

Anne Bullen, a major figure in the English Reformation, also dramatically represents the Tower’s spiritual and physical role in English national identity. Henry’s discourse with his future wife, for whom he would later withdraw from papal authority, anatomizes her—“The fairest hand I ever touched!”—as her beheading within the Tower walls, at his order, would do, which he also intimates as they dance: “Sweet partner,/ I must not yet forsake you” (1.4.76, 104–05). Similarly, Anne’s conversation with the Old Lady in the Queen’s Apartments, regarding Henry’s failing marriage to Queen Katharine, foreshadows Anne’s beheading at the Tower with a dazzling array of internal body parts, not unlike a dissection: “tongue,” “Hearts,” and “livers,” the liver also believed to be the source of natural choler, one of the body’s four humors.104 Additionally, the phrases “here’s the pang that pinches”; “by my life”; “’tis a sufferance panging/ As soul and body’s severing”; “to be perk’d up [‘trimmed out’] in a glist’ring grief ”; and “your mincing”; and other allusions to Anne’s body and “conscience”—one of Henry VIII’s operative words to justify his divorce that launched the English Reformation—resonate with Anne’s decapitation.105 Even the Old Lady’s sexual innuendoes about Anne’s “[be]get[ting] a boy,” or bearing a male heir as Henry’s queen—the obvious motivation for his break with Rome—such as “venture maidenhead for ’t” and “venture an emballing,” evoke Anne and Henry’s gendered bodies.106 In the play’s final act, having set the Reformation in motion, Henry tests his Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, Cranmer, gently alerting him that, until the religious charges against him can be tried, Cranmer will “make [his] house our Tow’r” (5.1.106). As the deferential Cranmer protests his virtue, he invokes his accusers’ bodies, specifically their “calumnious tongues,” and religion: “God and your Majesty/ Protect mine innocence!” (5.1.112, 140–41). Heated religious debate follows at the council meeting, Gardiner calling Cranmer a “sectary,” Cranmer revealing that Cromwell favors his sect,

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and the council ordering, no less than three times, that Cranmer be conveyed to the Tower.107 The unreformed councilors presume that the Tower is still a prison for Protestant heretics, yet the king overrules them and supports Cranmer (5.3.150–52). As Henry redefines the meaning of traitor (5.3.96), he aligns the Tower with English Protestantism. The Tower is a setting of action in fourteen plays, most of which were produced by 1599.108 In fact, Shakespeare, the most prolific author of Tower plays, represents the Tower as a physical setting for numerous scenes in his first tetralogy of history plays, but in his subsequent English histories, when the Tower is mentioned at all, its representations are merely spoken. This is also the case in the relatively late Tower plays When You See Me and H8. Perhaps, by the early seventeenth century, the Tower was a familiar enough trope in historical drama that its mere mention was sufficient to trigger playgoers’ emotions. For, despite the Tower’s spatial absence in these two plays, religious references to the Tower must have evoked strong affective responses in their original audiences, especially Protestant playgoers, whose faith these plays ultimately affirmed. Both plays repeatedly juxtapose the Tower with terms that describe human beings and their religious convictions, such as “traitors, rebels, and false heretickes” (Rowley I1v). The plays provide humanizing, religious discourse about the castle, such as a reformed Catholic king’s order that a Protestant archbishop “make your house our Tow’r” (Shakespeare and Fletcher 5.1.106). Even allusions to beheadings at the Tower, such as Anne Bullen speaking metaphorically of “soul and body’s severing” (2.3.16), link the Tower with the human body and England’s national religion. NONDRAMATIC CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HUMANIZED TOWER OF LONDON By the early seventeenth century, the plays’ nationalistic association of the Tower, not with the crown-sponsored ideology of royal spiritual authority but with English subjects’ bodies, especially the bodies of recusants and other traitors, seems to have gained cultural popularity beyond the theater, as the following examples illustrate. Even the crown was benefiting from and building the Tower’s carnivalesque reputation as an execution site, for by the late 1590s Tower warders were including body imagery into their tours of the Tower, fashioning the castle as a “corporeal space” (Albano 94). In Hentzner’s account of his 1598 Tower visit, he notes what he evidently heard from the crown-employed Tower warders: “when any of the nobility are sent hither, on the charge of high crimes, punishable with death, such as treason, &c. they seldom or

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never recover their liberty” (39). He was told the story of Anne Boleyn’s beheading at the Tower and that she “lies buried in the Chapel, but without any inscription” (39). And he was shown the scaffold on Tower Hill: “Near to this Tower, is a large open space, on the highest part of it is erected a wooden scaffold, for the execution of noble criminals; upon which they say, three princes of England, the last of their families, have been beheaded for high treason” (40). When Baron Waldstein visited the Tower two years later, several scaffolds and a similar execution story were part of the tour: “A large open space in front of the Tower contains four scaffolds, and here a number of dukes, earls, and others have been executed for treason” (Valdštejna 65). And when Philip Julius, Duke of Stettin-Pomerania, visited the Tower in 1602, besides being told that the Bloody Tower was named for “King Richardus,” who murdered his cousins there, he was shown seventeen cannon that Essex had brought back from Cadiz and “the spot [ . . . ] where the brave hero the Earl of Essex was beheaded, and lay buried in the chapel close by” (Gerschow 17, 15). The Tower warders evidently enhanced visitors’ “architectural experience” (Friedman 43) by incorporating into their guided tour narratives the Tower’s deep, visceral connection to England’s history and English bodies. Additionally, in 1611, by which time nineteen Tower plays had been produced,109 the watergate of St. Thomas’s Tower was, for the first time, recorded as “the Bridg called Traitors staires,” an early version of its modern soubriquet, “Traitors’ Gate” (Keay, Tower 32). While accused traitors did not necessarily enter the Tower through the watergate (32), the epithet demonstrates that the association between the Tower and human beings—specifically, human body parts—had resonated to the point at which a part of the Tower was popularly identified with a type of person: a traitor, which many characters in the previous thirty-two years’ Tower plays had been called. That this part of the Tower was specifically identified with traitors, and no longer merely with its namesake, Thomas à Becket (Younghusband 498), indicates a burgeoning nationalistic pride in the Tower based upon its notoriety in English history, as the Tower plays represented it. Moreover, many Tudor-Stuart recusants had been recast through the Tower as traitors (Lake and Questier 72), which numerous recusant characters in the previous decade’s Tower plays had been called. And identifying a part of the Tower with its recusant prisoners or martyrs furthermore affirmed the Tower’s role in England’s Protestant national identity, as the Tower plays represented it. A few years later, in 1615 the Tower was personified in Stow’s chronicle history that Edmond Howes continued: On Accession Day, November 17, 1595, “a day of great triumph, for the long and prosperous raygne of her

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maiestie, [ . . . ] the Tower shotte off her Ordinance” (Stow, Annales 769, emphasis mine). Though the Tower playwrights had stopped personifying the Tower by 1599 and had never assigned the Tower a gender, the idea of a humanized Tower apparently continued to develop in English popular culture after the peak of Tower play production. Finally, returning to the broadside ballad discussed in Chapter Four, “A Lamentable Ditty, Composed upon the Death of Robert Lord Devereux, Late Earle of Essex, Who Was Beheaded in the Tower of London, on Ash-wednesday in the Morning, 1600. To the Tune of Welladay,” c.1640–65, Wood 401 (75), Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (Figure 1), a single woodcut decorates most editions of the broadsheet. Whereas the woodcut on the 1603 edition depicts a formal garden, on the 1625 edition it portrays a man in armor and seated on a horse, sword drawn, a humanized character representing Essex going into battle or about to perform in a tilt.110 By c.1640–65, however, after all the Tower plays had been composed and/or performed, the woodcut represents the beheaded Essex lying on a scaffold, blood pouring from his neck. The executioner, axe drawn, gazes at the severed head while a clergyman prays nearby. Surrounding the scaffold’s three visible sides, Tower warders stand with edged weapons and observe the scene, resembling groundlings standing at an open-air theater stage. The broadsheet’s bloody and spiritual representation of this dramatic moment in Essex’s life, alongside oppositional lyrics that tell the story of his imprisonment and execution within the Tower walls and that he “néere lov’d Papistry/ But still did it defie,” visually and verbally humanizes the Tower and associates it with the body and England’s national religion, as the Tower plays did. After 1599 playwrights no longer represented the Tower as a personified, living being in its own right; as a hanted castle associated with ghosts; or as the anachronistic symbol of England’s Roman pedigree, “Julius Caesar’s Tower.” Rather, from this point on, Tower plays revealed the empty rhetoric of the royal ideology that the Tower symbolized the monarch’s spiritual authority and, instead, reflected the crown’s actual, gruesome methods of fashioning the Tower, humanizing it through language evocative of human bodies, body parts, physical violence, and death, almost always linked to the English Reformation. The consistency of these oppositional representations of the Tower after 1599 demonstrates that the contest for the Tower’s ideology continued into the 1630s. And it seems that English playgoers’ reactions to executions set at the Tower were not sympathetic to the monarch; on the contrary, the Tower’s representations probably appealed to playgoers’ sense of community and compassion for the English characters executed in the plays. The Tower plays embodied this castle’s many connections to English

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national identity, even as the concept of identity was evolving in Renaissance England. By the early-Stuart period, the Tower’s dramatic associations with English subjects’ bodies and executions, as England struggled to become a Protestant nation, appear to have reshaped the Tower’s popular cultural meanings. Even in the later Tower plays that did not visually represent the Tower, the characters’ discourse humanized the castle, encouraging English playgoers to identify with the Tower personally, physically, and spiritually.

Coda

The Tower of London An Evolving Icon

Prince Edward: I do not like the Tower, of any place. Did Julius Caesar build that place, my lord? Buckingham:

He did, my gracious lord, begin that place, Which, since, succeeding ages have re-edified. —Shakespeare, R3 3.1.68–71

Succeeding ages have indeed re-edified the Tower, both its fabric and, as the Tower plays epitomize, its emblematic meanings. The Tower’s spatial and/ or rhetorical roles in these twenty-four plays shaped the Tower’s cultural meanings over the fifty-five years of Tower play production and beyond and evolved its meanings in Renaissance London theatergoers’ minds. As stated in the Introduction, at times the Tower plays could be read as promoting the crown’s ideology of the Tower by fashioning the castle as a showplace of royal authority. The Tower playwrights treat it as “a loathsome dungeon” associated with “the rack” and “long imprisonment”; a “slaughterhouse”; an unwelcoming structure of “ragged stony walls”; a point along the route “to the stake” and an uncomfortable one at that: Old-castle complains, “The inner roomes be very hot and close,/ I do not like this ayre here in the Tower.”1 Princess Elizabeth, fearing the castle as a site of royal authority, calls it “a dungeon,” and even Cranmer dreads it: “Is there no other way of mercy,/ But I must needs to the Tower, my lords?”2 And yet, by representing only the Tower’s oppressive connections with royal power—for no Tower play includes a coronation procession that commences at the Tower, an installation of Knights of the Bath, or a pre-coronation sojourn at the Tower by a monarch who survives to be crowned—playwrights associated the Tower only with tyrannical government that warranted resistance. In fact, in Heywood’s 2E4 (1599), Richard III and his nephews represent the 150

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Tower—through the royal ideology that traces the Tower’s history to Julius Caesar—as a site of royal tyranny: Ri.

Brother, last night, when you did send for me, My mother told me, hearing we should lodge Within the Tower, that it was a prison, And therefore maruell’d that my vncle Gloster, Of all the houses for a kings receipt Within this city, had appointed none Where you might keep your court but only here.

Glos. [aside] Vile brats, how they do descant on the Tower! My gentle nephew, they were ill aduised To tutor you with such vnfitting terms (Who ere they were) against this royal mansion. What if some part of it hath been reseru’d To be a prison for nobility? Follows it therefore, that it cannot serue To any other use? Caesar himself, That built the same, within it kept his court, And many kings since him: the rooms are large, The building stately, and for strength beside, It is the safest and the surest hold you have. (p.146–47)

Indeed, the Tower plays had promoted this theme since the Tower’s first onstage appearance in Richardus Tertius (1579). And yet, from the Tower’s earliest dramatic representations, playwrights also treated it as an iconic English landmark for Londoners to embrace and a rallying point for resisting oppressive monarchy. The quintessential Catholic victim of royal tyranny, Sir Thomas More, addresses it with compassion— “Fair prison, welcome. Yet methinks,/ For thy fair building ’tis too foul a name”—and willingly adds his “bones to strengthen the foundation/ Of Julius Caesar’s palace.”3 And Dekker and Webster presented the imprisoned Wyat’s discoveries that “this inclosure here, of naught but stone,/ Yeildes far more comfort then the stony hearts/ Of them that wrong’d their country, and their friend,” and “In this the Tower is noble being base” (F3v). Perhaps the strongest evidence that many early modern English people embraced the Tower as a national symbol after the Tower plays is the Line of Kings, the earliest known historic display at the Tower of London, an early version of which was in the Tower Armories by October 1660 and placed on exhibit as early as 1661.4 The Line of Kings was a row of life-sized wooden

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figures mounted on wooden horses, which had been carved by leading sculptors, painted to represent selected English kings, and dressed in velvet and “fully accoutred in armour purported to be theirs, drawn from the Armouries stores. Though the Tower had long before been open to visitors, the creation of the ‘Line’ establishes the claim of the Armouries to be the oldest public museum in Britain.”5 Playgoers who may have seen Tower plays performed before the theaters closed in 1642, and younger generations more familiar with the play texts—Shakespeare’s First Folio, for instance, containing his six Tower plays, was in print by 1623, and Heywood’s four Tower plays were in print by 16326—composed a market of Tower visitors who could have recognized similarities between this exhibit and the Tower plays. Like the plays, the Line of Kings represented English kings as characters—who, by 1692, were called “heroes” (Borg, “The Museum” 71)—seated on stage properties and in costume, at the Tower, the theater that housed this exhibit. Hence, the Tower playwrights had drawn the Tower into history plays, and Tower officials subsequently drew upon the theater at the Tower, both to attract paying spectators or visitors. The early modern theater had brought the Tower to the popular stage in the national history play, and the Tower had become a popular stage of national history in its own right. The earliest printed guides to the Tower reveal the Line of Kings’ popularity through the eighteenth century; in fact, a version of the exhibit stands in the White Tower today. The early Tower guides also detail the extent to which the Richard III story, made legendary in the Richard III plays, influenced the Line of Kings. The first guide to treat the Tower exclusively, as opposed to various London sights, is an eighteenthcentury, two-volume set of children’s books, just over an inch in height and width, entitled Curiosities in the Tower of London. It devotes several pages to a description of each monarch represented in the Line—which has never included Richard III, who, as the Tower plays portrayed him, was considered an embarrassment to the monarchy.7 Instead, next to the Line of Kings was “a little suit of armour made in remembrance of Richard, Duke of York, who, with his brother Edward the fifth, was smothered in the Tower between two feather-beds [ . . . ]; the former being about eleven years old, and the latter thirteen” (48–49). Similarly, a guide book from 1750, A Historical Account of the Tower of London and its Curiosities, describes the Line of Kings as including the uncrowned Edward V: “King Edward V. who, with his Brother Richard, as has been said, was smothered in the bloody Tower: He was proclaimed King, but never crowned; for which Reason a Crown is hung over his Head [ . . . ]” (54). As always,

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Richard III is conspicuously missing from his chronological place in the Line (53), having been vilified in the Tower plays. As early as 1590, when Edmund Mortimer, ahistorically imprisoned in the Tower in Shakespeare’s 1H6,8 explains to his nephew, Richard Plantagenet, that his unjust incarceration warrants rebellion, and as late as c.1634, when Urswisk declares that Perkin Warbeck has, ahistorically, escaped from the Tower twice,9 representing escape from the Tower to be not only possible, but possible multiple times, the Tower plays refashioned the actual Tower’s identity. These plays announced that repressed early modern theatergoers could resist the crown’s authority, use the Tower for their purposes, and participate in the social construction of the Tower space, refashioning the Tower as their own—even in the years of the later Tower plays, when the Stuart royals were fashioning the Tower as a theater, drawing audiences there to view bloody spectacles staged at the Menagerie.10 Today the Tower, the most popular historical tourist attraction in England, is marketed as “A Day Out to Die For,” enabling England’s tourism industry to capitalize, as it did over four hundred years ago, on the Tower history these plays represented.11 In 2004 an eight-year construction project was completed at the Tower, celebrating its status, since 1988, as a UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) World Heritage Site, and in 2006, Icons: A Portrait of England, a project under Great Britain’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport, declared the Tower to be a national icon of England.12 UNESCO describes the Tower as “an imposing fortress with many layers of history.” This study illuminates one layer of that history: the significant role that English Renaissance drama played in the Tower’s development as an icon of English popular culture and national identity.

Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. Although the White Tower’s precise construction dates are not known (H. M. Colvin et al., The History of the King’s Works, 7 vols., gen. ed. Colvin [London: HMSO, 1963–82] 1:31), it was under construction during the last decade of the reign of William the Conqueror, 1066–87, and completed in the reign of Henry I, 1100–35 (Colvin et al. 2:707; Geoffrey Parnell and Ivan Lapper, The Tower of London: A 2000-Year History, Landmarks in History [Botley, Oxford: Osprey, 2000] 18–19; Geoffrey Parnell, English Heritage Book of the Tower of London [London: Batsford, 1993] 19; Edward Impey and Geoffrey Parnell, The Tower of London: The Official Illustrated History [London: Merrill, 2000] 19). The start of its construction is traditionally ascribed to about 1078 (A. R. Dufty, “The Tower: An Introduction,” The Tower of London: Its Buildings and Institutions, ed. John Charlton [London: HMSO, 1978] 15; Parnell and Lapper 18; R. A. Brown “Architectural History and Development to c.1547,” in Charlton 24; P. E. Curnow, “The Bloody Tower,” in Charlton 9; James Bartholomew, Inside the Tower: An Alternative Guide [London: Herbert, 1990] 101). 2. Thomas Legge, Richardus Tertius (1579), vol. 1 of Thomas Legge: The Complete Plays, ed. and trans. Dana F. Sutton, American University Studies 17th ser. 13 (New York: Lang, 1993); William Shakespeare, The First Part of King Henry the Sixth (1H6, 1590), The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed., ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992); Shakespeare, The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth (2H6, c.1590), in Bevington; The True Tragedie of Richard the Third [ . . . ] (True Tragedie R3, 1588–94), The True Tragedy of Richard the Third [ . . . ], introd. and notes by Barron Field (London: Shakespeare Society, 1844); The Life and Death of Iacke Straw, A Notable Rebell in England (Iacke Straw, 1590–93), ed. Kenneth Muir, The Malone Society Reprints, gen. ed. F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1957); Shakespeare, The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth (3H6, c.1591), in Bevington; George Peele, The Chronicle of King Edward the First,

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Notes to Chapter One Surnamed Longshanks, with The Life of Luellen Rebel in Wales (1590–93), ed. G. K. Dreher (Chicago: Adams, 1974); Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (R3, 1591–92), in Bevington; Christopher Marlowe, Edward the Second (1591–93), Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays, ed. J. B. Steane (New York: Penguin, 1986); Anthony Munday et al., Sir Thomas More (originally composed c.1592–93), ed. Vittorio Gabrieli and Giorgio Melchiori, The Revels Plays, gen. ed. E. A. J. Honingmann et al. (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester UP, 1990); Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Second (R2, 1595), in Bevington; Thomas Heywood, The First Part of King Edward the Fourth (1E4, 1592–99), in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, vol. 1 of 6 (1874; New York: Russell, 1964); Heywood, The Second Part of King Edward the Fourth (2E4, 1592–99), in Heywood; [Munday,] Michael Drayton, [Robert Wilson, and Richard Hathway,] The First Part of the True and Honorable Historie, of the Life of Sir John Oldcastle, the Good Lord Cobham (1599), The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel, vol. 1 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961); The Life and Death of Thomas, Lord Cromwell (Cromwell, c.1599–1602), Disputed Plays by William Shakespeare, ed. William Kozlenko (New York: Hawthorn, 1974); Thomas Dekker and John Webster, The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat (1602), The Tudor Facsimile Texts [New York: AMS, 1970]; Samuel Rowley, When You See Me You Know Me (1604), The Tudor Facsimile Texts, gen. ed. John S. Farmer (New York: AMS, 1970); Heywood, If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, or The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth (1 If You Know Not Me, 1604–05), in Heywood; Heywood, If You Know Not Me, You Know No Body. The Second Part (2 If You Know Not Me, 1604–05), in Heywood; Woodstock (c.1605–09), Elizabethan History Plays, ed. William A. Armstrong, The World’s Classics 606 (London: Oxford UP, 1965); Shakespeare and John Fletcher, The Life of King Henry the Eighth (1613), in Bevington; Thomas Drue, The Life of the Dutches of Suffolke (1624; London, 1631); Robert Davenport, King Iohn and Matilda, A Tragedy (Iohn and Matilda, c.1628– 29), in Armstrong; and John Ford, The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, A Strange Truth (Perkin Warbeck, c.1625–34), ed. Peter Ure, The Revels Plays, gen. ed. Clifford Leech (London: Methuen, 1968). Debate has long surrounded the dating and co-authorship of some of these plays. On Shakespeare, 1H6, see Albert H. Tricomi, “Joan la Pucelle and the Inverted Saints Play in 1 Henry VI,” Renaissance and Reformation 25.2 (2001) n.14; and Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (New York: Routledge, 1997) 65–66. Similarly, according to Donna B. Hamilton, “On 16 October 1599 Henslowe gave Dowton ten pounds sterling to pay Munday, Drayton, Wilson, and Hathway (listed in that order [ . . . ]) for The first parte of Sir John Oldcastle” (Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560–1633

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[Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2005] 138); Hamilton explains why, in the past, the play has been attributed only to Drayton (138). With three exceptions, listed below, the dates of all plays cited in this study are derived from Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama, 975– 1700: An Analytical Record of All Plays, Extant or Lost, Chronologically Arranged and Indexed by Authors, Titles, Dramatic Companies, &c., rev. by Samuel Schoenbaum, 3rd ed., rev. by Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim (New York: Routledge, 1989) xvi, 48–133; and Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge UP, 1992) 232–43, largely derived from Harbage. Any discrepancies between Harbage and Gurr are noted throughout this study. Both sources indicate when plays were most likely first performed (Harbage xvi; Gurr 232). While Munday et al. was originally composed c.1592–93 (Gabrieli and Melchiori, introduction, in Gabrieli and Melchiori 12, 19; Scott McMillin, The Elizabethan Theatre and The Book of Sir Thomas More [Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1987] 72), and McMillin argues that a revised version may have been performed after 1603 (74–95), Phillip J. Ayres (“Anthony Munday” 232, 237) and Peter Davidson (“Thomas Heywood” 101), both in Dictionary of Literary Biography 62, ed. Fredson Bowers (Detroit: Gale, 1987), believe it was probably not produced in the early modern period. McMillin affirms, “we cannot be confident the play was ever performed in its original version” (82). Therefore, I do not include this play in discussions of Tower plays that were performed. For the dates of three plays I use more specific or recent sources: Dana F. Sutton, introduction, in Legge, and George B. Churchill, Richard the Third up to Shakespeare (1900; Gloucestershire, Eng.: Sutton, 1976) for Legge; Gabrieli and Melchiori, McMillin, Ayres, and Davidson for Munday et al.; and MacDonald P. Jackson, “Shakespeare’s Richard II and the Anonymous Thomas of Woodstock,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 14 (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson UP [2001]) 42, 55, for Woodstock. My thanks to Dr. Steve Longstaffe for bringing the Jackson text to my attention. This study treats the Tower’s representations in English history plays, in both the strict sense of chronicle history and the more general sense that sometimes merges history with tragedy, as in Davenport, or what Jean E. Howard calls “chronicle comedies,” which “do not tell the monarch’s story” but “foreground the stories of prominent London citizens,” such as Heywood’s, 1E4, 2E4, and 2 If You Know Not Me (Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 [Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2006] 21). See “Chronicle Play” in C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon, A Handbook to Literature, 6th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1992) 85–86.

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3. I do not consider the Tower plays to compose a sub-genre of the history play; rather, I use the term as Howard uses “Exchange plays” for plays that represent the Royal Exchange (Theater of a City 24). 4. Stephen Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988) 16–17; Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: U of California P, 1975) 2–4. 5. David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999) 44, 47, 119. 6. Alice Friedman similarly views buildings as texts in “Architecture, Authority, and the Female Gaze: Planning and Representation in the Early Modern Country House,” Assemblage 18 (1992). Likewise, Catherine Belsey includes architecture as one of many historical “documents” (Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1999] 9). 7. Howard and Rackin 11; Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994) 11, 204. 8. Mullaney 9–10, vii, 13. 9. Peter M. Daly, “England and the Emblem: The Cultural Context of English Emblem Books,” The English Emblem and the Continental Tradition, AMS Studies in the Emblem 1, ed. Daly (New York: AMS, 1988) 1, 5–6, 10. 10. Karl Josef Höltgen, Aspects of the Emblem: Studies in the English Emblem Tradition and the European Context (Kassel, Germany: Reichenberger, 1986) 26; John Manning, The Emblem (London: Reaktion, 2002) 16, 25, 30. 11. Höltgen 26; Daly, “England and the Emblem” 5; Huston Diehl, An Index of Icons in English Emblem Books, 1500–1700 (Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1986) 3; Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale UP, 1978) 86. 12. Daly, “England and the Emblem” 3–4; George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. R. C. Alton, English Linguistics 1500–1800 110 (1589; Menston, Eng.: Scolar Press, 1968) Nχ3jr. According to R. C. Alton’s preliminary Note in Puttenham, “The copy here reproduced [ . . . ] is the only copy known to contain the four cancelled leaves [ . . . ] between gatherings N and O” (n. pag.); see Daly, “England and the Emblem” 3–4. 13. Strong, foreword, in Höltgen 9; Daly, “England and the Emblem” 1 n.2, 1–3; Diehl, An Index of Icons 3. 14. Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004) 134; see William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen (1587; Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1968) 226 and John Stow, A Svrvay of London (London, 1598) 37–46. (Except where noted, references to Stow, Svrvay, indicate this edition.) Even the 1637 edition of Camden’s Britannia, in its sixth edition by 1607 (Robert J. Mayhew, introduction, Britannia, by William Camden, 7th ed., trans. Philemon

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Holland, ed. Mayhew, Historical Cultures and Geography, 1600–1750 1 [1586; 1610; Bristol, Eng.: Thoemmes, 2003] xiv-xv), like Harrison and Stow, provides little more than a description of the complex (423). 15. Robert Greene, Greenes Neuer Too Late, The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene, M.A., ed. Alexander B. Grosart, vol. 8 of 15 (1590; New York: Russell, 1964) 68, 242n. (i.e., the note that refers to page 68, l.12); R. D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge: Belknap, 1978) 89. According to Altick, Ben Jonson’s The Fountaine of Self-Loue, or Cynthias Revels (1601; Louvain: Uystpruyst, 1908]) refers to seeing the lions in the same metaphorical way. Altick apparently meant the opening lines of Jonson’s The Masque of Augurs, presented in 1622 (The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, ed. John Nichols, vol. 4 of 4 [1828; New York: Franklin, 1967] 736–49), which liken seeing the lions to seeing the king. 16. Plantagenet Somerset Fry, The Tower of London: Cauldron of Britain’s Past (London: Quiller, 1990). Although Fry suggests Londoners’ likely reactions to the Tower, especially during the Norman Period, he merely intimates the Tower’s cultural evolution in chapter titles such as “Grandeur and Decline of its Feudal Role.” Similarly, Graham Keevill mentions, but does not elaborate upon, the White Tower’s “iconic status” in The Tower of London Moat: Archaeological Excavations 1995–9, Historic Royal Palaces Monograph 1 (Oxford: Oxford Archaeology with Historic Royal Palaces, 2004) xvi. 17. Ronald Sutherland Gower provides a short annotated list, attributed to the critic Dr. [Frederick James] Furnivall, of four plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries that refer to the Tower, and alludes to two additional plays from Shakespeare’s apocrypha, both of which represent the Tower, in The Tower of London, 2 vols. (London: Bell, 1901–02) 2:2n. All six plays are included in the present study. Arthur Poyser, in The Tower of London (London: Black, 1908), identifies scenes set at the Tower in three Shakespearean plays (7–8, 33–34, 101). Three texts from the 1970s identify the Tower in English Renaissance literature: Christopher Hibbert and the Editors of the Newsweek Book Division quote passages about the Tower from thirteen works, 1259 to 1963 (Tower of London, Wonders of Man, consulting ed. Milton Gendel [New York: Newsweek, 1971] 139–60). Throughout The Tower of London in the History of England (New York: Putnam, 1972), Alfred Leslie Rowse provides a partial overview of the wider body of Tower literature, including works composed by Tower prisoners. And Dufty briefly treats non-dramatic works of Tudor-Stuart literature composed during their authors’ confinement in the Tower (20–22). Graham Holderness devotes about a page to historicizing the Tower’s representation in Shakespeare, R2, in Shakespeare: The Histories (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000) 207. In Prisoners of the Tower: The Tower of London as a State Prison, 1100–1941 (Surrey, Eng.: Historic Royal Palaces, 2004), Jeremy Ashbee et al. mention

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Shakespeare’s history plays and many other cultural artifacts as they trace “the popular perception of the Tower as a state prison” (45) over the course of nine centuries. Finally, the Media Information section of the Historic Royal Palaces website includes a list of nine facts connecting the Tower to Shakespeare’s times and events portrayed in three Shakespearean plays (Historic Royal Palaces, “Shakespeare and the Tower of London,” Historic Royal Palaces, 29 Sep. 2007 ). 18. See A. C. N. Borg, “Two Studies in the History of the Tower Armouries,” Archaeologia 105 (1976); Geoffrey Parnell, “The Early History of the Tower Armouries,” Royal Armouries Yearbook 1 (1996); and Peter Hammond, “‘Epitome of England’s History’: The Transformation of the Tower of London as a Visitor Attraction in the 19th Century,” Royal Armouries Yearbook 4 (1999). 19. The actual forms of the Tower’s physical representations on the early modern stage are not known. None of the properties listed in “The Enventary tacken of all the properties for my Lord Admeralles men, the 10 of Marche 1598” hints at a representation of a castle (Walter W. Greg, ed., Henslowe Papers: Being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe’s Diary [London: Bullen, 1907] 116–18), though castles and similar architectural structures were common features of many types of contemporary productions (Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, 1300 to 1660, part 1 of vol. 2 of 4 [New York: Routledge, Paul, and Columbia UP, 1963, rpt. London: Routledge, 2002] 310). In 1579–80 the Office of the Revels purchased poles “to make Rayles for the battlements” (Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Albert Feuillerat, vol. 21 of Materialien zur Kunde des älteren Englischen Dramas, ed. W. Bang [Louvain: Uystpruyst, 1908; rpt. Vaduz: Kraus, 1963] 327), suggesting that battlements may have represented castles onstage. 20. These plays’ earliest production dates and the extent of their Tower content define the scope of this study. The first extant Renaissance history play in which the Tower appears onstage as a setting is Legge; the last known history play of the English Renaissance to represent the Tower physically is Ford. Although the Tower is mentioned in at least one history play before these limits, John Bale, Kynge Johan: A Play in Two Parts, ed. J. Payne Collier (1538, rev. 1558–62; London: Nichols, 1838), and it is the subject of discourse and the site of offstage action in at least one history play after these limits, Cromwell’s Conspiracy. A Tragy-Comedy, Relating to Our Latter Times. Beginning at the Death of King Charles the First, and Ending with the Happy Restoration of King Charles the Second, Three Centuries of Drama: English 1642–1700, microopaque (1660; New York: Readex, 1960), these plays were staged, respectively, well before and after any play treated in this analysis and thus are beyond the scope of this study. Although Harbage’s early limit for Iohn and Matilda (c.1628–29) is later than that of Perkin Warbeck (c.1625–34), both he and Gurr indicate that

Notes to Chapter One

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

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Perkin Warbeck was most probably first performed after the late limit for Iohn and Matilda: 1632 (Gurr, Shakespearean Stage 240) or 1633 (Harbage, Annals 132). Therefore, I treat Perkin Warbeck as the last of the Tower plays. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980) 1; Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988) 18–19. Stephen Greenblatt, introduction, The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance, ed. Greenblatt, spec. issue of Genre 15.1–2 (1982): 3; Carolyn Porter, “History and Literature: ‘After the New Historicism,’” New Literary History 21.2 (1990): 257; Jean E. Howard, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” New Historicism and Renaissance Drama, ed. Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton (New York: Longman, 1992) 20, 23. Louis Adrian Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996) 6; John Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998) 27, 60. Kastan 195; Montrose, The Purpose of Playing 2–3. Montrose, The Purpose of Playing 49, 50, 101, 209; Kastan 44. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations 6, 9, 11; Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001) 195, 237. See Jane P. Tompkins, “The Reader in History: The Changing Shape of Literary Response,” ReaderResponse Criticism: From Formalism to Post-structuralism, ed. Tompkins (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1980). Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979) 48–65; Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, trans. and ed. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980) 39–47; Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990) 95. Kastan 124–25; Emily Carroll Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993) xv; Carolyn Porter, “Are We Being Historical Yet?” South Atlantic Quarterly 87.4 (1988) 752–59; see Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning 43, 61; Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations 2–3. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2000) 20–74, esp. 28, 74, 47, 52, 53; Mullaney 26, 60, 88. Kastan 30–31, 29; Bartels xv-xvi; C. Porter, “Are We Being Historical Yet?” 759–81; C. Porter, “History and Literature” 253, 261; the quotation is from Kastan 29. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, “Foreword: Cultural Materialism,” Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Dollimore and

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32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47.

Notes to Chapter One Sinfield (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985) vii-viii; Albert H. Tricomi, Reading Tudor-Stuart Texts through Cultural Historicism (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1996); Montrose, The Purpose of Playing; and Kastan. C. Porter, “Are We Being Historical Yet?” 764; C. Porter, “History and Literature” 253; Kastan 31. C. Porter, “Are We Being Historical Yet?” 751; Tricomi, Reading TudorStuart Texts 13; Kastan 31; Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-fashioned Topics (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991) 5. Some overlap also exists between this group and a larger number of early modern historicists of the past decade who avoid the term new historicism or write about that mode as significantly different from theirs. See Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood; Tricomi, Reading Tudor-Stuart Texts; Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997); Nina Levine, Women’s Matters: Politics, Gender, and Nation in Shakespeare’s Early History Plays (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1998); Kastan; and Susan Zimmerman, The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare’s Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2005). Tricomi, Reading Tudor-Stuart Texts ix, 2. Kastan does not, however, use the term cultural historicism. Tricomi, Reading Tudor-Stuart Texts 5, 8; Kastan 17. Tricomi, Reading Tudor-Stuart Texts 17, 15–16, 20; Kastan 47, 195; Tricomi, Reading Tudor-Stuart Texts 1, 2, 8; Kastan 44, 47, 53, 119, 125, 215–16. Tricomi, Reading Tudor-Stuart Texts 2, 14, 17–18; Kastan 53–54. Kastan 196, 54; Tricomi, Reading Tudor-Stuart Texts 21. Williams 122–26; Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984) 7; Belsey 7. Brannigan 108; Belsey 17. Brannigan 13, 105–09; Belsey 6, 9. Gurr, Playgoing 69; Thomas Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991) 62. Arthur F. Kinney, Shakespeare and Cognition: Aristotle’s Legacy and Shakespearean Drama (New York: Routledge, 2006) xvi, 21; see 23–24; Arthur F. Kinney, Shakespeare’s Webs: Networks of Meaning in Renaissance Drama (New York: Routledge, 2004) xx, xi. Kinney, Shakespeare’s Webs xx; Kinney, Shakespeare and Cognition 130, emphasis mine. John J. Ratey, A User’s Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain (New York: Pantheon, 2001) 186; Kinney, Shakespeare and Cognition 22–23). Ratey 174; Kinney, Shakespeare and Cognition 54. Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1984)

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48. 49. 50.

51.

52.

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47; D. G. Watson, Shakespeare’s Early History Plays: Politics at Play on the Elizabethan Stage (Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1990) 24. Kinney, Shakespeare’s Webs xiv; Kinney, Shakespeare and Cognition 130. Ratey 203; Kinney, Shakespeare and Cognition 22, 34, 130; see xvi, 16, 24. Roy C. Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames, 1977) 119, 114–62; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400-c.1580 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992) 579–81; James V. Holleran, A Jesuit Challenge: Edmund Campion’s Debates at the Tower of London in 1581 (New York: Fordham UP, 1999) 10; Adrian Morey, The Catholic Subjects of Elizabeth I (Totowa, NJ: Rowman, 1978) 55–58; Peter McClure and Robin Headlam Wells, “Elizabeth I as a Second Virgin Mary,” Renaissance Studies 4.1 (1990). On Elizabeth as virgin, see Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning 168; “Queen Elizabeth’s First Speech before Parliament, February 10, 1559, Version 2: Her Answer to [the Commons’] Petition that She Marry” in Elizabeth I, Queen of England, Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus et al. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000) 58–60. On Elizabeth as bride, see McClure and Wells 42; Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990) 162; “Queen Elizabeth’s Conversations with the Scottish Ambassador, William Maitland, Laird of Lethington, September and October 1561” in Elizabeth I: Collected Works 65. On Elizabeth as mother and protector to her subjects, see “Queen Elizabeth’s First Speech before Parliament, February 10, 1559, Version 2: Her Answer to [the Commons’] Petition that She Marry” 58–60; “Queen Elizabeth’s Answer to the Commons’ Petition that She Marry, January 28, 1563” 72; and “A Report of Her Majesty’s Speech in the Parliament House at the Dissolving of the Parliament. [Endorsed] April, 1593, Version 2” 331, all in Elizabeth I: Collected Works. On Elizabeth as queen of the church, see Strong, Cult of Elizabeth 119, 121, 127. The government promoted the celebration of Accession Day, first in 1571, by ordering that a copy of the Protestant English historian John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs “be installed in every cathedral church” (Strong, Cult of Elizabeth 127; see also William Byron Forbush, “Sketch of the Author,” Fox’s [sic] Book of Martyrs, by John Foxe, ed. Forbush [Chicago: Winston, 1926] xiv; Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory 249). Starting in 1576, the Tudor government published a “succession of special service books for use in churches on” Accession Day (Strong, Cult of Elizabeth 131). The quotation is from Simon Schama, A History of Britain: The Complete Collection, 5 vols., exec. prod. Martin Davidson, dir. Clare Beavan, DVD, BBC, 2001, 2: “Burning Convictions.” John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis, Princeton Essays on the Arts (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989) 242; Strong, Cult of Elizabeth 119–20.

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53. Strong, Cult of Elizabeth 48, 52; Roy C. Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 17–19; Tricomi, Reading Tudor-Stuart Texts 19, 105–06. 54. D. Watson 22, 13; Fredrick Seaton Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1446–1776: The Rise and Decline of Government Control (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1965) 25–26. 55. D. Watson 31; Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 178. These citations specifically refer to Elizabeth’s repressive rule. 56. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation 92, 93, 97. Here, Patterson specifically refers to the start of Charles I’s reign in 1626 (88). 57. An Homilie Agaynst Disobedience and Wylful Rebellion (London, 1570); Gurr, introduction 225. 58. Julia M. Walker, “Introduction: The Dark Side of the Cult of Elizabeth,” Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana, ed. Walker (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998) 1. For the scope of this discourse, see Dissing Elizabeth in its entirety and Carole Levin, “Wanton and Whore,” The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1994). Paul E. J. Hammer, in The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, ser. ed. Anthony Fletcher et al. [Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1999] 9–10), and Alan G. R. Smith, in The Emergence of a Nation State: The Commonwealth of England, 1529–1660 (2nd ed. [New York: Longman, 1984] 251, 253), attest to Elizabeth’s declining popularity as her reign drew to a close. 59. Donald R. Kelley, “Ideas of Resistance before Elizabeth,” The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1988) 48–68, esp. 48, 51, 52; Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Early Modern Political Thought, vol. 2 of 2 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1978; rpt. 1993) 74–347; the quotations are from 237. 60. Morey 55; Andrew Gurr, Introduction to “An Homilie against Disobedience and Wilfull Rebellion,” Appendix 3, King Richard II, by William Shakespeare, ed. Gurr, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 2003) 225; Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1969) 3:14 and n.2; see Arnold Oskar Meyer, England and the Catholic Church under Queen Elizabeth, trans. J. R. McKee (London: Paul, 1916) 322–26; A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers, Works in English, vol. 2 of The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640 (Aldershot, Eng.: Scolar, 1994) entry 10; Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1977) 111–12.

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61. These writers build upon Raymond Williams’ work (Marxism and Literature [Oxford, Eng.: Oxford UP, 1977] 113–14, 123). See Margot Heinemann (Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts, Past and Present Publications, gen. ed. T. H. Aston [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980]) 35, 201, 203, 220, 231, 234; Dollimore 3–28; Patterson, Censorship viii, 74; Albert H. Tricomi, Anticourt Drama in England, 1603–1642 (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1989). The quotation is from Tricomi 174. 62. See Cartelli, Marlowe; Thomas Cartelli, “Jack Cade in the Garden: Class Consciousness and Class Conflict in 2 Henry VI,” Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994); D. Watson; Chris Fitter, “‘The Quarrel Is between Our Masters and Us Their Men’: Romeo and Juliet, Dearth, and the London Riots,” ELR 30.2 (2000); Chris Fitter, “‘Your Captain Is Brave and Vows Reformation’: Jack Cade, the Hacket Rising, and Shakespeare’s Vision of Popular Rebellion in 2 Henry VI,” Shakespeare Studies 32 (2004); Chris Fitter, “Emergent Shakespeare and the Politics of Protest: 2 Henry VI in Historical Contexts,” ELH 72.1 (2005); Debra Shuger, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in Tudor-Stuart England (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2006); and Rebecca Lemon, Treason by Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2006). 63. Harbage notes that Shakespeare, 1H6 and 2H6 were probably first performed in 1590 (Annals 56). Gurr concurs that 1H6 may have been performed in 1590 (Shakespearean Stage 237). 64. Cartelli, Marlowe 47; Andrew Gurr, “The General and the Caviar: Learned Audiences in the Early Theatre,” English Renaissance Drama and Audience Response, spec. issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination 26.1 (1993) 8. 65. These include Shakespeare, 1H6 and 2H6; True Tragedie R3; Shakespeare, 3H6 and R3; Peele; Marlowe; Shakespeare, R2; Heywood, 1E4 and 2E4; Munday, Drayton, et al.; Cromwell; Rowley; Heywood, 1 and 2 If You Know Not Me; Drue; and Shakespeare and Fletcher. My sources for the Tower plays’ provenance are Harbage, Annals 56–159, 353–56 and Gurr, Shakespearean Stage 232–43. See Chapter One, note 2. Although Harbage and Gurr generally agree on the companies that performed the Tower plays, and the playhouses where those companies performed in certain years, minor discrepancies exist. While Gurr and Harbage disagree about whether Shakespeare, 1H6 was played at the Theatre (Harbage 57, 353–54) or the Rose (Gurr 237), and whether Shakespeare, R3 was played at the Rose (Harbage 59, 354) or the Theatre (Gurr 241), both playhouses were open-air amphitheaters. Harbage also indicates that Queen Anne’s Men, who performed Heywood’s 1 and 2 If You Know Not Me, played at the Curtain—an amphitheater—in 1603–c.1605 (91, 93, 354),

166

66.

67.

68. 69.

Notes to Chapter One whereas Gurr lists these two plays as performed at the Red Bull (237)—“a rectangularly-shaped, open-air theatre” (Harbage 355). For my purposes, the distinction is negligible. Heywood’s 1E4 and 2E4 were produced by the Earl of Derby’s Men, who played at the Boar’s Head Theatre, which “was beyond all question an innyard theatre” (C. J. Sisson, The Boar’s Head Theatre: An Inn-yard Theatre of the Elizabethan Age, ed. Stanley Wells [London: Routledge, 1972] xvii), in 1599 (Harbage, Annals 73, 354; Herbert Berry, The Boar’s Head Playhouse [Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1986] 34, 126). With the possible exception of Heywood’s 1 and 2 If You Know Not Me, the other plays listed above were, evidently, originally played in amphitheaters. The remaining four plays from c.1590 to 1613 are Iacke Straw; Munday et al.; Dekker and Webster; and Woodstock. The two later Tower plays, Davenport and Ford, were played at the Cockpit, or Phoenix, a hall playhouse (Harbage, Annals 127, 133, 356). Gurr, “The General and the Caviar” 9; Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1984) 305; Gurr, Playgoing 58–93; Gurr, Shakespearean Stage 212–30; Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London, 1576–1642 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981) 8, 216–71; Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience (New York: Columbia UP, 1941) 11–12, 60–90. “Patent for Children of the Queen’s Revels,” 4 Feb. 1604, in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923) 4:335–36; see also Wickham 190; H. Berry 120–22. Wickham provides evidence that plays performed at inns were not necessarily played in the yards (187–96), though he does not dispute the heterogeneity of these productions’ audiences. Gurr, Shakespearean Stage 121; Gurr, Playgoing 45, 85, 78–93; Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience 87, 36, 64, 89. Gurr, Playgoing 89–90, 63, 77–78. Harbage (Shakespeare’s Audience) and Cook differ on the proportion of privileged to plebeian theatergoers. Harbage asserts, “audiences were composed largely of shopkeepers and craftsmen, people of low income taking advantage of the almost unique opportunity to get their money’s worth” (64, 60–61). Although both Harbage and Cook acknowledge that a lack of leisure and money were obstacles to playgoing for those below the status of artisan (Harbage 65), Cook argues that these factors prohibited most “lesser citizens” from regular attendance at plays, except on Sundays and holidays (273). It seems likely, however, that both are correct. While the privileged Londoners who attended plays (Harbage 65) may have been the most consistent individual playgoers (Cook 273), London’s sheer number of plebeian citizens and apprentices greatly outnumbered the gentry (Harbage 81, 90). Inns of Court students, for instance, who frequently attended plays, tended to

Notes to Chapter One

70.

71. 72.

73.

74.

75.

167

have “money, leisure, and inclination for playgoing”; however, by total population, London’s apprentices, also well-documented as theatergoers, “outnumbered the students ten to one” (80–81). Citizens and laborers thus provided a much larger pool of potential playgoers who likely composed a substantial segment—several hundred to several thousand people (37–38) out of London’s total population of 200,000 (Gurr, Playgoing 59)—of daily audiences at each of London’s open-air theatres on a rotating, if individually inconsistent, basis. Gurr, Playgoing 90; Wickham 138. The first two were Davenport in c.1628–29 or, according to Gurr, 1628–34 (Shakespearean Stage 237); and Ford in c.1625–34 or, according to Gurr, 1632 (240). The latter two were Heywood, 1 and 2 If You Know Not Me (Gurr, Shakespearean Stage 237). According to Gurr, the revivals of Heywood’s plays took place in c.1630 (237). Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience 64; Gurr, Playgoing 31. Gurr, Playgoing 3–4; Montrose, The Purpose of Playing 87; Arthur F. Kinney, Shakespeare by Stages: An Historical Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003) 75; Butler 305. Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) 193; Fitter, “‘The Quarrel” 175; Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience 82; William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1996) 141 n.15, 142. Outhwaite 40; Rappaport 13; I. Archer 11, 14; Power 385; Cook 239. The controversy is discussed in Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, gen. ed. Anthony Fletcher et al. (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1991) 9; and John Guy, “Introduction: The 1590s: The Second Reign of Elizabeth I?” The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. Guy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 9. R. B. Outhwaite (“Dearth, the English Crown and the ‘Crisis of the 1590s,’” The European Crisis of the 1590s: Essays in Comparative History, ed. Peter Clark [Boston: Allen, 1985] 41) and Steve Rappaport (Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London, Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time 7, gen. ed. Peter Laslett et al. [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989]) urge caution before calling the period a crisis. Peter Clark (“A Crisis Contained? The Condition of English Towns in the 1590s,” in P. Clark 61–62) and M. J. Power (“London and the Control of the ‘Crisis’ of the 1590s,” History 70.230 [1985]) consider the situation more severe and argue that it was, indeed, a crisis. P. Clark, “Crisis” 48; I. Archer 9–10; Roy Porter, London: A Social History (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994) 64; Power 371; Outhwaite 28; Cook 237, 230; Smith 168. The harvest failures and associated problems are discussed

168

76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88.

89.

90.

Notes to Chapter One in P. Clark, “Crisis” 45, 47–49, 62; Power 371; Cook 231; Smith 236; I. Archer 9–10; Guy, “Introduction” 9–10; and Outhwaite 23, 27–29. For food prices, see Cook 232, 234–35; Power 374–75; R. Manning, Village Revolts 204–05; and Outhwaite 27–29, 35. Cook 233–37; R. Porter 64; Power 372; P. Clark, “Crisis” 48. P. Clark, “Crisis” 49; I. Archer 9, 10; R. Porter 64; Power 371; Tudor Royal Proclamations 3:40–42, 59. Cook 230; Guy, “Introduction” 10. James R. Siemon, “Landlord Not King: Agrarian Change and Inarticulation,” in Burt and Archer 22; Thirsk, “Tudor Enclosures,” The Historical Association Book of the Tudors, ed. Joel Hurstfield (New York: St. Martin’s, 1973) 114; William C. Carroll, “‘The Nursery of Beggary’: Enclosure, Vagrancy, and Sedition in the Tudor-Stuart Period,” in Burt and Archer 36, 44; Fitter, “Your Captain,” 210. J. R. Wordie, “The Chronology of English Enclosure, 1500–1914,” The Economic History Review ser. 2, 36.4 (1983): 494; Thirsk 114. Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority 38; Stow, Svrvay 348. Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Inwardness and Spectatorship in Early Modern England,” Neo-Historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics, ed. Robin Headlam Wells et al., Studies in Renaissance Literature 5 (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000) 130; I. Archer 10; Cook 237, 239; Fitter, “Your Captain” 208; Smith 166, 168, 174; P. Clark, “Crisis” 62; Cook 239; Smith 167. “London’s population doubled, from 100,000 to 200,000, between 1580 and 1600, and doubled again by 1650, to 400,000, [ . . . ] when the total population of England grew only about 20 per cent, from a little over 4 million in 1600” (Gurr, Playgoing 59). Cook 239; R. Porter 65. Cook 237, 240. Mortality is discussed in P. Clark, “Crisis” 46; I. Archer 9; R. Porter 64–65; and Outhwaite 34, 37. P. Clark, “Crisis” 46; R. Porter 65; Cook 237. Cook 240; P. Clark, “Crisis” 46, 62; I. Archer 10; Power 371, 381; Outhwaite 23. Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority 36; see also 37 and Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury [ . . . ], 24 vols., Historical Manuscripts Commission 9 (Hereford: HMSO, 1883–1976) 13:168–69. For crime and vagrancy, see P. Clark, “Crisis” 55; I. Archer 9; R. Porter 64; Power 372; and Guy, “Introduction” 9. For threats of disorder and rebellion, see Power 372; Cook 239; P. Clark, “Crisis” 53; and Smith 174, 188, 237–38. Mihoko Suzuki, “The London Apprentice Riots of the 1590s and the Fiction of Thomas Deloney,” Criticism 38.2 (1996) 185; P. Clark, “Crisis” 52– 53; Cook 256. R. Manning, Village Revolts 207; I. Archer 3; P. Clark, “Crisis” 55.

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91. I. Archer 4; Letter of William Fleetwood to Lord Burghley, 18 June 1584, extracted in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 4:297. 92. R. Manning, Village Revolts 203; P. Clark, “Crisis” 53; Rappaport 11; I. Archer 4. P. Clark, “Crisis” misdates the riot to October (53), though one of his sources that mentions the riot is dated “the 29th of September, 1590” (Acts of the Privy Council of England, ed. John Roche Dasent, 32 vols. [London: HMSO, 1890–1907] n.s. 19:468, 476–77). 93. R. Manning, Village Revolts 203; P. Clark, “Crisis” 53. 94. R. Manning, Village Revolts 203; Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience 60. 95. “Report of the Lord Mayor on the Weavers’ Pamphlet,” 1595, and Thomas Deloney, William Muggins et al., “Complaint of the Yeomen Weavers against the Immigrant Weavers,” 1595, both in The London Weavers’ Company, vol. 1, ed. Francis Consitt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933) 318, 312–17. 96. Francis Oscar Mann, introduction, The Works of Thomas Deloney, ed. Mann (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912) ix-x; Suzuki 193. 97. Francis Bacon, “Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary, to Monsieur Critoy, Secretary of France,” The Works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, and Lord High Chancellor of England, ed. James Spedding et al., vol. 8 of 14 (c.1590; London: Longman, 1862) 98; André Hurault, Sieur de Maisse, A Journal of All That Was Accomplished by Monsieur de Maisse, Ambassador in England from King Henri IV to Queen Elizabeth, Anno Domini 1597, trans. and ed. G. B. Harrison and R. A. Jones (London: Nonsuch, 1931) 58. 98. Bernard J. Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean: Adiaphorism in the English Reformation to 1554, Studies in the Reformation 1 (Athens, OH: Ohio UP and Wayne State UP, 1977) xiv; Gary W. Jenkins, John Jewel and the English National Church: The Dilemmas of an Erastian Reformer (Aldershot, Eng.: Aldgate, 2006) 235, 249; Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon, 1967) 71, 61, 34–35; Verkamp xiv; Richard L. Greaves, “Concepts of Political Obedience in Late Tudor England: Conflicting Perspectives,” Journal of British Studies 22.1 (1982): 28; John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford UP, 1988) 261, 291; Charles W. A. Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church: The Politics of Religious Controversy, 1603–1625 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 2005) 109. 99. Hamilton xvi-xvii, Guy, Tudor England 296. 100. Guy, Tudor England 291; Duffy 568–69. 101. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement 69, 60; Guy, Tudor England 261–62. 102. Alison Plowden, Danger to Elizabeth: The Catholics under Elizabeth I, 2nd ed. (Stroud, Eng.: Sutton, 1999) 165; Smith 154; Guy, Tudor England 301. See Morey 41, 42, 45, 48, 51, 63, 208. 103. Alfred Leslie Rowse, The Elizabethan Renaissance: The Life of the Society, vol. 3 of The Elizabethan Age, 4 vols., 1950–72 (New York: Scribner’s, 1971) 74; Morey 212–13; Smith 246.

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104. Morey 42–43; Smith 246; William Raleigh Trimble, The Catholic Laity in Elizabethan England, 1558–1603 (Cambridge: Belknap, 1964) 271–72. 105. Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I (New York: Arnold, 1993) 114–44, 139; Hibbert et al. 50–52. 106. P. B. Clayton and B. R. Leftwich, The Pageant of Tower Hill (New York: Longmans, 1933) 313–14; Douglas Newton, Catholic London (London: Hale, 1950) 179. 107. Morey 62, 67, 208; Smith 246. 108. Holleran 11–12; Plowden 110–14; Smith 153; Morey 41. 109. Plowden 52, 109–10, 156–58, 170; Morey 46. 110. See Gurr, Playgoing 232, 236, 237. 111. Prior 26; Morey 59; Smith 153, 189; Bayley 458, 486–89. 112. Newton 179. For a history of many Tudor and early-Stuart Catholics who were imprisoned, tortured, and beheaded within the Tower walls, as well as those executed on Tower Hill and buried in the chapels within and surrounding the Tower complex, see Newton 179–202. While these chapters include some details that have been proven inaccurate, the volume of known martyrs, especially from the Elizabethan period, demonstrates the extent of Catholic persecution at the Tower and composes a convincing basis for the claim that early modern Catholics considered the Tower to be a shrine. 113. D. Watson 25; Smith 240–41, 255. 114. Guy, “Introduction” 1; Hammer 1–2, 8–9, 341–88; Smith 124, 241; G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968) 95; D. Watson 21. 115. Levine 29, D. Watson 23; Leonard Tennenhouse, “Sir Walter Ralegh and the Literature of Clientage,” Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981) 238. 116. On Spenser see Levine 29 and Ian Frederick Moulton, “Erotic Writing, Effeminacy, and National Identity,” Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England, Studies in the History of Sexuality, gen. ed. Guido Ruggiero (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) 91–92. On Sidney see Arthur F. Marotti, “‘Love Is Not Love’: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order,” ELH 49.2 (1982), esp. 400–04. On Ralegh see Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning 65. On Essex see Steven W. May, ed. and comm., The Poems of Edward DeVere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford and of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, Texts and Studies issue of Studies in Philology 77.5 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1980), esp. 43–59. 117. Strong, Cult of Elizabeth 56–57, 61. Although some scholars, for example Andrew Gurr (Shakespearean Stage 196), hesitate to affirm that the miniature represents Essex, Strong persuasively develops the argument, first set forth in 1959, that the Young Man is, indeed, Essex (Cult of Elizabeth 56–83).

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118. May 16–18; Strong, Cult of Elizabeth 78–83. For a concise history of Tyrone’s rebellion and Essex and Southampton’s roles in suppressing it, see Akrigg 75–93. 119. Akrigg 107; May 15–18; John J. Manning, introduction, The First and Second Parts of John Hayward’s The Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII, by John Hayward, ed. Manning, Camden Society 4th ser. 42 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1991) 31; May 18. 120. John Bale, Yet a Course at the Romyshe Foxe (Antwerp, 1543) [K8v]-L1r (I have silently expanded abbreviations in the quotation); Kelley 64. 121. Mary Bly, “Playing the Tourist in Early Modern London: Selling the Liberties Onstage,” PMLA 122.1 (2007): 63, 62; Cartelli, Marlowe 30. See also Bly 61, 65–66. 122. Bly 65–66; Tudor Royal Proclamations 3:60–61, 82–83. 123. Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience 105; Mullaney vii; R. Manning, Village Revolts 203; Montrose, The Purpose of Playing 41–65; Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse, Containing a Pleasant Invective against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, &c. (1579; London, 1841; New York: AMS, 1970) 34. See also Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience 14–15, 101–05; Kinney, Shakespeare by Stages 126–40. 124. Guy, “Introduction” 16; Gurr, Playgoing 142; Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience 37–38. 125. Cartelli, Marlowe 10–11, 22; the quotations are from 22 and 11. 126. Cartelli, Marlowe 12–18, 28, 30; the quotation is from 12. 127. Cartelli, Marlowe 28, 36, 30; see 51, 174; Fitter, “‘Your Captain” 181, 182. 128. Cartelli, Marlowe 121; see also Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 2003) 204. 129. Cartelli, Marlowe 93; see 167. 130. C. R. Cheney, A Handbook of Dates for Students of British History, rev. by Michael Jones, Royal Historical Society Guides and Handbooks 4 (1945; Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 2000) 12–13; Heather Wolfe, Textual Conventions and Dating, “The Pen’s Excellencie”: Treasures from the Manuscript Collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library, comp. and ed. Wolfe (Washington, D. C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2002) 20. 131. G. B. Harrison, The Life and Death of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (New York: Holt, 1937) 280–325; The Elizabethan Journals. Being a Record of Those things Most Talked of During the Years 1591–1603 (1938; London: Routledge, 1955) viii. 132. See, for example, the page heading in Acts of the Privy Council 31:179, which documents events that took place during the month of Essex’s revolt. 133. See the entry heading for the proceedings against the Essex conspirators, dated “February, 1600,” in Acts of the Privy Council 31:179–80; John Stow, who dates the revolt to “Sunday the 8. of February 1600” (The Annales,

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or Generall Chronicle of England, rev. by Edmond Howes [London, 1615], 791); the “Examination of Augustine Phillipps,” servant to the Lord Chamberlain, dated “18 Feb., 1600,” regarding the Essex conspirators’ bribe to have Shakespeare’s R2 played on the eve of the rebellion (printed in E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon, 1930] 2:325); the February “1600” entry for Essex’s burial in the Register of St Peter ad Vincula, Tower of London, HM Tower of London, London, Eng.; and the eye-witness account of “The Execution of Robert Late Earle of Essex the 25 of Ffebruary 1600 within the Tower of London,” RAR ms. 500/2, Board of Trustees of the Armouries, Royal Armouries Library, HM Tower of London, London, Eng. See also note 134, below. 134. Richard W. Goulding notes that, in the portrait’s inscription, “February 8, 1600 is the Old Style equivalent for the modern February 8, 1601” (“Wriothesley Portraits: Authentic and Reputed,” Walpole Society 8 [1919– 20]: 53 n.2, italics original). Akrigg concurs that the inscription follows “the Old Style dating” (133).

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. The early modern concept of “magnificence” is discussed in Leeds Barroll, “Shakespeare, Noble Patrons, and the Pleasures of ‘Common’ Playing,” Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Whitfield White and Suzanne R. Westfall (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 2002) 94–98. 2. Parnell, English Heritage 12–13; Mike Ibeji, “An Overview of Roman Britain,” BBC History 1 Jun. 2001, 29 Sep. 2007 ; Impey and Parnell 11; Parnell and Lapper 7–10. Successive Roman invasions of the island took place in 55 and 54 B.C. (Roy C. Strong, The Story of Britain [New York: Fromm, 1997] 2, 6); however, Caesar’s attempts to conquer Britain were unsuccessful. It was the Emperor Claudius who conquered Britain (Schama 1: “Beginnings”). 3. Keevill 4; Parnell, English Heritage 15; Impey and Parnell 11, 12; Parnell and Lapper 12–14. 4. Impey and Parnell 12–13; Parnell and Lapper 14–16; Keevill 6. 5. Thurley, Impey, and Hammond 31; Keevill 6. 6. Colvin et al. 1:20; Parnell and Lapper 16. 7. Colvin et al. 2:706–07; A. L. Rowse, The Tower of London in the History of England (New York: Putnam, 1972) 10; Fry, Tower 8. 8. Parnell, English Heritage 20; R. Porter 22; Phillip Drennon Thomas, “The Tower of London’s Royal Menagerie,” History Today 46.8 (1996): 29; Brown, “Architectural History and Development” 24; Keevill 7.

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9. Fry, Tower 1; Keevill 8; The Tower of London: The Official Guide, exec. prod. Andrew Treagus, dir. John Hall, videocassette, British Tourist Authority, 1989. 10. Fry, Tower 1, 7; Simon Thurley, Edward Impey, and Peter Hammond, The Tower of London: The Official Guidebook (1996; London: Historic Royal Palaces, 2000) 46. 11. R. A. Brown, “Architectural Description,” in Charlton 48; Bayley 100; Fry, Tower 20; Impey and Parnell 18; Colvin et al. 1:29, 2:707; Thurley, Impey, and Hammond 46; Caroline M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People, 1200–1500 (New York: Oxford UP, 2004) 47. 12. Thurley, Impey, and Hammond 46; Fry, Tower 10–15. 13. Sarah Barter, “The Board of Ordnance,” in Charlton 106; Fry, Tower 46, 88. 14. Colvin et al. 1:25, 31, 45, 2:707; John Bayley, The History and Antiquities of the Tower of London, 2nd ed. (London, 1830) 6. 15. Colvin et al. 2:707; A. C. N. Borg, “The State Prison,” in Charlton 86; Fry, Tower 24–25. 16. Bayley 6; Fry, Tower 26. 17. Bayley 6–7; Fry, Tower 26; Colvin et al. 1:41. 18. Fry, Tower 27–28; R. Porter 23; Parnell, English Heritage 19; Colvin et al. 1:32. John Stow appended to his Svrvay of London William Fitzstephen’s Descriptio Londoniae, which originally served as the introduction to Fitzstephen’s Life of Becket (Henry B. Wheatley, introduction, Stow’s Survey of London, 2nd ed. [1598, 1603; London: Dent, 1956] x). Wheatley translates arx palatina to “the Palatine tower” (Fitzstephen, in Stow, Survey [1603] 502). 19. Michael Grant, History of Rome (New York: Scribner’s, 1978) 54, 314. 20. Fitzstephen, in Stow, Survey (1603) 502; Hibbert et al. 22. 21. V. D. Lipman, “The Jurisdiction of the Tower Authorities Outside the Walls,” in Charlton 144; R. Porter 28; Stephen Inwood, A History of London (New York: Carroll, 1998) 70. 22. Colvin et al. 2:708; Parnell and Lapper 20; Fry, Tower 31–35. 23. Russell Chamberlin, The Tower of London: An Illustrated History (London: Webb, 1989) 31; Bayley 8–9. 24. Inwood 58; Chamberlin 31. 25. Inwood 58; Bayley 8–9; Chamberlin 31. 26. Bayley 10; Fry, Tower 37. 27. Bayley 10; Fry, Tower 38. 28. Bayley 11; Parnell and Lapper 22–24. 29. Bayley 19–20; Hibbert et al. 30–31; Stow, Svrvay 41; Margaret Howell, Eleanor of Provence: Queenship in Thirteenth-Century England (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998) 194–96; Inwood 63. 30. Stow, Svrvay 41; Howell 194–96. 31. Impey and Parnell 25, 29; Fry, Tower 43.

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32. Matthew Paris, Matthew Paris’s English History. From the Year 1235 to 1273, trans. J. A. Giles, 3 vols., Bohn’s Antiquarian Library (London: Bohn, 1852–54) 3:115; Borg, “The Royal Menagerie” 101. 33. The Tower of London: The Official Guide; Geoffrey Parnell, The Royal Menagerie at the Tower of London (Leeds, Yorkshire, Eng.: The Trustees of the Armouries, 1999) 5. 34. Parnell and Lapper 24; Colvin et al. 1:114, 2:708, 710; Brown, “Architectural History” 28–29; Fry, Tower 39–45; Impey and Parnell 25–30; Anna Keay, The Elizabethan Tower of London: The Haiward and Gascoyne Plan of 1597, London Topographical Society 158 (London: London Topographical Society, 2001) 27–49. 35. Colvin et al. 1:67–68, 129, 130, 234; 2:710, 713–15, 723; C. Paul Christianson, The Riverside Gardens of Thomas More’s London (New Haven: Yale UP, 2005): 9, 36–41. 36. Fry, Tower 23, 42; Thurley, Impey, and Hammond 34. 37. Brown, “Architectural History” 29–30; Keevill 10. 38. Paris 1:326–27; Keevill 75; Impey and Parnell 28–29; Parnell, English Heritage 34; Brown, “Architectural History” 30; George Younghusband, “The Constable of the Tower,” Chambers’s Journal 7th ser. 10 (1920): 498. Although St. Thomas’s Tower, which stands over Traitors’ Gate, is named for Becket (498), the collapsed gateway was not St. Thomas’s Tower but a structure along the western wall of the Tower complex (Colvin et al. 2:712–13). 39. Impey and Parnell 30–38; Brown, “Architectural History” 32; Colvin et al. 1:206, 2:716, 722, 726; Parnell and Lapper 25–26; Keay, Tower 27–49. 40. Colvin et al. 1:233; Impey and Parnell 30–38; Parnell and Lapper 26. 41. R. Porter 28, Inwood 70; Lipman 145. 42. Schama 2: “Nations”; Fry, Tower 51–52; R. Porter 28. 43. Hibbert et al. 78; Stow, Svrvay 41; Thurley, Impey, and Hammond 20; Bayley 281. 44. Impey and Parnell 39; Colvin et al. 2:722; Thurley, Impey, and Hammond 49. 45. Impey and Parnell 41–42; Rowse, Tower 14; Keay, Tower 27–49. 46. Impey and Parnell 42; Fry, Tower 79; Keay, Tower 48. 47. Hammond 19; Impey and Parnell 42; Thurley, Impey, and Hammond 37; Ashbee et al. 18. 48. Barron 141, 242, 141, 37. 49. Hammond 19; Bayley 22. 50. Bayley 24; Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6 vols. (1577; 1587; London, 1807) 2:581. 51. Impey and Parnell 42; Fry, Tower 64. 52. Schama 2: “King Death”; Fry, Tower 65; Dufty 18; Gerald Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England 1360–1461 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005) 448.

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53. Bayley 29–30; Impey and Parnell 44; Chamberlin 35, 38; Borg, “The State Prison” 92. 54. Schama 2: “King Death”; John E. N. Hearsey, The Tower: Eight Hundred and Eighty Years of English History (London: MacGibbon, 1960) 39; Bayley 295. 55. Schama 2: “King Death”; Impey and Parnell 42–44; Thurley, Impey, and Hammond 33, 50; Dufty 16. 56. Impey and Parnell 41; J. F. M. Llewellyn, “The Tower and the Church,” in Charlton 131. 57. Keith Baines, Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table (New York: New American Library, 1962) 495, 497, 502. 58. Charles, Duke of Orléans, Poems of Charles, Duke of Orléans (England, c.1500). Earlier visual images of the Tower exist, mostly as parts of illuminations or marginal drawings in medieval manuscripts; however, the Tower is discernable only through the events these images represent and not for its own features. My thanks to Dr. Geoffrey Parnell for clarifying this distinction. 59. The Tower of London: The Official Guide; Impey and Parnell 51; Hibbert et al. 49; William Hepworth Dixon, Her Majesty’s Tower (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1869) 51. 60. Grant 21; T. P. Wiseman, The Myths of Rome (Exeter, Devon, Eng.: U of Exeter P, 2004) 114, 121. 61. Grant 21, 54–55; Wiseman 138, 140–41. 62. Impey and Parnell 45–46; Stow, Svrvay 45. 63. Fry, Tower 83; Hibbert et al. 87. 64. Rowse, Tower 20; Dufty 16; Fry, Tower 70; Thurley, Impey, and Hammond 50. 65. Sydney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997) 11. The following texts illuminate the Tower’s role in these celebrations. See Bryan Bevan, Henry VII: The First Tudor King (London: Rubicon, 2000) 44, and Anglo, Spectacle 10–15, for the coronation entry and celebration of Henry VII in 1485. See Hibbert et al. (45) for the marriage procession of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York in 1486. See Antonia Fraser, The Wives of Henry VIII (New York: Knopf, 1992) for the coronation celebrations of Henry VIII in 1509 (49) and Katharine of Aragon in 1509 (50). See David Starkey, Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (New York: HarperCollins, 2003) 489–95 for the marriage procession and celebration of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in 1533. See Anglo, Spectacle for the coronation entries of Elizabeth of York in 1487 (11, 49–50) and Anne Boleyn in 1533 (247–48). 66. Alan St. Hill Brock, “Pyrotechny in Europe: The Early Years,” A History of Fireworks (Toronto: Harrap, 1949) 32; Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes

176

67.

68.

69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77.

78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83.

Notes to Chapter Two of the People of England, rev. by Charles Cox (1903; Detroit: Singing Tree, 1968) 295. Dixon 50–51. Dixon specifies that the gift appears to have been a “bridal present.” Though most sources date the book to c.1500, Ashbee et al. have recently dated it to c.1483 (17); thus, Dixon may be correct, as the royal couple married in 1486 (Anglo, Spectacle 11, 49–50). Bevan 64; Howard and Rackin 11–12; Helen M. Lyle, The Rebellion of Jack Cade, 1450, The Historical Association gen. ser. G (London: Philip, 1950) 3, 22; Wickham 245. L. W. Cowie, “Kings in the Tower of London,” History Today 28.9 [1978]: 595; Anglo, Images of Tudor Kingship 8. Bevan 44; Edward Hall, Hall’s Chronicle [ . . . ]. Carefully Collated with the Editions of 1548 and 1550 (London, 1809) 423. Impey and Parnell 51; R. J. Minney, The Tower of London (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970) 121; Fry, Tower 81. Westminster Palace was England’s main royal residence throughout the Middle Ages (Cowie 589); by the mid-Tudor era, when the monarchy became “less itinerant, helping the consolidation of Westminster” (R. Porter 33), the attractions of other palaces led to the Tower’s “virtual abandonment as a royal residence except for special occasions” (M. W. Thompson, The Decline of the Castle [Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1987] 12). H. D. W. Sitwell, “The Jewel House and the Royal Goldsmiths,” Archaeological Journal 117 (1960): 132; Colvin et al. 3:263–64, 4:18–19. Minney 121; Bevan 82; Llewellyn 131. David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford UP, 1997) 1; Starkey, Six Wives 44. Stow, Survey (1603) 55; Barter 107. See Geoffrey Parnell, “Diary of a Death at Daybreak,” BBC History Magazine 2.2 (2001): 14. Colvin et al. 3:264–69; Keay, Tower 41; Keevill 13. Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life, 1460–1547 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993) 98; J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (Berkeley: U of California P, 1968) 16, 20, 79. Starkey, Six Wives 494; E. Hall 800. Scarisbrick 216–17, 328; Starkey, Six Wives 494; Fraser, The Wives of Henry VIII 171, 184; Louis Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2006) 12–13. Impey and Parnell 52; Fry, Tower 97; Keevill 13. Fry, Tower 93; The Tower of London: The Official Guide; Bayley 100, 296, 297, 378, 517. Scarisbrick 328; Chamberlin 53. Starkey, Six Wives, 569–83, esp. 575–81; Fraser, The Wives of Henry VIII 243–57, esp. 253–54.

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84. Starkey, Six Wives 579; Chamberlin 56–57. 85. Starkey, Six Wives 579–81. While Anne Boleyn and others are usually thought to have been beheaded on Tower Green, it is now believed that early modern executions within the Tower walls took place on the parade ground just north of the White Tower, “in the high court aboue Caesars Tower,” where the Earl of Essex was beheaded in 1600 according to “The Execution of Robert Late Earle of Essex,” fol. 1v. See Parnell, “Diary” 14–15. 86. Chamberlin 58–59; Bayley 383; Fraser, The Wives of Henry VIII 296, 300, 311, 313, 323–24, 330. 87. Starkey, Six Wives 673; Scarisbrick 431–33; Chamberlin 58–59. 88. Scarisbrick 121–23; Chamberlin 61; Minney 145. 89. Chamberlin 86; Borg, “The State Prison” 88–89; Hibbert et al. 87. 90. Except where indicated, throughout this study, references to Thomas More’s text are to the edition of c.1513: The History of King Richard III, The History of King Richard III and Selections from the English and Latin Poems, ed. Richard S. Sylvester (c.1513; New Haven: Yale UP, 1976). To this day, the most popular figures in Tower history include those whose deaths More reports, some with very scanty evidence: George, Duke of Clarence (8); Henry VI (9); William, Lord Hastings (50); and the young sons of Edward IV (88). 91. King 20–22; Peter Saccio, Shakespeare’s English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) 13; John J. Manning 21. Saccio’s dating of Holinshed’s Chronicles to 1578 evidently refers to its 1578 entry in the Stationers’ Register (Elizabeth Story Donno, “Some Aspects of Shakespeare’s Holinshed,” Huntington Library Quarterly 50 [1987] 230). Manning (21), Donno (229, 232), and Annabel Patterson (Reading Between the Lines [Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1993] 117, 120, 122, 128–29) date it to 1577. 92. Chamberlin 27; V. Norskov Olsen, John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church (Berkeley: U of California P, 1973) 19; John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of These Latter and Perillous Dayes [ . . . ], 2 vols. (London, 1570) 2:2229; Borg, “The State Prison” 89. 93. Forbush xiv; Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory 249; Strong, Cult of Elizabeth 127. 94. Impey and Parnell 106; Colvinet al. 3:13, 37, 268–69. 95. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, part 1 of vol. 2 of 21, comp. J. S. Brewer (London: HMSO, 1920; rpt. Vaduz: Kraus, 1965) 116–17; Keay, Tower 29. 96. Chamberlin 90; Impey and Parnell 52. 97. Chamberlin 62; Jennifer Loach, Edward VI, ed. George Bernard and Penry Williams (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999) 102. 98. Loach 160–63; Hester W. Chapman, Lady Jane Grey: October 1537-February 1554 (London: Cape, 1962) 111. 99. Chamberlin 63; Loach 173.

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100. Chapman 158; Chamberlin 64. 101. Impey and Parnell 52; David M. Loades, Mary Tudor: A Life (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) 205–06. 102. Chamberlin 65; Chapman 169. 103. Llewellyn 131; Thurley, Impey, and Hammond 36. 104. Cressy 1; Starkey, Six Wives 44. 105. Loades 325–26; Thurley, Impey, and Hammond 10. 106. Fry, Tower 104; Impey and Parnell 73. 107. Chamberlin 65–66, 83; Loades 215; Fry, Tower 106. 108. Loades 188, 211, 215; Chapman 161, 179–80, 192, 201, 203–04. 109. Loades 284, Chamberlin 67; David Starkey, Elizabeth: Apprenticeship (London: Chatto, 2000) 145. 110. John Nichols, ed., The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, vol. 1 of 3 (1823; New York: Franklin, 1966) 34–35; Mullaney 11; Fry, Tower 110. 111. Mullaney 11, 16; Richard Mulcaster, “The Queen’s Majesty’s Passage through the City of London to Westminster the Day before Her Coronation,” Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (1558; Maldon, MA: Blackwell, 2001) 22. 112. Thurley, Impey, and Hammond 52; Bayley 131–71, 203–04. 113. MacCaffrey 116, 138–39, 343–47; Fry, Tower 111. 114. Borg, “The State Prison” 89; Hibbert et al. 87. 115. Analytical Index to the Series of Records Known as the Remembrancia. Preserved among the Archives of the City of London. A.D. 1579–1664. Prepared by the Corporation of London (London: Francis, 1878) entry 1:89 (426–28); see also entry 1:379 (429–30). 116. William Camden, The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth, Late Queen of England (London, 1688; rpt. New York: AMS, 1970) 270; Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: The Courtships of Elizabeth I (London: Routledge, 1996) 166; Lloyd E. Berry, ed., John Stubbs’s Gaping Gulf with Letters and Other Relevant Documents (Charlottesville: The UP of Virginia, 1968) xxxvii, xl. Two of Stubbs’ letters, written from his prison in 1580, identify his location as the Tower (117, 118). 117. The Tower of London: The Official Guide; Thurley, Impey, and Hammond 30. 118. Keay, Tower 37; Borg, “The Record Office,” in Charlton 104. 119. Dufty 18; Colvin et al. 3:79, 271; A. C. N. Borg, “The Museum: The History of the Armouries as a Showplace,” in Charlton 69; Thurley, Impey, and Hammond 37. 120. Colvin et al. 3:270; Fry, Tower 110; Nichols, Elizabeth 91. 121. Keay, Tower 33; Albert Feavearyear, The Pound Sterling: A History of English Money, 2nd ed., rev. by E. Victor Morgan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963) 93; Charles Oman, The Coinage of England (London: Pordes, 1967) 280–81.

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NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1. Parnell, Menagerie 7. Harbage cites this type of evidence as providing “our most revealing descriptions of the English theatres” (Shakespeare’s Audience 86–87). 2. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (1598–99), in Bevington 1025–59, 3.1.151; Stow, Svrvay 38. 3. Svrvay 38; Georges Edelen, introduction, The Description of England, by William Harrison xxv-xxviii. 4. Edelen xxvi; Ibeji, italics mine; Keevill 1. 5. In the early Tudor period the Salt Tower was generally called “Julius Caesar’s tower,” but by the late Elizabethan age that name had been transferred to the White Tower (Fry, Tower 87; Keay, Tower 37; Bayley 204–05; Charles J. Ffoulkes, Inventory and Survey of the Armouries of the Tower of London, vol. 1 of 2 [London: HMSO, 1916] 67), which is named “Caesar’s Tower” on the 1597 plan of the Tower of London (Keay, Tower 37). A 1641 list of the towers in the Tower complex similarly refers to “The White Tower or Caesar’s Tower belonging to Ye Office of the Ordinance” (“A Perticular of the Names of the Towers & Prison Lodgings in His Majesties Tower of London; Taken out of a Paper of Mr. William Francklyns, Sometymes Yeoman-Warder. Dat. 16 March, 1641,” Harley ms. 1326, f. 125r, British Lib., London). 6. The German nobleman Lupold von Wedel mentions having “visited a castle which is said to have been built by Julius Caesar, after whom it is named” (Lupold Von Wedel, Journey through England and Scotland Made by Lupold von Wedel in the Years 1584 and 1585, trans. Gottfried von Bülow, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, n.s. 9 [1895]: 223–70, 233; Parnell, Menagerie 7). Though Von Wedel’s diary is dated 1584–85, he apparently visited the Tower in August 1584 (Parnell, Menagerie 7). Previous visitors, none of whom mentions Caesar in connection with a visit to the Tower, include the German knight Wilwolt von Schaumburg in 1489 (Borg, “The Museum” 69); the Venetian diplomat Peter Pasqualigio in 1515 (Letters and Papers 116–17); Frederick, count palatine, in 1539 (Borg, “The Museum” 69); the Spanish nobleman and Knight of the Golden Fleece Don Manriquez de Lara, Duke de Najera, in 1544 (Parnell, Menagerie 7; William Brenchley Rye, introduction, England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First, ed. Rye [1865; New York: Bloom, 1967] xlvi); Monsieur Kentell in 1578 (Acts of the Privy Council 10:441); and the German merchant Samuel Kiechel in 1585 (“Samuel Kiechel, 1585,” in Rye). 7. Zdenĕk Brtnickýz Valdštejna, The Diary of Baron Waldstein, a Traveller in Elizabethan England, trans. G. W. Groos (London: Thames, 1981) 71; Frederic Gerschow, Diary of the Journey of Philip Julius, Duke of StettinPomerania, through England in the Year 1602, ed. Gottfried von Bülow, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, n.s. 6 (1892): 13, 15.

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8. Sir John Peyton, “A Declaracon of the State of Yor Highnes Tower of London,” 1597, Royal Armouries ms I. 243, Board of Trustees of the Armouries, Royal Armouries Lib., HM Tower of London, London, Eng., transcribed in Keay, Tower 57–59. For similar references to the Jacobean Tower as James,’ see William Hubbocke, An Oration Gratvlatory to the High and Mighty Iames of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, King, Defendor of the Faith, &c. on the Twelfth Day of February Last Presented, When His Maiesty Entered the Tower of London to Performe the Residue of the Solemnities of His Coronation through the Citie of London [ . . . ] (Oxford, 1604) B1r. 9. By the 1590s visitors to the armory “were already being shown items selected for their historical interest,” especially exhibits from the Tudor dynasty (Impey and Parnell 98), such as the wooden cannon that, in 1542, Henry VIII had used to deceive the French at Boulogne (Borg, “The Museum” 69). 10. Thomas Platter, Thomas Platter’s Travels in England, 1599, trans. Clare Williams (London: Cape, 1937) 161, 163. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs reports that, upon arriving at the Tower for her imprisonment, Elizabeth “first stayed and denied to land at those stayres where all traytours & offendours customably vsed to land” and eventually, “hauyng one foote vpon the stayre, sayd: Here landeth as true a subiect, beyng prisoner, as euer landed at these stayres” (Foxe 2:2290; Thomas S. Freeman, “‘As True a Subiect being Prysoner’: John Foxe’s Notes on the Imprisonment of Princess Elizabeth, 1554–5,” English Historical Review 117.140 [2002]: 113). Keay acknowledges the contemporary association of Elizabeth and the water entrance later known as “Traitors’ Gate”; however, the royal prisoner “was actually ‘taken in at the drawebridge’ [ . . . ] and not at St. Thomas’s Tower at all” (Tower 32; The Chronicle of Queen Jane, and of Two Years of Queen Mary, and Especially of the Rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyat, Camden Society 48, ed. John Gough Nichols [1553–54; London: Nichols, 1850] 70). See also Starkey, Elizabeth: Apprenticeship 141. 11. Von Wedel 234; Wirtemberg 19; Paul Hentzner, A Journey into England in the Year 1598, trans. R. Bentley, ed. Horace Walpole (Strawberry Hill, 1757) 37; Platter 159; Valdštejna 67; Gerschow 15. 12. Platter 160; A. Searle, “Sir Thomas Barrington in London, 1640–44,” Essex Journal 2 (1967): 36. 13. Gerschow 13; Platter 161. 14. Hentzner 39; Platter 163; “Frederick, Duke of Wirtemburg” 20. 15. Von Wedel 233; Ffoulkes 65; Hentzner 38; Platter 161; Gerschow 13. 16. Gerschow 13; Hentzner 38; Platter 161. The scheme is described in note 9, above. 17. Colvin et al. 3:98, 99, 271, 272; Keay, Tower 48–49. 18. William Fulke, A Sermon [on John xvii. 17] Preached [ . . . ] within the Tower of London in the Hearing of Such Obstinate Papistes as Were Prisoners There

Notes to Chapter Three

19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

181

(London, 1581); John Keltridge, Two Godlie and Learned Sermons [ . . . ] Preached before the Jesuites [ . . . ] and Other Adversaries to the Gospell of Christ in the Tower of London. In which, Were Confuted to Their Faces, the [ . . . ] Cheefe Poincts of Their Religion, etc. (London, 1581). Holleran 35; Hibbert et al. 89. Holleran xii, 41; see A True Report of the Disputation or Rather Priuate Conference Had in the Tower of London, with Ed. Campion, Iesuite, the Last of August. 1581 (London, 1583). Holleran 81; Anthony Munday, A Discouerie of Edmund Campion, and His Confederates, Their Most Horrible and Traiterous Practises, against Her Maiesties Most Royall Person and The Realme (London, 1582) [F3v-7v, G3v]. Impey and Parnell 52; John Nichols, ed., The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, 4 vols. (1828; New York: Franklin, 1967) 1:118. Nichols, James 1:119; Impey and Parnell 52. Plantagenet Somerset Fry, Kings and Queens of England and Scotland (London: Kindersley, 1999) 67; Nichols, James 1:235 n.2, 235–44. Nichols, James 1:237, 239, 237, 241. Nichols, James 1:320 n.1; Hubbocke B1r-2r. The traditional coronation procession through London had been postponed because of the plague (Nichols, James 1:319). According to Nichols (*325 n.1), the date in the title, “the twelft day of February,” is an error. As the title indicates, the speech was presented when James entered the Tower on March 12, 1604, preparatory to his royal entry through the city on the 15th (319, 324). Thomas Dekker, “The Magnificent Entertainment: Giuen to King James, Queene Anne His Wife, and Henry Frederick the Prince, vpon the Day of His Maiesties Tryumphant Passage (from the Tower) through His Honourable Citie (and Chamber) of London, being the 15. of March. 1603,” A Third Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, vol. 1 (London, 1751) 116–54. According to the modern calendar, this event took place on March 15, 1604 (Nichols, James 1:319, 324; James Travers, James I: The Masque of Monarchy, English Monarchs: Treasures from The National Archives [Kew, Eng.: The National Archives, 2003] 20). Nichols, James 1:515; Colvin et al. 3:272–73; A. C. N. Borg, “The Royal Menagerie,” in Charlton 102; Curiosities in the Tower of London, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1741) 1:84–89; Parnell, Menagerie 8–9; P. Thomas 32. For the 1605 event, see Nichols, James 1:515; Stow, Annales 865. For the 1609 event, see Nichols, James 2:259; Stow, Annales 895–96. In 1610 Prince Henry also entertained his cousin, Frederic Ulric, son of the Duke of Brunswick, at the Tower during a tour of England, with a fight between a lion and four dogs (Nichols, James 2:307; Stow, Annales 896). The masque is Ben Jonson, The Masque of Augurs (1622), in Nichols, James 4:736–49; for the reference to the lions, see 736.

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30. Nichols, James 2:64, 67, 78–79, 88. 31. Calendar of the Manuscripts [ . . . ] Salisbury 15:283; Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, and in Other Libraries of Northern Italy, ed. Horatio Brown, vol. 10 (London: HMSO, 1900) 83. 32. Rowse, Tower 123, 124, 141; Fry, Tower 119–23; Travers 42. 33. Fry, Tower 126–28; Travers 54–55. 34. Kinney, Shakespeare and Cognition 43, 46. 35. Travers 59–64; Rowse, Tower 145–52; Fry, Tower 128–31. 36. Travers 152; Nichols, James 2:675, 678; 3:100–04, 118–21, 137, 167–70. 37. Nichols, James 3:100; Colvin et al. 3:274; Rowse, Tower 143–44; Fry, Tower 124–25. 38. Fry, Tower 132; Fry, Kings and Queens 68; Siebert 21. 39. Fry, Kings and Queens 69; Impey and Parnell 42, 54–55; Parnell and Lapper 31. 40. Harold Hulme, The Life of Sir John Eliot, 1592 to 1632: Struggle for Parliamentary Freedom (New York: New York UP, 1957) 140; John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State. [ . . . ] Beginning the Sixteenth Year of King James, anno. 1618. And Ending the Fifth Year of King Charles, anno. 1629, vol. 1 of 8 (1659; Westmead, Farnborough, Hants., Eng.: Gregg, 1969) 356, 360, 691. For the impeachment proceedings, see Rushworth 302–91. 41. Kinney, Shakespeare by Stages 126, 141–44; Siebert 1–161; Patterson, Censorship 7, 10–12, 14–17, 25, 44–45, 47, 74–75, 10 n.11; Gurr, Shakespearean Stage 72–77; Montrose, The Purpose of Playing 99; D. Watson 25. Wickham provides a history of English Renaissance state censorship of drama, 54–149. Although only thirty instances of censorship were recorded by the Master of the Revels from 1590 to 1642 (Sheila Lambert, “State Control of the Press in Theory and Practice: The Role of the Stationers’ Company Before 1640,” Censorship and the Control of Print in England and France, 1600–1910, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris, St. Paul’s Bibliographies, gen. ed. Myers and Harris [Winchester, Eng.: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1992] 3), plays were not the only censored medium in early modern England. Shuger discusses laws against ecclesiastical, civil, and criminal defamation, as well as statues and proclamations that regulated language (70–77). On the government censorship of Holinshed’s Chronicles, see Donno 229, 232–33, 238. Sir John Hayward was imprisoned after the publication of The First Part of the Life and Raigne of Henry IIII, the second edition of which was burned according to the 1599 Bishops’ Ban (C. H. Herford Percy and Evelyn Simpson, eds., Ben Jonson, vol. 9 [Oxford: Clarendon, 1950] 589). For the text of that order, see London Stationers’ Company, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 A.D., vol. 3 of 5 (London, 1876) 677–78. For

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42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

183

more on the ban, see Lynda E. Boose, “The 1599 Bishops’ Ban, Elizabethan Pornography, and the Sexualization of the Jacobean Stage,” in Burt and Archer 185–86; Siebert 63; John J. Manning 24–25; Patterson, Censorship 47; and Moulton 103–04. Gabrieli and Melchiori quote a marginal note signed by Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels, 1579–1610, in the original portion of the manuscript of Munday et al., Sir Thomas More. Tilney required that the authors omit the Evil May Day “insurrection” of 1517 from the play “att your own perilles,” since the play, originally composed c.1592–93, would likely have provoked further anti-alien riots (17–19). A facsimile of Tilney’s order is printed in Kinney, Shakespeare by Stages 146. For additional details on the view that Sir Thomas More “was originally a dangerous play,” see McMillin 67–68. McMillin concurs that Tilney “heavily censored” the play’s first three scenes (20) and points out specific lines that Tilney marked for omission, concerning More and Fisher’s Catholicism (30). Shuger 183, 185; Maus 134; Patterson, Censorship 10–11, 18, 86. Kelley 61; Maus 113–15, 123; the quotation is from 122. Maus 124–28; Plowden 48; Hamilton xvi-xvii. Maus 132; Smith 153; Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester UP, 2004) 23– 24. Wilson argues for Shakespeare’s Catholic self-withholding (10–65) and use of the pseudonym Shakeshafte in the 1580s (48–50, 53–54). Akrigg 8; Prior 86; Freeman 110–12; Plowden 23. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reigns of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, James I, ed. Mary Ann Everett Green, vol. 5 of 12 (1856–72; Vaduz: Kraus Reprint, 1967) 566, 584. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic 554, 556–57, 566, 579, 581, 583. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic 593, 568, 569, 584, 590, 555, 556, 584. See also “The Execution of Robert Late Earle of Essex,” fol. 3r. Holinshed 4:934; “Queen Elizabeth’s First Reply to the Parliamentary Petitions Urging the Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, November 12, 1586,” version 2, in Elizabeth I: Collected Works 194. Montrose, The Purpose of Playing 80, 81, 84–86, 96. Gurr dates this play to “1592–3?” (Shakespearean Stage 237). Iacke Straw ll.456–62, 503–11, 647–51. Gurr dates this play to 1592 (Shakespearean Stage 235). 4.1 n.; Poyser 34; E. Hall 12. Montrose, however, interprets this dramatic scene as taking place in Flint Castle (The Purpose of Playing 95). The text of the play leaves the location open. Shakespeare, R2 4.1.317, 5.1.2. Here, “ill-erected” implies “not that it was ill-built but that it was built for ill” (Rowse, Tower 10; Holderness 207). Gurr expresses uncertainty about this original production date and notes that the play was revived in 1594 (Shakespearean Stage 237).

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58. Shakespeare, 1H6 1.3.31, 62, 65. 59. Although the early limit of True Tragedie R3, 1588–94, indicates that it could have been performed before 1590, Harbage’s years of most probable first presentation place 1H6 first. Still, True Tragedie R3, which Harbage places in 1591 (Annals 58–59), could be a case for which Harbage notes, “Sometimes the year in which a play has been placed is merely a median point between a forward and a backward limit, but usually there are better reasons for it chronological position than this” (xvii-xviii). 60. The second part of this play, now lost, was ready for production the following year (Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge, introduction, The Oldcastle Controversy: Sir John Oldcastle, Part I and The Famous Victories of Henry V, ed. Corbin and Sedge, The Revels Plays Companion Library, gen. ed. E. A. J. Honingman et al. [Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991] 9). 61. Hamilton xvi-xviii, 37, 41, 122–24. 62. Nichols, James 1:319; Calendar of the Manuscripts [ . . . ] Salisbury 15:283; see also 15:278–79. 63. Woodstock 5.4, 2.2; William A. Armstrong, introduction, in Armstrong x-xi. 64. Woodstock 5.4. See Holinshed 2:852–53. 65. Gurr dates this play to “1592–3?” (Shakespearean Stage 237). 66. Shakespeare, 2H6 5.1.40–45. For Queen Margaret’s desire to overthrow York, see E. Hall 232; Holinshed 3:244–45; Stow, Annales 402. Hall specifies that Somerset was “sent to the toure of London” (232). 67. Shakespeare, 2H6 5.1.83–87, 134, 136. Holinshed does not mention the Tower: “the duke of Yorke (as prisoner) rode before [the king], and so was kept a while” (3:233). 68. See Chapter One, note 2 about Sir Thomas More. 69. Munday et al. 4.1.73–74, 127–28, 157–62; 5.4.14, 27. 70. Heinemann 205; Strong, Cult of Elizabeth 15. 71. Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1925) 2:399. For an account of the actual Parry’s attempted assassination of Elizabeth, see Read 2:399–405 and R. Manning, “The Prosecution of Sir Michael Blount, Lieutenant of the Tower of London, 1535,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 57.136 (1984) 219. 72. Heywood spells Leicester as both Lecester and Lester. 73. This play’s character tags are inconsistently abbreviated. 74. Thomas Hamond, The Late Commotion of Certaine Papists in Herefordshire (London, 1605) B4v-C1r, B2v. 75. Acts of the Privy Council 32:506; Calendar of the Manuscripts [ . . . ] Salisbury 15:283. 76. Chapman 158; Loades 190.

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77. Gurr dates the play to 1628–34 (Shakespearean Stage 237). 78. Rushworth 357, 391; Hibbert et al. 94. 79. Fry, Tower 134; Hulme 272; John Morrill, “The Stuarts (1603–1688),” The Oxford History of Britain, rev. ed., ed. Kenneth O. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999) 352; Tricomi, Anticourt Drama 137–39. Although Gurr indicates a range of years (1628–34) for Iohn and Matilda (Shakespearean Stage 237), his early limit is the year of Buckingham’s assassination. For citizen opposition to Charles, see Tricomi, Anticourt Drama 133–41. 80. Harbage, Annals 127, 356; Gurr, Shakespearean Stage 237; Gurr, Playgoing 90. 81. Gurr dates the play to 1632 (Shakespearean Stage 240). 82. Harbage, Annals 133, 356; Gurr, Shakespearean Stage 240. According to Gurr, Perkin Warbeck was first performed in 1632 (240). 83. Thomas Fuller, The Worthies of England, 1662, ed. John Freeman, 1st abr. ed. (London: Allen, 1952) 421; Churchill 266–67, 270; Sutton xii. 84. Churchill 269–71. The playwrights were Marlowe and Peele (270). 85. Harbage, Annals 58, 72. Gurr dates Shakespeare, R3 to “1593?” (Shakespearean Stage 241). 86. Legge p.99, 101; True Tragedie R3 p.30–31; Shakespeare, R3 3.1.140–50, 3.1.191–94, 3.4.58–107, 4.1.15–27; Heywood, 2E4 p.145, 146, 152. 87. Legge p.213; True Tragedie R3 p.40–41, 44; Shakespeare, R3 4.2.66–82, 4.3.1; Heywood, 2E4 p.148–49, 153–55. Richard is crowned after the murders in 2E4 (p.184) and thus is protector and not king when the murders are ordered and carried out; yet, in this play the princes themselves exhibit the duality of royal strength, in their bravery and love for each other (p.153–54), and royal weakness, in their powerlessness as murder victims (p.154–55). 88. True Tragedie R3 was in print by 1594 (Harbage, Annals 59); Shakespeare, R3, by 1597 (59); and Heywood, 2E4, by 1599 (73); Boose 185. For the text of the Bishops’ Ban, see London Stationers’ Company 677–78. 89. The quotations are from Acts of the Privy Council 29:659–60 and Calendar of the Manuscripts [ . . . ] Salisbury 17:443; see also Acts of the Privy Council 32:4, 503; Calendar of the Manuscripts [ . . . ] Salisbury 16:192– 93, 197–98; 17:377, 388, 443–44, 644. Although the outgoing Lieutenant, Sir George Harvey, had grown somewhat lenient in this matter by November 1604, the entries above demonstrate that his successor, Sir William Waad, who was installed in August 1605, strictly limited the prisoners’ visitors (Calendar of the Manuscripts [ . . . ] Salisbury 16:362; 17:375–76). 90. Keay, Tower 38. As Curnow points out, “The fact that [the Bloody Tower] was still known as the Garden Tower well into the 16th century only emphasises the contemporary lack of association with the sons of

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91.

92.

93.

94. 95.

96.

Edward IV” (61). Although Curnow does not give a specific date, Brown notes that in 1532 the Bloody Tower was known as the Garden Tower (“Architectural Description” 42), as it was called in a survey of the Tower under Henry VIII (Bayley 257). Due to Henry VII’s questionable claim to England’s throne, “The Tudor state sought to legitimate itself by means of its integration into a providentially ordered cosmos” (E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays [London: Chatto, 1948] 29; Montrose, The Purpose of Playing 21). The Tudor Myth required the vilification of Richard III, so England could appear to have been saved by his successor, Henry Tudor (Tillyard 29–30). See King 19–44; Saccio 172, 184; Rackin 40–41; Dollimore 89–90; and Tillyard 29–32. To cite an example from each play, Forrest in True Tragedie R3 calls the murders “a bloodie deed” (p.44); Tyrrel in Shakespeare, R3 announces, “The tyrannous and bloody act is done,” and shares this news with “the bloody king” (4.3.1, 22); and in Heywood, 2E4, Prince Richard notices that Prince Edward bleeds: “What, bleeds your grace?” as they kneel in prayer within the Tower, moments before their murder (p.154). Tyrrel’s name is spelled Tyrell in Legge; Tyrrel in Shakespeare, R3; Terrill and Terrell in True Tragedie R3; and Tirill and Tiril in Heywood, 2E4. Arthur F. Kinney, editor’s note, Holinshed’s Chronicles, by Alison Taufer, Twayne’s English Authors Ser., gen. ed. Kinney (New York: Twayne, 1999) ix; Donno 229, 232–33, 238; Saccio 13; John J. Manning 21; Shuger 2; Patterson, Reading 128–29. Heywood revises the order of events to conclude with Richard’s crowning (2E4 p.184). These include Legge; Shakespeare, 1H6 and 2H6; True Tragedie R3; Iacke Straw; Shakespeare, 3H6; Peele; Shakespeare, R3; Marlowe; Munday et al.; Shakespeare, R2; Heywood, 1E4 and 2E4; Munday, Drayton, et al.; Cromwell; and Dekker and Webster. Kinney, editor’s note ix; Donno 229, 232–33, 238; Patterson, Censorship 86.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. 9/24=.375. These include Legge; True Tragedie R3; Shakespeare, 3H6 and R3; Marlowe; Heywood, 1E4 and 2E4; Dekker and Webster; and Heywood, 1 If You Know Not Me. 2. 15/24=.625. These include Shakespeare, 2H6 and 3H6; Peele; Shakespeare, R3; Marlowe; Shakespeare, R2; Heywood, 1E4 and 2E4; Munday, Drayton, et al.; Rowley; Heywood, 1 If You Know Not Me; Shakespeare and Fletcher; Drue; Davenport; and Ford. 3. 17/24=.708. These include Legge; Shakespeare, 1H6 and 2H6; True Tragedie R3; Shakespeare, 3H6; Peele; Shakespeare, R3; Marlowe; Munday et al.;

Notes to Chapter Four

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

187

Heywood, 1E4; Munday, Drayton, et al.; Dekker and Webster; Rowley; Heywood, 1 If You Know Not Me; Shakespeare and Fletcher; Davenport; and Ford. 20/24=.833. These include Legge; Shakespeare, 1H6 and 2H6; True Tragedie R3; Iacke Straw; Shakespeare, R3; Marlowe; Shakespeare, R2; Heywood, 1E4 and 2E4; Munday, Drayton, et al.; Cromwell; Dekker and Webster; Rowley; Heywood, 1 and 2 If You Know Not Me; Woodstock; Shakespeare and Fletcher; Drue; and Ford. 21/24=.875. These include Legge; Shakespeare, 1H6 and 2H6; True Tragedie R3; Iacke Straw; Shakespeare, 3H6; Peele; Shakespeare, R3; Marlowe; Shakespeare, R2; Heywood, 1E4 and 2E4; Munday, Drayton, et al.; Cromwell; Dekker and Webster; Rowley; Heywood, 1 and 2 If You Know Not Me; Shakespeare and Fletcher; Davenport; and Ford. The exceptions are Woodstock (c.1605–09) and Drue (1624). Legge; True Tragedie R3; Shakespeare, R3; and Heywood, 2E4. Shakespeare, 3H6 and Heywood, 1E4. Shakespeare represents Warwick’s men freeing Henry VI from the Tower (3H6 4.3). In Peele, Lluellen reminds Edward that his father attempted to escape from the Tower, though he died from a fall in the process (p.40). Shakespeare, R3 depicts William, Lord Hastings, newly released from imprisonment in the Tower (1.1), as well as the imprisoned Clarence recounting for his Keeper a dream he has had of escaping from the Tower (1.4). By imaging escape, Clarence encourages playgoers to imagine themselves in control at the Tower. The same is true of the Younger Mortimer in Marlowe, who is sent to the Tower for the death of the king’s lover, Gaviston (3.3), but escapes— as Mortimer actually did, by giving his keepers “a sleepie drinke” (Stow, Svrvay 41)—and goes on to lead a rebellion against the king. In Shakespeare, R2, although Bolingbroke sends the deposed King Richard to the Tower, Richard is redirected to Pomfret (5.1). In Heywood, 1E4, though Falconbridge is unsuccessful at “Encouraging his forces to deliuer/ King Henry, late depos’d, out of the Tower” (p.7), during a victory celebration at the Tower, Edward pardons the son of Hobs the Tanner, imprisoned in Stafford Jaile for a robbery (p.86–88). Heywood, 2E4 represents Edward pardoning his mistress’ husband, Matthew Shore, a Tower prisoner condemned to die, along with the rest of his company (p.134–39). Not only does Shore, under the pseudonym Matthew Floode, manage to avoid being executed at the Tower, but the Lieutenant of the Tower, Brackenbury, invites Shore to lodge at the Tower as his guest (p.141). In fact, Brackenbury later allows Shore to advise him in following Gloucester’s orders regarding the princes in the Tower (p.145–46). A Tower prisoner thus sees his fortunes reversed, moving to

188

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

Notes to Chapter Four a position of power over the Tower’s use, and, however inadvertently, condoning the murder of his despised king’s children. In Rowley, at the last minute, Henry VIII reverses his order to have his queen, Katharine Parr, imprisoned in the Tower for her Lutheran beliefs (K2r). In Heywood, 1 If You Know Not Me, Princess Elizabeth is released from the Tower (p.221). In Shakespeare and Fletcher, Henry rescues Cranmer from Gardiner and the other privy councilors who have arranged to have him imprisoned in the Tower (5.3). In Drue, King Edward’s Tower prisoner, Gardner, is moved from the Tower to the Marshlsea and later released ([A3v], B3r). In Davenport, the king’s prisoners, Fitzwater, Old Lord Bruce, and Leicester, are soon free from the Tower and building an army against the king, demonstrating the Tower’s limited use as a tool of the king’s oppression (3.2). In Ford, it is announced that Warbeck has escaped from the Tower twice (5.3). Shakespeare, 1H6 5.1.86–87, 136. According to John Gerard, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, trans. Philip Caraman (New York: Longmans, 1951), in 1597 Gerard was imprisoned in the Tower (102, 104), where he was repeatedly tortured (108–15). See also Hibbert et al. 90. For the details of Gerard’s escape, see Gerard 116–39; Hibbert et al. 78. Munday, Drayton, et al., ll.2076–85. Inconsistencies in characters’ names abound throughout the text of this play (Corbin and Sedge 33). In this passage, Old-castle is both “sir John” and “Old-ca.” Keay, Tower 8; Lipman 146. Lipman 147; Keay, Tower 8, 10. Keay, Tower 8; Lipman 147; R. Manning, “The Prosecution” 217. Stow, Svrvay 94–95; Analytical Index to [ . . . ] Remembrancia, entries 1:81 (426), 1:89 (426–28), 1:94 (428), 1:379 (429–30), 1:380 (430), 1:475, 476 (434), 1:590 (553–54), 1:658 (186), 5:4 (441–42), 5:16 (442–43), 6:79 (445). Richard Helgerson, “The Folly of Maps and Modernity,” Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain, ed. Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (Cambridge, Eng: Cambridge UP, 2001) 241. See also Gordon and Klein, introduction, in Gorden and Klein, esp. 3–4. Lipman 146; Keay, Tower 1, 8–10, 13. The original survey is lost: “the Robert Whitehand copy of January 1712/13 [ . . . ] , for the time being, can only be assumed to be an accurate copy of the original survey” (Keay, Tower 16). Peyton (1597) 57. East Smithfield, to the northeast of the Tower, fell “within the Tower liberties” (Younghusband 500). Keay, Tower 10; Peyton (1597) 58.

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189

21. Keay, Tower 10–11, also citing Sir John Peyton, “A Declaration of the State of the Tower of London,” 1598, ms. Eng. Hist. e. 195, fols. 1r-8v, Bodleian Lib., University of Oxford, Oxford, Eng., transcribed in Keay, Tower 60. 22. Keay, Tower 8, 26; see Calendar of the Manuscripts [ . . . ] Salisbury 17:558. 23. Stow writes, “Upon this [Tower] hil is alwayes readily prepared at the charges of the City a large Scaffold, and gallowes of timber, for the execution of such traitors or other transgressors, as are delivered out of the Tower, or otherwise, to the Sheriffes of London by writ there to be executed” (Svrvay 94). 24. Acts of the Privy Council 27:86; Bartholomew 80; W. D. M. Raeburn, “Ceremonies of the Tower,” in Charlton 128. The custom dates to 1555 (128). 25. In Shakespeare, 1H6, in his prison at the Tower, Edmund Mortimer claims that his unjust imprisonment “Within a loathsome dungeon” warrants rebellion (2.5n., 2.5.57). His imprisonment is ahistorical (see Charles Boyce, Shakespeare A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Plays, His Poems, His Life and Times, and More [New York: Dell, 1990] 444–45). In Shakespeare, 2H6, Somerset’s release from the Tower only strengthens York’s resolve to depose the king (4.9). In Shakespeare, 3H6, Warwick’s men decide that their first priority is to free Henry VI, unjustly imprisoned in the Tower by King Edward (4.3). In Peele, Lluellen’s memory of his father’s death while trying to escape from the Tower strengthens his resolve to defeat Edward (p.40). In Marlowe, the Younger Mortimer is sent to the Tower for Gaviston’s murder (3.3), inciting him to escape and lead the rebellion against Edward. In Heywood, 1E4, Falconbridge encourages his rebel forces to take revenge at the Tower for their oppression (p.8–9) and Edward’s tyranny in imprisoning their king there (p.25). In Munday, Drayton, et al., Old-castle’s escape is a rebellion against Henry V for imprisoning him in the Tower. In Dekker and Webster, the servant Ned Homes recounts that, upon entering his home, he was “attached,/ Threatned the Rack” and told to yield his master, Suffolk, to Mary’s supporters (C2v), and the rebel Wyat compares Mary to the Tower as “the key that opens vnto all the Land” for Philip of Spain, as a warrant for rebellion (D1v). In Rowley, when the temperamental Henry VIII is disturbed by his councilors, he orders them conveyed to the Tower and beheaded (C2v-3v), blaming them for “ill May-daies, and riots made:/ For lawlesse rebels do disturbe our state” (C3r-v). In Heywood, 1 If You Know Not Me, when Elizabeth is crowned, the Tower Constable who mistreated her as a prisoner, in the name of the Catholic Queen Mary, begs her pardon, and though she forgives him, she takes his staff of office (p.244–45).

190

26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Notes to Chapter Four In Shakespeare and Fletcher, Lord Surrey unites with the Duke of Norfolk, the Duke of Suffolk, and the Lord Chamberlain against Wolsey, to avenge his father-in-law’s execution at the Tower (3.2.6–9). In Davenport, the lecherous king tyrannically orders his rebellious nobles, Leicester, Fitzwater, and Old Lord Bruce, to the Tower to be muzzled as mastiffs because they oppose his deference to the pope, who will overpower England (2.4). In Ford, a previous sovereign’s deployment of the Tower warrants rebellion. Warbeck’s claim to be one of the princes in the Tower helps him obtain foreign support and domestic rebels; in fact, at the Tower itself, King Henry and his nobles discuss the Lord Stanley’s treasonous support of Warbeck (1.3). Antonia Fraser, Mary, Queen of Scots (New York: Delacorte, 1969) 369, 371, 534; MacCaffrey 105–06. See MacCaffrey for details of the Norfolk marriage proposal (114–25), the Northern Rebellion (126–34), the Ridolfi Plot (135–44), the Throckmorton Plot (221, 341–42), and the Babington Plot (346–48). In the late sixteenth century, “the Catholic Church did not recognize Elizabeth’s right to the throne,” as she was the illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII’s illegal union with Anne Boleyn. Thus, unless Elizabeth produced an heir, Catholics considered Mary Stuart to be next in line to the English throne (Schama 3: “The Body of the Queen”). Morey concurs that, among English Catholics, Mary Stuart “was widely regarded as the heir to Elizabeth’s throne” (52). Andrew Gurr similarly argues that Shakespeare depicts the contemporary issue of “royal hands red with the blood of their kindred,” comparing Richard II’s role in the murder of his uncle Woodstock, the duke of Gloucester, in R2 to Elizabeth’s execution of Mary Stuart (The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642 [Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 2004] 178). According to Patterson, “We do not need to argue a tight fit between events and characters in history and fiction”; in fact, in many cases, “it was the very inexactness of the analogies [ . . . ] that made them useful, by providing writers with an escape route” (Censorship 85, 47). The play does not dramatize the Mary Stuart story but alludes to it (86). Legge p.227. All quotations attributed to Legge in this study are from Sutton’s prose translation of the original Latin. Fraser, Mary, Queen of Scots 284–304; Legge p.247, 249. Legge p.85; MacCaffrey 114; Hamilton 41. Hamilton 119. According to Hamilton, fifteen Catholics were executed in 1591, thirty-one in 1588 (119). Aleida Assmann, “Spirits, Ghosts, Demons in Shakespeare and Milton,” Renaissance Go-Betweens: Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, ed. Andreas Höfele and Werner von Koppenfels (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006)

Notes to Chapter Four

34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

191

206; Duffy 372; Munday G3r; True Tragedie R3 p.3; Wilson 48; Wickham 112, 265. For the medieval development of purgatorial doctrine, see Zimmerman 36–39. True Tragedie R3 p.5. This Latin is evidently corrupt. Cresse should be cresce, [ . . . ] and scitio should, perhaps, be citò. It would then translate to “Increase, blood! Let blood be satisfied with blood! Which I hope it quickly will. O, quickly, quickly, revenge!” The final phrase may, however, be sitio vindictam or “I thirst for vengeance!” (p.3 n.1). Wilson provides “mounting evidence” that Shakespeare was raised in a Catholic family in Warwickshire, “the epicenter of the English CounterReformation culture,” and later worked as a servant in Catholic households in Lancashire, “the most Catholic of English counties” (1–65); the quotations are from 1 and 44. Richard Simpson provides evidence for Shakespeare’s parents’ Catholicism in “What Was the Religion of Shakespeare?” The Rambler 9 (1858): 169–78. Wilson (17, 50–51) and Michael Wood (Shakespeare [New York: Basic, 2003]) document “a six-page handwritten Catholic testament of faith, in English, each page signed in the name of John Shakespeare,” which was discovered in the roof of “the Shakespeare birthplace in Henley Street,” Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1757, and is now lost (Wood 75–77). Greenblatt documents this “spiritual testament” in Hamlet in Purgatory 248–49 and Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004) 101–02, 316– 17, concluding that Shakespeare “was probably brought up in a Roman Catholic household” (Hamlet in Purgatory 249). Akrigg concurs that the Ardens were Catholics and that John Shakespeare was, perhaps, “a covert Catholic” (191). R. Simpson 170, 178–80; Greenblatt, Will in the World 157–58; Wood 88– 89, 91; Wilson 105. Wood 88–89, Greenblatt, Will in the World 157; Wilson 53, 105. The quotation is from Wood 89. Wood 90–91. The name is sometimes spelled Throckmorton. For more on that plot, see Fraser, Mary, Queen of Scots 469–70. Wood 91; R. Simpson 181–82, 184. Wood 93; R. Simpson 184. These events are documented in the diary of a Catholic priest who spent over four years imprisoned in the Tower: Brian A. Harrison, A Tudor Journal: The Diary of a Priest in the Tower, 1580–1585 (London: St. Paul’s, 2000). See also Holinshed 4:510. M. C. Bradbrook, The Living Monument: Shakespeare and the Theatre of His Time (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1976) 4; R. Simpson 180. “London Tower” is named as a London landmark in Bale (p.63). The 1579 play is Legge. Shakespeare first brought the Tower to the stage in 1H6 1.1 and 2H6. Shakespeare, 1H6 and 2H6.

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44. “Other dramatists—among them Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood and William Shakespeare—may have collaborated on the initial writing and on revisions” (Hamilton 119). McMillin argues that the contribution to the Sir Thomas More manuscript known as “Hand D” and traditionally attributed to Shakespeare is actually a later addition by the contributor known as “Hand C” (135–59). However, he is careful not to deny that both hands may be Shakespeare’s (152, 154–55, 158, 159). A brief look at some of the arguments that Hand D is indeed Shakespeare’s, and a partial copy of the Hand D manuscript, are in Wood 267–70. 45. McMillin 139, 140–41. 46. In Legge, Gloucester acts on the king’s behalf at the Tower council (p.57–71). In Shakespeare, 1H6, the Bishop of Winchester locks the Duke of Gloucester out of the Tower and prevents him from inspecting the Tower’s artillery for the king (1.1, 1.3). In Shakespeare, 2H6, Cade and his rebels necessitate that the Lord Scales defend London at the Tower (4.5). In True Tragedie R3 Myles Forest tells Prince Edward, identified in the text as “King,” that the protector has appointed “an ayde to sir Thomas Brokenbury,” the Lieutenant of the Tower. Richard thus acts on the sovereign’s behalf, though without his permission; in fact, Richard has hired Prince Edward’s murderer (p.42). In Iacke Straw, after the rebellion, the king, feeling unsafe, continues to use the Tower as a fortress with a significant escort (ll.1208–10). In Shakespeare, R3, Gloucester has Clarence executed at the Tower in King Edward’s name (1.4), though against the king’s will (2.1). In Shakespeare, R2, the usurping subject, Bolingbroke, orders the deposed king to be conveyed to the Tower (4.1). In Heywood, 1E4, Falconbridge and his rebels force the citizens and apprentices to defend the city at the Tower (p.13–14, 17–18), and the king’s officer, the Lieutenant of the Tower, must spend time investigating the rebel army (p.14). In Heywood, 2E4, Jane Shore secures King Edward’s pardon for her husband at the Tower (p.138), and Gloster has the Tower prepared for the princes to stay there (p.145), only to have them murdered before, not after, he is crowned (p.154–55, 184). In Munday, Drayton et al., King Henry must order that “the Posterne by the Tower be kept” (l.1378) against rebels. In Cromwell, Cromwell is arrested under false charges in the king’s name and executed on Tower Hill before the king’s reprieve is delivered (5.5). In Dekker and Webster, Northumberland dictates to Queen Iane that she must go to the Tower until her coronation (A3v), and when he leaves to fight Mary’s forces, he leaves the Tower in Iane’s name, though she is powerless to defend it (B1r).

Notes to Chapter Four

47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

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In Rowley, Woolsie attributes Anne Bullen’s beheading (at the Tower) to his influence over the king and assures Gardner that prelates still control the kingdom (C1r). In Heywood, 1 If You Know Not Me, Elizabeth’s friends petition Queen Mary to allow kinder treatment of the royal prisoner at the Tower, and the king grants the petition and “whispers a little to the Queen” (p.216). In Heywood, 2 If You Know Not Me, councilors dictate how the queen will deploy the Tower, forcing her to imprison her would-be assassin, whom she would prefer to forgive (p.327). In Woodstock the king’s treasonous councilors decide to make the Tower their power base (5.4). In Shakespeare and Fletcher, two Gentlemen discuss Wolsey’s direction of Buckingham’s trial and death sentence as Buckingham is conveyed to the Tower after his arraignment (2.1). In Drue, Bonner instructs Clunie to say Queen Mary has ordered him to remain at the Dutches’ house “till her highnesse further pleasure,/ That she shall walke the hie-way to the Tower” ([B4v]). In Ford, Henry VII must make the Tower his fortress to protect himself against an uprising by Warbeck’s supporters (1.1.135–39). Gloucester is spelled Gloster in True Tragedie R3 and Heywood, 2E4. Gurr dates the play to 1592 (Shakespearean Stage 235). R. Manning, Village Revolts 187–88, 202. Harbage 58; Gurr, Shakespearean Stage 235, P. Clark, “Crisis” 54. R. Manning dates this riot to “11 July 1591” in Village Revolts 207. The year is apparently a misprint since it occurs in a paragraph about 1592. The disorder occurred on June 11, 1592, according to the “Extract from a letter of Sir William Webbe, Lord Mayor, to Lord Burghley,” in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 4:310. P. Clark, “Crisis” (53), Cook (251), and Rappaport (11) also date the riot to 1592. Marlowe 4.1, 4.2. See note 52, below, for representations of rebellions in these plays. In these plays that represent rebellions against the sovereign involving the Tower, dates are given for the eight plays most probably first produced from 1590 to 1592, including Marlowe—as well as Heywood’s 1E4 and 2E4, which may have been produced as early as 1592 (Harbage, Annals 72). Dates are also given for the nine to eleven plays most probably first produced after 1595, for readers returning from Chapter Four, note 101. In Legge, Buckingham, Richmond, and Lord Stanley lead a rebellion against the king’s tyranny, especially the murder of the princes in the Tower (p.249, 251, 313, 315). In Shakespeare, 1H6 (1590), imprisoned in the Tower, Edmund Mortimer incites his nephew, Richard Plantagenet, to challenge the Lancastrian king, beginning the Wars of the Roses (2.5).

194

Notes to Chapter Four In Shakespeare, 2H6 (c.1590), Cade stirs his followers to burn down the Tower (4.6). In True Tragedie R3 (1588–94) Buckingham, Richmond, and other peers lead a rebellion against the king for his tyranny, especially the murder of the princes in the Tower (p.45–46, 54–55). In Iacke Straw (1590–93) rebels attack and kill at the Tower, where the king’s mother has taken refuge (ll.456–62, 647–51). In Shakespeare, 3H6 (c.1591), Warwick and his forces rebel against Edward IV when they free Henry VI from the Tower (4.3.60–64; 4.6); King Edward later deposes Henry VI and sends the former king to the Tower, where he is murdered (4.7–4.8, 5.6). In Peele (1590–93), the rebel Lluellen uses the memory of his father’s attempted escape from the Tower to defy the king (p.40). In Shakespeare, R3 (1591–92), Richmond, Buckingham, and Stanley lead a rebellion against the king for his tyranny, especially the murder of his nephews in the Tower (4.4.433–538, 4.5, 5.2, 5.3.227–46). In Marlowe (1591–93), Mortimer escapes from imprisonment in the Tower and goes on to lead a rebellion against the king (4.2.43–45). In Shakespeare, R2, Bolingbroke deposes the king and has him conveyed to the Tower (4.1). In Heywood, 1E4 (1592–99, but most probably first performed in 1599; see Harbage, Annals 72), Falconbridge and his rebels march on London to free Henry VI from the Tower in defiance of King Edward (p.14–15, 25–26). In Heywood, 2E4 (1592–99, but most probably first performed in 1599; see Harbage, Annals 72), Gloster has the princes in the Tower murdered; still uncrowned, in so doing he commits a rebellion against the rightful uncrowned king in addition to regicide (p.148–49, 154–55, 184). In Munday, Drayton, et al. (1599), when the Lollards rebel, the Postern of the Tower is to be kept from them (ll.1360–83), and Old-castle craftily escapes from imprisonment in the Tower (ll.2031–90), defying the king. In Cromwell (c.1599–1602), Gardiner, Norfolk, and Bedford have Cromwell executed on Tower Hill against the king’s will (5.5). In Dekker and Webster (1602), the Lady Iane’s supporters, rebels to the rightful Queen Mary, “haue ceased her in the tower,/ By publicke proclamation made her Queene” (B3r). In Rowley (1604), the king’s unreformed bishops conspire to have Queen Katharine imprisoned in the Tower and beheaded for her Lutheran beliefs (H2v-I1v, [I4v]-K2r). In Heywood, 1 If You Know Not Me (1604–05), the forces of “Wiat and the Kentish rebels” are committed to the Tower (p.194, 197). In Heywood, 2 If You Know Not Me (1604–05), a subject plans to shoot the queen and is committed to the Tower (p.324–27).

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53.

54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65.

66.

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In Shakespeare and Fletcher (1613), when Buckingham is imprisoned for vowing to kill the king, the people, who love him, observe as he is taken to the Tower (1.1, 1.2, 2.1). In Davenport (c.1628–29) the king’s councilors escape from the Tower to lead a rebellion against him (3.2). In Ford (c.1625–34), Warbeck’s claim to be one of the princes in the Tower helps him obtain foreign support and domestic rebels against the king (1.3, 2.1). These two plays are Munday et al., Sir Thomas More (2.3, 5.1.43)—featuring More’s ahistorical intervention in the riot (2.4n.); and Woodstock (4.4). The other play that does not represent a rebellion is Drue. These included Munday, Drayton, et al.; Cromwell; Dekker and Webster; Rowley; Heywood, 1 and 2 If You Know Not Me; Shakespeare and Fletcher; Davenport; Ford; and—according to Harbage (Annals 72)—probably Heywood, 1E4 and 2E4. The exceptions were Woodstock and Drue. Shakespeare, 2H6 4.2.31–75, 149–50, 4.6.2–6; Fitter, “Your Captain” 181, 197–98; Cartelli, “Jack Cade” 58. Shakespeare, 2H6 4.2.8–9; see Cartelli, Marlowe 54; Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1982) 150; Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority 38–39. Shakespeare, 2H6 4.3.14–16, 4.7.1–2, n.1, 4.6.15; Cartelli, “Jack Cade” 57, 63. See also note 68, below. Shakespeare, 2H6 4.4.49–53, 4.5.7–8; Fitter, “Your Captain” 197. Shakespeare, 2H6 4.7.13–14, 19–22, 28–30. Shakespeare, 2H6 4.7.38–108, 42n.; Cartelli, “Jack Cade” 59–60. Cartelli, “Jack Cade” 56, 53; Fitter, “Your Captain” 181, 182, 197. Holinshed 3:224; E. Hall 220. Except for this statement, chronicle accounts by Hall, Holinshed, and Stow refer to Cade’s rebels vaguely as “the Kentishe people” (E. Hall 220), the “commons of Kent” (Stow, Annales 388; Holinshed 3:222, 223), “the poore people and commons of the Realme” (Stow, Annales 389; Holinshed 3:222), and “the common people” (E. Hall 220; Stow, Annales 390). Shakespeare, 2H6 4.4.33, 4.2.66 and n., 4.7.17, Carroll, “Nursey of Beggary” 42. Carroll attests that Cade’s revolt in this play is “perhaps the most directly connected to the issues of vagabondage and enclosure” (41). Shakespeare, 2H6 4.2.10–11, 4.4.32–33, 50. Lyle speculates that Cade “must have negotiated with the Governor of the Tower for the surrender of Saye and Crowmer” and that “Lord Scales, the Governor of the Tower, had managed to keep [the Tower] in his own hands as the price of surrendering Saturday’s victims” (12). This conjecture, while possible, is not made in Shakespeare’s sources (E. Hall 220; Holinshed 3:224). Lyle 9–12; Shakespeare, 2H6 4.7.

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67. Greenblatt, Will in the World 157–73, esp. 158. 68. Stow, Annales 284–89; Shakespeare, 2H6 4.4.43–48; 4.5.8. Unlike Saccio, who argues that the rebels of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, like Shakespeare’s version of Cade’s men, were “an ignorant mob who yearn to upset the whole of society” (124), Greenblatt specifies that Shakespeare “add[s] details drawn from the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381” (Will in the World 169). These details include the following actions by the rebels: excessively drinking beer or wine (Shakespeare, 2H6 4.2.65–66, 71; 4.6.3–4; Stow, Annales 284, 285, 286); freeing the prisoners from the jails (Shakespeare, 2H6 4.3.14–15; Stow, Annales 285, 286); attacking the Tower (Shakespeare, 2H6 4.6.14–15; Stow, Annales 285, 286, 287); destroying the Savoy (Shakespeare, 2H6 4.7.1, 4.7. n.1; Stow, Annales 285, 286); and burning the kingdom’s records (Shakespeare, 2H6 4.7.12–13; Stow, Annales 285). Holinshed seems to support Saccio’s view of the Peasants’ Revolt (2:734– 51). E. Hall’s Chronicle begins with the reign of Henry IV and thus does not contain an account of the 1381 Revolt. For “The complaint of the commons of Kent” in 1450, see Holinshed 3:222–23 and Stow, Annales 388–89. 69. Lyle 12; Shakespeare, 2H6 4.5.7. 70. Rappaport 13. These included Shakespeare, 1H6 (1590) and 2H6 (c.1590); True Tragedie R3 (1588–94); Iacke Straw (1590–93); Shakespeare, 3H6 (c.1591); Peele (1590–93); Shakespeare, R3 (1591–92); Marlowe (1591– 93); Shakespeare, R2 (1595); Heywood, 1E4 and 2E4 (1592–99); Munday, Drayton, et al. (1599); and Cromwell (c.1599–1602). 71. These were Shakespeare, 1H6 and 2H6; True Tragedie R3; Iacke Straw; Shakespeare, 3H6; Peele; Shakespeare, R3; Marlowe; Shakespeare, R2, and—according to Harbage, Annals 72—probably Heywood, 1E4 and 2E4. Shakespeare’s 1H6 and R3 were revived in 1594 (Gurr, Shakespearean Stage 237, 241). 72. Except for Lent, from June 3, 1594 until July 1596, a continuous sequence of plays ran in London (Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 1:297; Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience 45), and April 1595, just weeks before the apprentice riot on Tower Hill, brought in Henslowe’s highest receipts from 1594 to 1597 (Philip Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert [Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1961] 176–77). 73. Rappaport 12; I. Archer 4. 74. R. Manning, Village Revolts 208. The Long Parliament began in 1640 (Smith 233, 389). 75. Stow, Annales 768; R. Manning, Village Revolts 204–05; Suzuki 183; I. Archer 1; P. Clark, “Crisis” 53–54; Power 379; Cook 256–57; John Stow, The Abridgement or Summarie of the English Chronicle, First Collected by Master John Stow, and after Him Augmented [ . . . ] . By E[dmund] H[owes]

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76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

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(London, 1607) 499–500. Although Wrightson cautions that, “By ‘riot,’ contemporaries meant the committing of an unlawful act by three or more persons assembled for the purpose, a legal definition which meant that many comparatively petty offences could be subsumed under the term” (173), the riots of June 1595 were rather large scale. The June 6 uprising, in which a silk-weaver who had expressed grievances against the Lord Mayor was rescued from confinement in Bedlam, involved “a crowd of 200 or 300 persons” (R. Manning, Village Revolts 209). And the food riot against the fishwives on June 12 involved “a crowd of between sixty and eighty apprentices” (I. Archer 6). R. Manning, Village Revolts 209; Suzuki 183; I. Archer 1, 56; Power 379. R. Manning, Village Revolts 204–05, 208, 209; Stow, Abridgement 499–500; P. Clark, “Crisis” 53–54; Suzuki 183. R. Manning, Village Revolts 201; Rappaport 14. Stow, Annales 769; R. Manning, Village Revolts 209–10. Stow, Annales 769; Fitter, “‘The Quarrel” 161; Buchanan Sharp, “Popular Protest in Seventeenth-century England,” Popular Culture in SeventeenthCentury England, ed. Barry Reay (London: Croom Helm, 1985) 286; Stow, Abridgement 500. “Edward Coke, Attorney-General, vs. Sir Michael Blount, Attorney General’s Information,” ms. STAC 5/A19/23, The National Archives, London, transcribed in R. Manning, “The Prosecution” 222; Stow, Annales 769; Stow, Abridgement 500. I. Archer 1; Fitter, “‘The Quarrel” 155; R. Manning, Village Revolts 315; “Edward Coke” 221–22. Stow, Annales 769; Stow, Abridgement 500. Stow, Annales 769; Stow, Abridgement 500–01; R. Manning, Village Revolts 210. While the authorities’ actions, and “the differences between the City and the authorities of the Tower, as to the Tower Liberties” that motivated them, added to the riot’s complexity, they did not cause it, as suggested in Analytical Index to [ . . . ] Remembrancia 172–73 n.2. R. Manning, Village Revolts 210; R. Manning, “The Prosecution” 218–19; Keay, Tower 9. I. Archer 5; Wrightson 177–79. Rappaport 13; I. Archer 2; R. Manning, Village Revolts 210; Power 379; P. Clark, “Crisis” 54, 61; Stow, Annales 769; Stow, Abridgement 501. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 4:318; Analytical Index to [ . . . ] Remembrancia, entry 2.103 (354). Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 4:318; Carroll, Fat King 144. Rappaport 13; Tudor Royal Proclamations 3:143. Shakespeare and Fletcher 5.4.55; Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience 79, 82, 83. Gurr, Shakespearean Stage 235; R. Manning, Village Revolts 213.

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93. Gurr, Playgoing 203–204. In an argument that privileged playgoers were more faithful to the theater than apprentices were, Cook claims that apprentices intended “to rase and pull downe” the Fortune, as well as the Red Bull and the Phoenix, “hardly the acts of dedicated theatergoers” (253). 94. Hulme 226, 254–55; Joseph Mead, “Rev. Joseph Mead to Sir Martin Stuterville,” The Court and Times of Charles the First, ed. Thomas Birch, vol. 1 of 2 (1628; London: Colburn, 1848) 362. 95. G. Harrison, The Life and Death of Robert Devereux 279; Akrigg 109. 96. Akrigg 48, 67–74; G. Harrison 280, 296; Gurr, Playgoing 229; James 436. 97. Gurr, Playgoing 237; A. L. Rowse, Shakespeare’s Southampton: Patron of Virginia (New York: Harper, 1965) 155. 98. Gurr, Playgoing 225, 229, 236, 237, 240. 99. Guy, “Introduction” 1; Rowse, Tower 114; Rowse, Southampton ix, 154, 155; Travers 43–45; Akrigg 109; James 436. 100. Akrigg 126; Calendar of State Papers, Domestic 554–57, 566–69, 579, 581, 583–84, 590, 593. 101. Harbage, Annals 72. See Chapter Four, note 52 for Tower plays first staged after 1595. 102. Heywood, 1E4 p.10; Oman 234; Strong, Portraits 31. See Oman, Plates XXIV-XXXIV, depicting coins of the Tudor and early-Stuart monarchs, all of whose profiles appear on their coins. 103. Heywood, 1E4 p.26; Stow, Svrvay 45. 104. Shakespeare, 2H6 represents Cade’s Rebellion with elements of the Peasants’ Revolt; Iacke Straw also represents the Peasants’ Revolt, including the characters Wat Tyler and Jack Straw. 105. Heywood, 1E4 p.9; May 15–18. 106. G. Harrison, Robert Devereux 280–81, Bayley 510. According to Akrigg, “At the second meeting at Drury House it was decided not to attempt the Tower of London but to concentrate upon seizure of the Court at Whitehall” (111). 107. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic 577, 579, 580, 581, 597, 599. 108. John J. Manning 1–4, 18–19, 22, 29–34. See John J. Manning 33 and Calendar of State Papers, Domestic 555, 567, 584. See John Hayward, The First Parte of the Life and Raigne of King Henry the Fourth, in Hayward 131–33. This was the first book in English to utilize the ambiguous “Tacitean history of utility,” or “‘politic’ history” (John J. Manning 36). See Fred Jacob Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, CA: Huntingdon, 1967) 250. Hayward was imprisoned in the Tower “seventeen months after his book’s publication, and seven months before the Essex rebellion” (John J. Manning 42). See also Patterson, Censorship 44. 109. John J. Manning 25; Rowse, Tower 114, 116; Akrigg 176, 187. Shakespeare dedicated his poems, “Venus and Adonis” (1593) and “The Rape of Lucrece” (1594), to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton; facsimiles of the

Notes to Chapter Four

110.

111.

112.

113. 114. 115.

116. 117.

118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123.

124. 125. 126. 127.

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dedications are printed in S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (New York: Oxford UP, 1975) 129, 132. “Rowland Whyte, Esq; to Sir Robert Sydney,” Letters and Memorials of State in the Reigns of Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, King James, King Charles the First, Part of the Reign of King Charles the Second, and Oliver’s Usurpation, ed. Arthur Collins, 2 vols. (1746; New York: AMS Press, 1973) 2:132. See the “Examination of Augustine Phillipps,” servant to the Lord Chamberlain, dated “18 Feb., 1600,” regarding the Essex conspirators’ bribe to have the play performed on the eve of the rebellion, printed in Chambers, William Shakespeare 2:325 and, with modernized spelling and grammar, and the modernized date (Feb. 18, 1601), in Calendar of State Papers, Domestic 578. Montrose, The Purpose of Playing 67, 70; G. Harrison, Robert Devereux, 281– 82. For an analysis of the play’s role in the Essex revolt, see Montrose, The Purpose of Playing 66–75, 87–95. Kastan 126; Montrose, The Purpose of Playing 74 n.69; John J. Manning 21; Kinney, Shakespeare by Stages 144. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic 555, 567, 575, 584, 599. Henk Gras, Studies in Elizabethan Audience Response to the Theatre, part 1 of 2, European University Studies ser. 30: Theatre, Film and Television, vol. 48 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1993) 41; Retha M. Warnicke, William Lambarde, Elizabethan Antiquary, 1536–1601 (London: Phillimore, 1973) 136; Bayley 517; Wood 236; Patterson, Censorship 45, 47. Wood 233; Barroll 113. See Gras 40. These include Shakespeare, 1H6 and 2H6; True Tragedie R3; Iacke Straw; Shakespeare, 3H6; Peele; Shakespeare, R3; Marlowe; Shakespeare, R2; Heywood, 1E4 and 2E4; and Munday, Drayton, et al. G. Harrison, Robert Devereux 281–95, 313, 318–19. See also Akrigg 109– 29. May 15; Rowse, Tower 114, 115; Rowse, Southampton 161. G. Harrison, Robert Devereux 321–22; Rowse, Southampton 161; Colvin et al. 3:272; Akrigg 127. Akrigg 78, 100, 109; Hurault 33. William Shakespeare, The Life of King Henry the Fifth (1599), in Bevington 5.0.29–35; Akrigg 249–50. May 17–18; Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell [ . . . ] (1617; Glasgow: MacLehose, 1907) 2:317. On Essex’s behavior in Ireland and subsequent hearing, see John J. Manning 25–27; Akrigg 75–96. Colvin et al. 3:272; Parnell, “Diary” 14–15. “The Execution of Robert Late Earle of Essex,” fol. 5r-v. See also Calendar of State Papers, Domestic 595. G. Harrison, Robert Devereux 325, 350; Akrigg 127–28. Stow records an account of Essex’s revolt and execution in Annales 791–94. Barroll 98; Wood 236.

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Notes to Chapter Four

128. The first known edition is “A Lamentable Dittie Composed vpon the Death of Robert Lord Deuereux Late Earle of Essex, Who Was Beheaded in the Tower of London, vpon Ashwednesday in the Morning, 1601. To the Tune of Welladay” (London, 1603). Five subsequent editions, dated 1620, 1625, 1635, 1670, and 1695, are accessible in Early English Books Online (EEBO). The dates in the titles vary; the earliest edition with the year 1600 in the title is “A Lamentable Ditty Composed vpon the Death of Robert Lord [Deuereux] Late Earle of Essex Who Was Beheaded in the Tower of London, o[n Ashwednesday] in the Morning, 1600. To the Tune of Welladay,” (London, 1625). The edition of c.1640–65 is discussed below. May suggests with uncertainty that Gerschow refers to a poem Essex had composed, “The Right Honourable Robert, Earle of Essex: Earle Marshall of England” (19), printed in May 45–46. May partially quotes the StettinPomerania diary, where it indicates that in the song Essex “takes leave of the Queen and the whole country” (May 19; see Gerschow 15) but omits the more telling clue, that in the song “also he shows the reason of his unlucky fate.” The poem May prints is brief and vague about Essex’s “taking leave,” while “A Lamentable Ditty, Composed upon the Death of Robert Lord Devereux, Late Earle of Essex, Who Was Beheaded in the Tower of London, on Ash-wednesday in the Morning, 1600. To the Tune of Welladay” (c.1640–65, Wood 401 (75), Bodleian Lib., University of Oxford) alludes to Essex’s attempted coup and describes his execution, with multiple references to both the “Queene” and “England,” or “the Queen and the whole country” (May 19). Moreover, Gerschow’s description of the song as being “sung and played on musical instruments” fits “A Lamentable Ditty [ . . . ] . To the Tune of Welladay” (emphasis mine), which was a sung ballad (Claude M. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music [New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1966] 747), whereas the poem May cites shows no evidence that it was sung. 129. C. Simpson 747, 748; Gerschow 15. My thanks to Angela McShane for her explanation of songs that were sung at court and later printed as broadside ballads. 130. Rowse, Tower 119; Akrigg 133–35, 176; Goulding 26–27, 30–31; Anna Keay, The Earl of Essex: The Life and Death of a Tudor Traitor (Surrey, Eng.: Historic Royal Palaces, 2001) 17. Goulding argues that the portrait was “probably painted by Marcus Gheeraerts the younger in 1603” (53). 131. Akrigg 111, 114–26. Even before Essex’s execution, Southampton’s sentence had been commuted to imprisonment for life, perhaps to “help to conciliate public opinion” in the light of Essex’s death sentence (130–31; Goulding 30). 132. Akrigg 125, 129. For Elizabeth’s dislike of Southampton, see Goulding 29– 30. For the details of the refusal of the generalship, see Akrigg 77, 86–87, 90; for the refusal of the governorship, see 104. 133. Rowse, Tower 116, 119; Rowse, Southampton 165; Akrigg 132.

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134. The first quotation is from “J. Camerarius, Symbolorum [ . . . ] Quadrupedibus Cent. Secunda (1595), LXXVIII. p.80. Cf. Pierius Valerianus, Hieroglyphica, de Fele,” qtd. in Leslie Hotson, Mr W. H. (New York: Knopf, 1964) 207 n.3. Gertrude Grace Sill, A Handbook of Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Macmillan, 1975) 18; Akrigg 132 n.5; Hotson 207–08. 135. Rowse, Southampton 165; Akrigg 131; see Acts of the Privy Council 32:175, 256. 136. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, Dictionary of Christian Art (New York: Continuum, 1998) 345; Sill 29–30. 137. Rowse, Southampton 165; Akrigg 133 n.1; Goulding 52–53; Bernard Burke, The General Armory of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales (London: Harrison, 1884) 1140; Marks 59. The Wriothesley coat of arms is also represented in the 1617 engraving by Simon Passe entitled “Third Earl of Southampton, K.G.,” pictured in Goulding, Plate XXV and in Akrigg facing page 156. 138. James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (New York: Harper, 1974) 240; Greaves 32; Rowse, Southampton ix, 154; Wood 147; Akrigg 179–80. Southampton’s father was “an adherent of the old form of religion” (Goulding 24). Akrigg provides and disputes several pieces of evidence that Southampton’s conversion to Protestantism took place in James’ reign, arguing instead that he held Protestant convictions by 1598 (177–81), though he admits the evidence is “inadequate” (181). 139. Carl-Alexander Von Volborth, Heraldry: Customs, Rules and Styles (Poole, Dorset, Eng.: Blandford, 1981) 52; Apostolos-Cappadona 277; J. Hall 184, 240. The scripture is from The New Testament of Iesus Christ, Faithfully Translated [ . . . ] By the English College Then Resident in Rhemes. Set Forth the Second Time, by the Same College Now Returned to Doway (Antwerp, 1600) 44. 140. Schiller 156; Apostolos-Cappadona 276, 326; J. Hall 240. 141. J. Hall 240; Akrigg 9. 142. Wilson, Secret Shakespeare 48; Roy Strong, The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture, Studies in British Art (New Haven: Yale UP, 1969) 261; Rowse, Tower 119. Both Akrigg and Strong translate the phrase to “Unconquered though in chains” (Akrigg 133; Roy C. Strong, “Shakespeare’s Patrons: Portraits in the Shakespeare Exhibition at Stratford on Avon,” Apollo 79 [April 1964]: 298). 143. While the plate’s stylized design has made some pottery experts, including W. B. Honey, hesitant to identify the Tower or even London in the image (English Pottery and Porcelain, 5th ed., rev. by R. J. Charleton [London: Black, 1962] 37), the plate is pictured and tentatively identified as the Tower of London in F. H. Garner, English Delftware, The Faber Monographs on Pottery and Porcelain, ed. W. B. Honey (London: Faber, 1948) 4, Plate 5; Frank Britton, London Delftware (London: Horne, 1987) 105; and

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Alan Caiger-Smith, Tin-Glaze Pottery in Europe and the Islamic World: The Tradition of 1000 Years in Maiolica, Faience & Delftware (London: Faber, 1973) Colour Plate S. It is described and identified as the Tower of London in Anthony Ray, English Delftware Pottery in the Robert Hall Warren Collection, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (London: Faber, 1968) 34. Despite the caution that some authors exercised in past decades, recent authoritative sources—including Dr. Geoffrey Parnell, Keeper of Tower History, and the Museum of London, which has custody of the plate—consider the image to represent the Tower. The plate is pictured and identified as a representation of the Tower in Geoffrey Parnell, “The Rise and Fall of the Tower of London,” History Today 42.3 (1992): 18; and Museum of London Picture Library, “Tin-glazed Delftware plate, 1600,” Museum of London, 29 Sep. 2007 . In the plate’s image, flags, rather than the Tudor weather vanes (Keay, Tower 41; Colvinet al. 3:271), cap the tower cupolas. Nevertheless, both the flags and the cupolas resemble, in shape and color, the representation of the top of the White Tower’s turrets in the detailed 1615 drawing of the Tower of London complex by a Dutch traveler, printed in Rowse, Tower 136. The White Tower’s cupolas date to the 1530s (Keay, Tower 41). In the image, the year “1600” is clearly painted in the sky amid the cupolas. However, because the year appears to the left of what could be a flag waving from one of the turrets, resembling the number two, some authors suggest the possibility that the plate is dated 1602 (Michael Archer, English Delftware/Engels Delfts Aardewerk [Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1973] 14; Ivor Noël Hume, Early English Delftware from London and Virginia, Colonial Williamsburg Occasional Papers in Archaeology, ed. Ivor Noël Hume [Williamsburg: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1977] 36; Britton 105). While the date cannot be read as 1602 but 16002, which makes little sense, the 2 is also smaller and must be read at a different angle than the first four digits. Probably for this reason at least, more sources, including the most recent and authoritative ones, identify the date as 1600 (Garner 4; Parnell, “The Rise and Fall of the Tower of London” 18; Museum of London Picture Library; Caiger-Smith Colour Plate S; Honey 37, 41). Another possibility is that the plate was created in 1602 to commemorate Essex’s 1600 execution. 144. The Tower was again represented in fine art in c.1630, in the Exeter Salt or Salt of State, set with over seventy gemstones, which was presented to Charles II at the Restoration (Kenneth Mears, The Crown Jewels, rev. with additions by Simon Thurley et al. [1994; London: Historic Royal Palaces Agency, 1996] 37), an indication of the Tower’s prominence as a cultural symbol. 145. On the inscription, see Britton 105, Colour Plate B; Museum of London Picture Library; M. Archer 14; Garner 4; Hume 36; Honey 37. For the plate’s provenance see Britton 105. For references to the Dutch potters, see Honey 37; Caiger-Smith Colour Plate S; Ray 34; Britton 29, 105.

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146. The facts are as follows. Eighteenth-century editions of Stow’s Survey, edited by Strype (Britton 21), mention a petition to Elizabeth by two potters, Jasper Andries and Jacob Janson, who had emigrated to England in 1567 “to avoid the Persecution” in Antwerp and “removed to London” in 1570. Having “presented [Elizabeth] with a Chest of their handy Work,” they requested that she “grant them House-room in or without the Liberties of London, by the Water side; and Privilege for the time of twenty Years, that none but they, their Wives and Children, and Assigns, might exercise the same Science in this Realm” (John Stow, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster [ . . . ] Brought Down from the Year 1633 [ . . . ] to the Present Time by J. Strype, vol. 2, book 5 [London, 1720] 240–41). The petition, from Burleigh Papers, Lansdowne ms. 12, ff. 131–32, British Lib., London, is transcribed in Britton 20. Though Andries and Jansen’s petition was unsuccessful, their pottery was established in Aldgate in 1571, and in 1600 it was the only delftware pottery in London (Britton 20, 27, 29). In 1567 Protestant Antwerp was under attack by Philip of Spain (Plowden 81). Andries and Janson, evidently Protestants (Britton 19), would have had little motivation to represent the Tower in opposition to Elizabeth. However, Andries is not known to have abandoned his pottery in Norwich, as he is recorded as a resident of Colchester in 1571; and Janson, having Anglicized his name to “Johnson,” died in 1593, leaving others to carry on the Aldgate pottery until about 1615 (Ray 34; Britton 21, 22, 27). 147. Honey 41; Garner 4. The plate’s rim has a blue-dash edge (Britton 105). Downman wrote his book during World War I, which precluded his traveling to England to view the British Museum’s collection firsthand (Edward Andrews Downman, Blue Dash Chargers and Other Early English Tin Enamel Circular Dishes [London: Laurie, 1919] 55). He evidently was not aware of The London Plate, as the earliest dated charger he cites is from 1616. Nevertheless, The London Plate is only dated sixteen years earlier than the 1616 plate, which is the first of eleven blue dash chargers known to Downman that are dated 1660 or earlier (50–55). Although The London Plate is dated slightly earlier than the blue dash chargers in Downman’s study, the distinctive blue dashes “round the extreme outside edge, on the face” indicates that he would have considered it to be “a true ‘blue dash charger’” (1–2). 148. Downman 4. The London Plate’s colors are “blue, ochre, yellow, green and manganese” (Britton 105). 149. Museum of London Picture Library; Downman 55–56. 150. Downman includes many photographs of blue dash chargers, very few of which are inscribed with verses. See Essex’s poems numbered 1–3 and 5–11 in May. See also May 20–21. 151. Strong, Cult of Elizabeth 80–82, 54, 68–69; D. Watson 24; King 257.

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152. Guy, “Introduction” 3–4. See also Hurault 25–26. 153. Alan Haynes, Sex in Elizabethan England (Stroud, Eng.: Sutton, 1997) 19, 23; Fraser, The Wives of Henry VIII 404; Doran 2–3. 154. Elizabeth I, Queen of England, “Letter 4. Elizabeth to Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset, Lord Protector, January 28, 1549,” Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, ed. Steven W. May (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004) 103–04. A subsequent letter, dated 21 February 1549, also refers to the tales of her “lewd demenure,” as Elizabeth asks Somerset to issue a proclamation “that no suche rumors shulde be spreade of anye of the Kinges Maiesties Sisters” (Elizabeth I, Queen of England, Elizabeth I: Her Life in Letters, comp. Felix Prior [Berkeley: U of California P, 2003] 20–21). 155. See Chapter Three, note 10 about Elizabeth and the watergate of St. Thomas’ Tower. 156. Elizabeth I, Queen of England, “Letter 13. Elizabeth to Queen Mary I, March 17, 1554,” in Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works 126. 157. Starkey, Elizabeth: Apprenticeship 142, 145; Freeman 104. 158. Anne Boleyn is buried in the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula (Doyne C. Bell, Notices of the Historic Persons Buried in the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, in the Tower of London [London: Murray, 1877] 50). 159. Levin 87. It was probably the Tower’s role as the setting of her mother’s trial and execution that motivated Elizabeth to refuse her council’s wish to bring Mary Stuart to the Tower before her trial in 1586 (Fraser, Mary, Queen of Scots 501 n.). 160. Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, is buried in the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula (D. Bell 50). 161. Garner 4; Honey 37; Caiger-Smith Colour Plate S, 164. 162. Strong, Cult of Elizabeth 68, 69; Strong, Portraits 21. 163. Clare Asquith, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (New York: Public Affairs, 2005) 138–39, 296–97, 331 n.12. The quotation is from 297. 164. Apostolos-Cappadona 325; Sill 204. 165. Jones 141. Whetstone’s text has been republished as Censure Upon Notable Traitors. George Whetstone, Censure upon Notable Traitors [The Censure of a Loyall Subiect], The English Experience 631 (1587; New York: Da Capo, 1973). For an account of the Babington Plot, see Holinshed 4:898–926. 166. Juliet Wightman, “‘Death Made an End of Them’: Narrative Representations of Executions in the English Renaissance,” The Aesthetics and Pragmatics of Violence: Proceedings of the Conference at Passau University, March 15–17, 2001, ed. Michael Hensen and Annette Pankratz (Passau, Germany: Stutz, 2001) 59. The dedication begins, “To the right honorable, Sir William Cicill, knight, Baron of Burleigh, Lord high Treasurer of England”

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167.

168.

169.

170.

171.

172.

205

(Whetstone A2r). See “Queen Elizabeth to the Commoners of London, August 18, 1586,” in Elizabeth I: Collected Works 285–86. The letter is also printed in Holinshed 4:933–35 and paraphrased in Whetstone (B1r). The name is spelled Titchburne in Karen Cunningham, “Renaissance Execution and Marlovian Elocution: The Drama of Death,” PMLA 105.2 (1990); Chediok Tichburn in Wightman; Chediock Tichburn in Whetstone; Chidiock Tichbourne in Marcus Clarke, Chidiock Tichbourne, or The Catholic Conspiracy (London: Eden, 1893); Chidiock Tichborne in Chidiock Tichborne, “Tichborne’s Elegy,” The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, 2 vols., gen. ed. Frank Kermode and John Hollander (1586; New York: Oxford UP, 1973) 1:611; and in Holinshed, Tichborn (4:911) and Chidiocke Tichborne (4:917). Tichborne, “Tichborne’s Elegy,” 611 n.; Patterson, Reading Between the Lines 155. The nineteenth-century edition of Holinshed includes the previously censored letter (Patterson, Reading Between the Lines 129, 154; Holinshed 4:911). Cunningham 210, 212; Clarke 336. Although the facts are uncertain, the elegy is usually subtitled “Written with his own hand in the Tower before his execution” (Tichborne, “Tichborne’s Elegy” 611 n.), following Holinshed (4:911). The elegy sometimes takes as its title the poem’s first line, “My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,” as in Chidiock Tichbourne, “My Prime of Youth is but a Frost of Cares,” in Clarke 336–37. Tichborne was executed in “Lincolns Inn Fields” (Clarke 336). Chidiock Tichbourne, “My Prime of Youth is but a Frost of Cares” 336. In Holinshed, the same line reads: “My fruit is falne, and yet my leaues are greene:” (4:911). The Oxford Anthology of English Literature prints the Holinshed version with modernized spelling and pronunciation (Tichborne, “Tichborne’s Elegy” 611). C. T. Onions, A Shakespeare Glossary, rev. by Robert D. Eagleson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986) 122. According to The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, Tichborne was probably born in 1558 (Tichborne, “Tichborne’s Elegy” 611). In his scaffold speech, Tichborne likewise compared himself to Adam eating the forbidden “frute of one tree,” which Holinshed interpreted as a metaphor for Elizabeth as “the pleasant and glorious frute, so pretious in Gods eies, as he forbad Adam and all others to laie violent hands vpon” (Holinshed 4:917). This interpretation also evokes imagery that a later work connects to Essex, believed by many to be a Catholic or Catholic sympathizer. John Dowland’s book of lute songs, published in 1597 and 1600, includes a song of six stanzas written from Essex’s viewpoint about a woman whose love is cold, clearly Elizabeth after learning of his secret marriage (“Can She Excuse My Wrongs? [The Earl of Essex’s Galliard],” The First Book of Ayres, English Lute-Songs 1st ser., ed. Edmund H. Fellowes, rev. by Thurston Dart [1597;

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173.

174. 175. 176. 177.

1600; 1603; 1606; 1613; New York: Galaxy, 1965] 10). One line in the song, “Must I praise the leaves where no fruit I find?” (11), metaphorically describes Elizabeth in vegetative terms, specifically as having leaves. Ilona Bell, “Souereaigne Lord of Lordly Lady of this Land”: Elizabeth, Stubbs, and the Gaping Gulf,” in J. Walker 99–102, 112–13; Camden 270; L. Berry xxxv, xxxvi, 111, 114. Holinshed 4:917; Plowden 177; “Account of the death of the Earl of Essex,” Calendar of State Papers, Domestic 596. Patterson, Reading Between the Lines 142; D. Watson 16; Stow, Annales 762; Calendar of State Papers, Domestic 562, 580–81. See Patterson, Censorship, 47. See, for example, Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion (1613), in Drayton 4; Sir Walter Ralegh, “The Preface,” The History of the World, ed. C. A. Patrides (1614; London: Macmillan, 1971); “Elegies of Seuerall Authors,” The “Conceited Newes” of Sir Thomas Overbury and His Friends: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Ninth Impression of 1616 of Sir Thomas Ouerbury His Wife, Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, gen. ed. Harry R. Warfel (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles, 1968); Drayton, Poems (1619), in Drayton 2; and Drayton, “The Miseries of Queene Margarite, the Infortunate Wife, of That Most Infortunate King Henry the Sixt” (1627), in Drayton 3.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE 1. While a fine distinction arguably exists between personifying and humanizing, I use personification in the literary sense of “a figure that endows [ . . . ] inanimate objects with human form; the representing of [ . . . ] things as having human personalities, intelligence, and emotions” (Holman and Harmon 353). Thus, playwrights personified the Tower, or represented it as human, as one technique for humanizing it, or associating it with human beings. 2. This period most likely includes the first productions of Heywood’s 1E4 and 2E4 in 1599 (Harbage, Annals 975–1700 72). 3. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning 1, 2, 13. 4. David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (New York: Viking, 2001) 12, 71, 183. 5. Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997) 52, 62, 88, 114; James M. Clark, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Glasgow: Jackson, 1950) 1, 2. 6. Neill 66; J. Clark 3. 7. J. Clark 1. Neill refers to “the tapestry Dance of Maccabre kept in the Tower” in the early modern period (53); however, his sources misinterpret “The Second Part of the Inventorye of Our Late Sovereigne Lord Kyng Henry the

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8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

207

Eighth,” Harley ms. 1419, f. 5, British Lib., London, which actually lists no tapestry resembling “Dance of Maccabre.” Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (New York: Routledge, 1990) 107; Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning 166. “Queen Elizabeth’s First Speech, Hatfield, November 20, 1558,” in Elizabeth I: Collected Works 51–52. See Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 34, gen. ed. Stephen Orgel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 8, 24. See also 24–32. Schoenfeldt 2, Zimmerman 8. Contemporary humoral theory is outlined in Thomas Elyot, The Castel of Helth, 1541 (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles, 1936) B2r-3r. For a concise explanation of humoral theory, see Schoenfeldt 2–3. Margaret E. Owens, Stages of Dismemberment: The Fragmented Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 2005) 124, citing Paul-Henri Stahl, Histoire de la décapitation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986) 68, trans. by Owens. Saunders, J. B. DeC. M. and Charles D. O’Malley, introduction, The Anatomical Drawings of Andreas Vesalius [ . . . ], by Andreas Vesalius (New York: Bonanza, 1982), rpt. of The Illustrations from the Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels (Cleveland: World, 1950) 23–25. See Neill 114. Saunders and O’Malley 16; William S. Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp: An Iconological Study (New York: New York UP, 1958) 52; Caterina Albano, “Visible Bodies: Cartography and Anatomy,” in Gordon and Klein 94; Neill 102, 104, 114; Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1996) 65–66. Heckscher 27, 29, 101; Saunders and O’Malley 12, 24; Sawday 56. Neill 114–17; Sawday 56, 65; Heckscher 27–34. Schoenfeldt 3; Neill 104; Albano 90, 95; Gordon and Klein, introduction 7; Heckscher 53; Sawday 22–23. Heckscher 53, 57, 59. Gordon and Klein, introduction 7; Albano 91, 94; Smith 202. Albano 93–94, 98; Gordon and Klein, introduction 6; Schoenfeldt 7; Sawday 130–31. Albano 98. In many of these images, the body blends with the land (Sawday 115, 116–17) and is seen in relation to buildings. See, for instance, Vesalius 43–45, 87, 93, 95–119; Albano 99; and Sawday figures 15, 16, and 23. Smith 213. For changes in architectural design and room functions, see Girouard 87–94, 99–105; Sara Lillian French, “Women, Space and Power:

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23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

Notes to Chapter Five The Building and the Use of Hardwick Hall in Elizabethan England,” diss., Binghamton U, 2000, 4, 219; Smith 213; Belsey 7. French 1, 4; Girouard 116. French 218, 219, 252. Girouard 116; French 1. Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) xi, 108, 254; Tennenhouse, “Sir Walter Ralegh” 254. More 7–8, 50, 88–89. Elizabeth had imprisoned Ralegh in the Tower for five weeks in 1592 for secretly marrying one of her maids of honor, Elizabeth Throckmorton (Rowse, Tower 108). Ralegh’s second and longer imprisonment in the Tower spanned over thirteen years of James’ reign, 1603 to 1616. He was also imprisoned there for several weeks before his execution in 1618 (P. R. Walker, “Sir Walter Ralegh at the Tower,” in Charlton 95). The quotation is from Ralegh 51. Hardyng evidently stopped writing his original Chronicle around 1465 (Henry Ellis, Preface, in Iohn Hardyng, The Chronicle of Iohn Hardyng. [ . . . ] Together with the Continuation by Richard Grafton [ . . . ], ed. Ellis [1543; London, 1812] xiii), and Grafton later continued it (xix, xxi). Ellis discusses the early books of Polydore Vergil’s English History in the Preface to Three Books of Polydore Vergil’s English History, Comprising the Reigns of Henry VI., Edward IV., and Richard III, by Vergil, ed. Ellis, Camden Society 29 (1534; London: Nichols, 1844) xx; he also indicates that Vergil’s text was printed in 1534 (xiv). Richard Grafton’s Chronicle (Grafton’s Chronicle; or, History of England. [ . . . ], 2 vols. [1569; London, 1809]) and Holinshed’s Chronicles, respectively, begin with the biblical story of the creation (Grafton 1:1) and before the story of Noah (Holinshed 1:425) in Genesis. Ralegh 59; P. Walker 95; Hibbert et al. 85. Ralegh’s execution took place in the Old Palace Yard in Westminster (95). For an account of the execution, see Stephen Greenblatt, Sir Walter Raleigh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven: Yale UP, 1973) 15–21. Don Wayne, Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1984) 19, 23, 25, 46, 109, 59. Wayne 97, 114. Wayne explains the apparent paradox: “Though Gothicism in sixteenth-century architecture was closely associated with medieval castle and church architecture, it was [ . . . ] admired not because it was the style of the old church, but because it was the only style that was a native one” (97). Greenblatt, Will in the World 172–73; Cunningham 210, 213. Though Cunningham writes specifically about Marlowe, this concept also applies to some of his contemporaries, including Shakespeare, whose acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later the King’s Men, worked at the first and second Globe Playhouses in Southwark (Harbage, Annals 81, 105,

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34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

209

335; Gurr, Shakespearean Stage 241), and who lived, for at least part of his career in London, across the Thames, in the parish of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate (Wood 124). Owens 115; Heckscher 27–34. Cunningham 209, 210; Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986) 13–15; Gillian Murray Kendall, introduction, Shakespearean Power and Punishment: A Volume of Essays, ed. Kendall (London: Associated U Presses, 1998) 8–9; J. A. Sharpe, “‘Last Dying Speeches’: Religion, Ideology, and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 107 (May 1985): 161–66; Wightman 58, 63, 64; Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning 201; Owens 120–21; Foucault, Discipline and Punish 32–69. Additional texts that present execution scaffolds as representations of state power include Orgel; Mullaney; and Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations. Tennenhouse, Power on Display 13; Cunningham 211. Cunningham 210–11; Peter Lake and Michael Questier, “Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 153 (Nov. 1996) 73–74. Lake and Questier 78; Wightman 62, 64; Sharpe 157–58, 160. Wightman 59. According to Lake and Questier, “There is no shortage of evidence of a wide variety of audience participation in the theatre of the gallows” (97). Friedman 43; Wightman 60; Owens 123. John Laurence, A History of Capital Punishment, with Special Reference to Capital Punishment in Great Britain (London: Sampson, 1932) 8; Clayton and Leftwich 314–15; John Fisher, introduction, The A to Z of Elizabethan London, comp. Adrian Prockter and Robert Taylor (London: London Topographical Society, 1979) x. For the beheadings of Anne Boleyn’s fellow accused on Tower Hill in 1536, the scaffold was “built especially high, to give a good view to the vast crowds who were certain to turn up” (Starkey, Six Wives 580–81). And for the execution of Northumberland and others in 1554, over ten thousand spectators gathered on Tower Hill (Chapman 169). Owens 277 n.19; Annabel Patterson, Reading Between the Lines (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1993) 155; Whetstone [A4v]. Holinshed 4:915. See also 918. Tichborne was “not setled so much in papistrie as the others” (Holinshed 4:917); Kinney, editor’s note ix. Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1984) 101; Cunningham 211. Legge is set after the Edward VI’s death (p.11) and thus after Henry VI’s; it also does not treat George, Duke of Clarence’s death. Legge’s intimation and

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50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61.

Notes to Chapter Five descriptions of Hastings’ beheading (p.113, 121–27, 133), though, involve graphic visual images. True Tragedie R3 takes place after the deaths of Henry VI and George, Duke of Clarence (p.5), and the plot to kill Hastings is described just before and as Hastings is pulled across the stage to exit to his death (p.32– 33). In Heywood, 1E4, Henry VI’s death is merely reported (p.51). In Heywood, 2E4, Clarence’s death is merely reported (p.142). Hastings’ death is not treated in either of these plays by Heywood. See Chapter Four for Shakespeare’s relatives’ experiences at the Tower. Shakespeare, 3H6 5.6.63–65, 67, 68–83, 84–91, 92–93. Shakespeare, R3 (1597) D1r, C4r; Shakespeare, R3 1.4, 1.3.339. William, Lord Hastings was beheaded within the walls of the Tower complex in 1483. By the 1590s, five beheadings had subsequently taken place within the Tower walls, those of Anne Boleyn in 1536; Margaret, Countess of Salisbury in 1541; Katherine Howard and Jane, Vicountess Rochford, in 1542; and Lady Jane Grey in 1554. In 1600, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was the last to suffer beheading within the Tower walls (E. H. Carkeet-James, Her Majesty’s Tower of London, 2nd ed. ([New York: Staples, 1953] 70). On Tower Green, see Chapter Two, note 85. Shakespeare, R3 3.2.43–55, 102–04, 3.4.59–107, 3.6. Curnow, “The Bloody Tower” 55; see also Dixon 52. More 88–89; E. Hall 378; Fitzstephen, in Stow, Survey [1603] 502. True Tragedie R3 p.36, 39, 41–43. True Tragedie R3 p.44. This rhetorical connection of the princes’ bodies to the Tower parallels the accounts of More, Vergil, Hardyng (The Chronicle of Iohn Hardyng), E. Hall, Rastell’s edition of More’s work, Grafton’s continuation of Hardyng, and Holinshed. Shakespeare, R3 4.3.5, 6, 8, 10–13. This progression may support Harbage’s view that Heywood’s 1E4 and 2E4 were first performed in 1599 (Annals 72), or at least that 2E4 was first performed after True Tragedie R3 and Shakespeare, R3. Heywood, 2E4 p.153; Onions 303; Neill 67. Heywood, 2E4 p.154; Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall: A Reprint Based on the 1604 Edition (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1971) 169. Heywood, 2E4 p.154; Owens 124. Ford 1.1.30, 32, 1.2.80, 1.1.69–70. In Shakespeare, 1H6, in a room in the Tower, Mortimer speaks of his physical ailments from long imprisonment, and he and his nephew, Richard Plantagenet, name the body parts employed during their visit. The rest of their conversation evokes body parts, death, physicality, and violence. When Mortimer dies on stage, Richard wishes peace to his soul and says he will

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lock Mortimer’s counsel in his breast. As Mortimer’s body is carried away, Richard vows to be restored to his blood (2.5.122–29). In Shakespeare, 2H6, a play that represents four decapitations in which the severed heads are brought back onto the stage, Clifford says of York, “He is a traitor; let him to the Tower,/ And chop away that factious pate of his” (5.1). In True Tragedie R3, Richard refers to Hastings’ head in ordering his execution (p.33). Also, following the graphic representation of the princes’ murder in the Tower, Myles Forest tells Terril that the bodies have been conveyed “to the staires foote among a heape of stones” (p.44). In Iacke Straw, King Richard is told that the rebels have frightened his mother, whom he has left at the Tower (ll.458–62, 649), and made “fowle slaughter of your Noblemen” (l.651). Later, the weary king plans to sleep at the Tower, “Where wele repose and rest our selues all night” (l.1209). In Shakespeare, 3H6, Clarence tells King Edward that Richard has probably gone “To make a bloody supper in the Tower” (5.5). King Henry’s murder scene, in a room in the Tower, includes the names of many body parts and terms evocative of death, before and after Gloucester repeatedly stabs him and exits with the body (5.6). In Peele, Lluellen reminds Longshanks that his father “broke his neck” while trying to escape from the Tower (p.40). In Marlowe, Queen Isabella, suspected for Edward II’s death, is committed to the Tower three times, and each time she reacts with tears and/or by evoking death (5.6.83–95). In Shakespeare, R2, the Queen personifies the Tower, “To whose flint bosom my condemned lord/ Is doomed a prisoner” (5.1.3–4), and, as Richard approaches the Tower, he tells her, “Think I am dead and that even here thou takest,/ As from my deathbed, thy last living leave” (38–39). In Heywood, 1E4, it is reported that Gloucester has murdered Henry VI in the Tower (p.56). In Munday, Drayton, et al., the Catholic authorities connect Old-castle’s name and person with a castle to be subverted (ll.180–84). The bishop also allows Harpoole to attend Old-castle in the Tower, wishing no harm to come to Old-castle’s soul (ll.1973–75). In Heywood, 2 If You Know Not Me, Doctor Parry “offers to shoote” Elizabeth (p.325, 326), for which Leicester orders Parry sent “to the Tower, then to death.—/ A traitours death shall such a traitour haue,/ That seeks his soueraignes life that did him saue” (p.327). In Woodstock, only when Greene is slain do the councilors suggest fortifying the Tower (5.6) In Drue, Bonner asks Gardner how he likes the air in the Marshalsea compared with that in the Tower; then they discuss King Edward’s sickness and long for his death (B3r).

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63. 64. 65.

66.

67.

Notes to Chapter Five In Davenport, the king orders Fitzwater, Old Lord Bruce, and Leicester to “th’ Tower,” calling them “fierce mastiffs/ That durst leap at the face of majesty,/ And strike their killing fangs into honour’s heart” (2.4). In Legge, see p.85, 97, 113, 121–27, 133, 191–93, 207, 213–23, 227, 247, 249–51, 275, 291, 307–09, 313. In Shakespeare, R3, Clarence’s murder in the Tower is plotted (1.3), intimated, and dramatized (1.4) with references to body parts and death. Clarence’s murder in the Tower is invoked, and Queen Margaret reminds the audience that Gloucester “kill’dst my husband Henry in the Tower” (3.1). Hastings’ execution is ordered at the Tower council meeting, purportedly because of a curse on Richard’s arm: “Off with his head!” (3.4), and Hastings’ decapitated head returns to the stage in the scene that follows his offstage execution within the Tower walls (3.5). Tyrrel’s description of the princes’ murders in the Tower incorporates emotionally evocative terms and intermingles violent and deathly images and body parts (4.3). Queen Elizabeth, the Duchess of York, and Queen Margaret lament the murders of their family members and others, including those killed in the Tower: the princes, Henry VI, Clarence, and Hastings, with physical and deadly terms (4.4), expanding the Tower’s lore as a place associated with unnatural death. The ghosts of Richard’s victims at the Tower carry this representation even further, invoking the Tower as they curse their murderer (5.3). In Heywood, 2E4, see p.131–33, 142–49, 151–53, 162–64, 167. Also, the princes’ murders are represented in graphic detail (p.154–55). See Munday et al., 4.2.8–26; 4.4.151–55, 170; 5.1.31–32; 5.3.1–33, 80, 96–99; 5.4. See Heywood, 1 If You Know Not Me p.197–98, 208–21. Ford’s representations of Prince Edward’s murder in the Tower and Prince Richard’s rescue employ physical language. See also 2.1.60, 62, 64, 65; 5.2.128–29. Other passages that represent the Tower do so in similar language; see 1.1.135–39; 1.3.1–138; 2.2.1–162; 3.1.94–98; 5.3.6, 10–17. Shakespeare and Heywood’s work accounts for eight of the thirteen Tower plays of the 1590s: Shakespeare, 1H6 (1590), 2H6 (c.1590), 3H6 (c.1591), R3 (1591–92), and R2 (1595); Heywood, 1E4 (1592–99) and 2E4 (1592– 99); and Munday et al. (originally composed c.1592–93), revised by Chettle, Dekker, Heywood, and Shakespeare. The Tower is also personified in Munday et al. (originally composed c.1592– 93), which was revised by Shakespeare, Heywood, and others. Rochester, imprisoned in the Tower, says the Tower and he will confer (4.3), and More addresses the Tower with a soliloquy about the innocent people who have died there (5.1.57–69). Additionally, in Shakespeare, R2 (1595), the Queen refers to the Tower’s “flint bosom,” personifying it as a human being with a stone body, and, as interpreted by Holderness (207), addresses it apostrophically (5.1.11–15).

Notes to Chapter Five

68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

76.

77.

213

And in Heywood, 1E4 (1592–99), the Tower entices the rebels to release Henry VI, imprisoned there (p.10). Harbage, Annals 72; Heywood, 2E4 p.154. Churchill has identified the following historical sources of Richardus Tertius (273). In More (c.1513) there are no references to ghosts; in fact, More glosses over the Battle of Bosworth and omits Richard’s dream that precedes it (93). In Vergil (1534) there are no references to ghosts; Richard “thowght in his slepe that he saw horryble ymages as yt wer of evell spyrytes haunting evidently abowt him” (221). In Hardyng (1543) there are no references to ghosts; the dream consists of “horrible deuilles” (544). In E. Hall’s version (1548, 1550), which combines Vergil and Hardyng’s representations of the dream, there are no references to ghosts; Richard dreams of “diuerse ymages lyke terrible deuelles” (414). William Rastell’s 1557 edition of More’s text (Thomas More, The History of King Richard III, The English Works of Sir Thomas More. Reproduced in Facsimile from William Rastell’s Edition of 1557, ed. W. E. Campbell, vol. 1 of 7 [1557; London: Eyre, 1931]) closely follows the earlier one cited above (453). In Grafton’s continuation of Hardyng’s Chronicle (1569) there are no references to ghosts; copied from Hall, Richard dreams of “dyuers ymages like terrible Deuils” (2:150). In Holinshed’s version (1577, 1587) as in Hall and Grafton, there are no ghosts; Richard dreams of “diuerse images like terrible diuels” (3:438). In Legge (1579) there are no references to ghosts; before the battle, Richard dreams that “a baleful cohort of Furies attacked me [ . . . ]. I became foul prey for raging demons” (307). Each of these passages falls short of representing the ghosts of Richard’s Tower victims. Assmann 205–12; the quotation is from 206. Shakespeare, R3 5.1.10–18; 5.3.124–38, 146–58. Harbage, Annals 72; Heywood, 2E4 p.154. Svrvay 38; Edelen xxv-xxviii. In Peele (1590–93), Lluellen recalls his rebel father’s broken neck from a fall while trying to escape “from Julius Caesar’s tower” (p.40). In Munday et al. (originally composed c.1592–93), More assents to his imprisonment in the Tower, “thereto add/ My bones to strengthen the foundation/ Of Julius Caesar’s palace” (4.4.150–54). In Shakespeare, R2 (1595), the Queen calls the Tower “Julius Caesar’s illerected tower” (5.1.2). Heywood, 2E4 p.147. The same passage similarly associates the Tower with two more human beings, Edward IV (p.146) and George, Duke of Clarence (p.147). This association is made through Gloucester’s epithets, such as “the Claudian” (p.79), “Claudian Protector” (p.99), “Claudian Duke” (p.49, 117), and “Claudian Regent” (p.27). 5.1.2, 11; Holderness 207.

214

Notes to Chapter Five

78. Heywood, 2E4 (1592–99, most probably first presented in 1599 according to Harbage, Annals 72) employs personification: “The very senseless stones here in the walles/ Breake out in teares but to behold the fact” (p.154); inclusion and embellishment of the myth of Caesar’s Tower: “Caesar himself,/ That built the same, within it kept his court” (p.147); and the Tower’s association with ghosts, as Frier Anselme’s ghost haunts Doctor Shaw: “First, wronged Clarence drowned in the Tower;/ Next Edwards children murder’d in the Tower” (p.163). 79. These include Legge; Shakespeare, 1H6; True Tragedie R3; Shakespeare, 3H6 and R3; Marlowe; Munday et al.; Heywood, 2E4; Munday, Drayton, et al.; Cromwell; Dekker and Webster; Rowley; Heywood, 1 and 2 If You Know Not Me; Shakespeare and Fletcher; Drue; Davenport; and Ford. 80. Munday et al., 5.2.38, 61–62, 5.4.28. 81. In Marlowe (1591–93), the bishop of Coventry is imprisoned in the Tower, an act that Lancaster interprets as tyranny upon the Church (1.2.1–3). In Ford, Perkin Warbeck (c.1625–34), which returned playgoers to the pre-Reformation Tower, Henry VII declares, “Churchmen are turned devils” (1.3.80). 82. Shakespeare, 1H6 1.1.176–77, 1.3. See also 3.1. 83. The eight plays are Legge, Shakespeare, 1H6; True Tragedie R3; Shakespeare, 3H6 and R3; Marlowe; Munday et al.; and Heywood, 2E4; the remaining six being Shakespeare, 2H6; Iacke Straw; Peele; Shakespeare, R2; Heywood, 1E4; and Cromwell, which is dated c.1599–1602. 84. Heywood, 1 If You Know Not Me (1604–05), demonstrates that knowing Elizabeth means knowing the Tower’s role in her life and in English Protestant national identity (p.206–07, 212–21). In Heywood, 2 If You Know Not Me (1604–05), the Catholic subject, Dr. Parry, reveals the Catholic Church’s role in his plot to kill Elizabeth (p.324). When the Lords enter and Lecester orders Parry to be sent to the Tower and executed, his language has religious overtones (p.326), as does the Queen’s (p.327). Because the Queen knows how it feels to be imprisoned in the Tower, her reluctance to deploy it (p.327), even when warranted, demonstrates extreme Protestant beneficence and compassion—something which the reigning monarch, whose Catholic mother had been executed by Elizabeth’s order, would not likely have accepted. In Drue (1624), the Catholic Bishop Gardner is conveyed to the Tower but later joins his coreligionist, Bishop Bonner, in the Marshalsea when the Protestant Edward VI is gravely ill ([A3v]-B3r). In Mary I’s reign, the restored Bonner and Gardner plot to have the Protestant Dutches of Suffolke imprisoned in the Tower ([B4v]). In Davenport (c.1628–29), the papal legate, Pandulphus, crowns John, and three councilors are imprisoned in the Tower for opposing the king’s deference to the pope (2.4). And yet, as Armstrong points out, “Far from

Notes to Chapter Five

85. 86. 87.

88. 89.

90. 91.

92. 93.

94. 95.

215

being the pioneer of Protestant virtues, Davenport’s John is a lustful tyrant who neglects the commonweal to pursue Matilda Fitzwater, daughter of one of the barons with whom he has quarreled” (introduction xiii). Ford (c.1625–34) represents conflict between the church and state at the Tower, as Henry VII declares, “Churchmen are turned devils” (1.3.80). Bale’s Kynge Johan, produced decades before the period under consideration here, also ties the Tower to the Reformation: Pandulphus aims to conquer King John “for the Holy Chryrchis right” and says the French King, with his power, will slay and burn till he come to “London Tower” (p.63). Hamilton 137, 138; Gurr, Shakespearean Stage 240; Munday, Drayton, et al. ll.158, 168, 174. For other references to religion concerning the Tower in Munday, Drayton, et al., see ll.102–13, 957–61, 970–72, 1938–39, 1997–2122. Many of these references are more corporeal than spiritual. Bedford intimates Cromwell’s beheading: “How smooth and easy is the way to death!” (5.1). In “A Room in the Tower” (5.5.s.d.), Cromwell says he could have been “free from the lion’s paw,” invoking the bodies of lions in the Tower Menagerie while representing the Tower, where his freedom is literally restricted, as the arm of the king (5.5). As the action builds toward the execution, the language becomes focused on physicality and death (5.5). According to Harbage, Cromwell was first produced by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (Annals 81), who performed at the Globe (355). Neill 70. Details in many early modern tragedies similarly evoke the Dance of Death (58, 81, 89). Neill cites allusions to the Dance in other plays by Webster, as well as Middleton, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Tourneur (54, 58, 81–101). The stage directions indicate that “Guilford speakes” ([A4r]). When their palace becomes their prison, Iane and Guilford immerse their discourse in the language of the body, especially the eyes (D2v-3v). With reference to his heart, Wyat compares the Tower’s stone fabric to “the stony hearts/ Of them [i.e., the Catholics] that wrong’d their country, and their friend” (F3v), and his dialogue with Winchester evokes his death ([F4r]). On their execution day Guilford greets Iane, who is reading “On a prayer booke,” and their discourse for the remainder of the play centers on physicality, spirituality, and death ([F4v-G3r]). This play’s character tags are inconsistently abbreviated. Belsey 19; R. Valerie Lucas, “Puritan Preaching and the Politics of the Family,” The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1990) 224. See note 92, above. As a matter of record, Guilford’s execution took place first as Lady Jane watched from the window of her cell (Chapman 203; Holinshed 4:22).

216

Notes to Chapter Five

96. See note 92, above. 97. Zimmerman 7, 8, 24, 25, 28–29, 45, 48. 98. The king orders Brandon, Surrey, Seymer, and Gray to be borne to the Tower and beheaded as traitors for disturbing his rest (C2v). And when Brandon returns from France, having married the king’s widowed sister, Mary, without his permission, Henry orders Brandon to the Tower with the imperative, “Off with his head.” However, King Henry reveals to the Queen that his threat is feigned and announces, with a religious interjection and several bodily references, “Gods holy Mother, Ile not haue him hurt, for all your heads:/ Deare Brandon, I imbrace thee in mine armes:” (G1r-v). 99. The Queen tells Prince Edward that the king’s “frowne is death, and I shall die” (I3r) for being associated with those who wish to “Alter Religion, and bring Luther in,/ [ . . . ] Ere long I know Queene Katherins head must off ” (I3r-v). Later, Compton informs the queen that Henry “hath granted firme commission/ To attach your person and conuay ye hence,/ Close prisoner to the Towre” and “to arrest your person” ([I4r]). The bishops likewise incorporate body imagery into their plot ([I4v]). 100. Rowley K1r-2r; Lucas 224. 101. Like Rowley, Shakespeare and Fletcher spell Boleyn as Bullen. 102. Shakespeare and Fletcher 1.1.114s.d.-119, 198, 203, 220, 223, 209–10, 215. 103. Shakespeare and Fletcher 2.1.53s.d., 58–65, 76–78. 104. Shakespeare and Fletcher 2.3.3, 11, 20; Elyot D1r. 105. Shakespeare and Fletcher 2.3.1, 4, 15–16, 21, 31, 32; Scarisbrick 153–55. The early modern meaning of the phrase “perk’d up” is provided in the gloss at 2.3 n.21. For additional references to Anne’s body and soul, see Shakespeare and Fletcher 2.3.26–27, 32, 38–40, 42, 44. 106. Shakespeare and Fletcher 2.3.44; Scarisbrick 150–52; Shakespeare and Fletcher 2.3.24, 47. 107. Shakespeare and Fletcher 5.3.70, 80–81, 54, 89, 97. 108. These are Legge (1579); Shakespeare, 1H6 (1590) and 2H6 (c.1590); True Tragedie R3 (1588–94); Shakespeare, 3H6 (c.1591) and R3 (1591–92); Munday et al. (originally composed c.1592–93); Heywood, 1E4 (1592–99) and 2E4 (1592–99); Munday, Drayton, et al. (1599); Cromwell (c.1599– 1602); Dekker and Webster (1602); Heywood, 1 If You Know Not Me (1604–05); and Ford (c.1625–34). In Marlowe, 4.1 takes place “Near the Tower of London” (4.1s.d.), and in Shakespeare, R2, 5.1 takes place on “A street leading to the Tower” (5.1n.); however, the Tower is not a setting of any action in these two plays. Nearly three-fourths (10/14) of the Tower plays that were first produced and/or composed by 1599 represent the Tower spatially, while fewer than half (4/10) of the plays first produced after that year do so. These fourteen plays and their dates of production or composition are listed in this note, above.

Notes to the Coda

217

109. These were Legge; Shakespeare, 1H6 and 2H6; True Tragedie R3; Iacke Straw; Shakespeare, 3H6; Peele; Shakespeare, R3; Marlowe; Shakespeare, R2; Heywood, 1E4 and 2E4; Munday, Drayton, et al.; Cromwell; Dekker and Webster; Rowley; Heywood, 1 and 2 If You Know Not Me; and Woodstock. 110. “A Lamentable Dittie [ . . . ]” (London, 1603); “A Lamentable Ditty [ . . . ]” (London, 1625).

NOTES TO THE CODA 1. Shakespeare, 1H6 2.5.57, 3, 4; Shakespeare, R3 3.1.43; Marlowe 3.3.69; Munday, Drayton, et al. ll.1939, 2065–66. 2. Heywood, 1 If You Know Not Me p.208, 213; Shakespeare and Fletcher 5.3.92–93. 3. Munday et al. 5.1.57–58, 5.4.153–54. 4. The earliest known documentation of the Line of Kings at the Tower is “A View and Survey of All the Armour and Other Municion or Habiliaments of Warr Remayneing at the Tower of London, Taken in the Month of October 1660,” Dartmouth Loan ms. AL.3 5, Board of Trustees of the Armouries, Royal Armouries Lib., HM Tower of London, London, Eng. See Parnell, “The Early History of the Tower Armouries” 46. Because the Line included a representation of Charles I, Parnell believes its presence at the Tower began no earlier than the Restoration (47). Although Borg has suggested that this “proto-Line of 1660” was preliminary and that the actual Line of Kings was not “formally established and open to public view” until as late as 1694 (“Two Studies” 317–21), a Dutch visitor to the Tower in 1661, William Schellinks, saw the Line and noted that it was “all well looked after and kept polished” (Parnell, “The Early History of the Tower Armouries” 47; William Schellinks, “The Journal of William Schellinks’ Travels in England 1661–1663,” trans. and ed. Maurice Exwood and H. L. Lehmann, Camden Society 5th ser. 1 [London: Royal Historical Society, 1993]: 49). 5. Dufty 16; Borg, “The Museum” 69, 71; Parnell, “The Early History of the Tower Armouries” 46. 6. William Shakespeare, The Norton Facsimile of the First Folio of Shakespeare, prepared by Charlton Hinman (New York: Norton, 1968); Kastan 80–82. According to the title pages of Heywood’s texts, The First and Second Parts of King Edward the Fourth was printed in London in 1600; 1 If You Know Not Me, in 1605; and 2 If You Know Not Me, in 1632. 7. Curiosities in the Tower of London 2:52–57; Borg, “The Museum” 71. My thanks to Bridget Clifford for confirming that Richard III was never represented in the Line of Kings. 8. Shakespeare, 1H6 2.5n., Boyce 444–45. 9. Ford 5.3.13–14. Historically, Warbeck escaped from the Tower only once (5.3 n.13–19).

218

Notes to the Coda

10. These early-Stuart entertainments were considered important enough to be included in detail in the first Tower guidebook, Curiosities in the Tower of London, 1:84–89. 11. “High Pound Hits Tourist Spots,” BBC News 1 Aug. 2000, 29 Sep. 2007 ; The Tower of London: A Day Out to Die For (London: Historic Royal Palaces, 2001). 12. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), “Tower of London,” World Heritage 19 Nov. 2005, 29 Sep. 2007 ; Icons Online, Icons: A Portrait of England 29 Sep. 2007 .

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Index

1E4, see First Part of King Edward the Fourth, The 1H6, see First Part of King Henry the Sixth, The 1 If You Know Not Me, see If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, or The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth 2E4, see Second Part of King Edward the Fourth, The 2H6, see Second Part of King Henry the Sixth, The 2 If You Know Not Me, see If You Know Not Me, You Know No Body. The Second Part 3H6, see Third Part of King Henry the Sixth, The

A Abington, Edward, 112 Actes and Monuments, or Book of Martyrs, 11, 48, 121 Act for the Queen’s Safety, 18 Act of Supremacy, 16 Act of Uniformity, 16 Act to Retain the Queen’s Majesty’s Subjects in their Due Obedience, 16 adiaphora, 15–16. See also Elizabethan Settlement Africa, 115 aldermen, 38 Aldersgate Street, 14 Aldgate, 108 Allen, William, 17

All Hallows by the Tower, 29 anatomy: and amphitheaters, 117, 121; and anatomical drawings, 116; and architecture, 117, 121; dissections, 116–17; and landscapes and built structures, 117–18; microcosm/macrocosm analogy, 117; as performances, 117, 121; texts, 116–17, 118. See also blood; body and soul; body imagery; humoural fluids Anne of Cleves, 47 Anjou, Duke of, 52 anti-alien protests, see social problems apprentice riot, 19, 23, 25, 78, 92–94, 95–96, 114 apprentices, 12, 13–15, 24, 70, 78, 79, 81, 84, 85, 86, 88–97, 99 architecture, 26, 114, 117, 118, 119–20, 128; and room functions, 118. See also anatomy; national identity Arden, Edward, 87, 92, 110, 124 Arden, Mary, 87 armor(y), 30, 41, 53, 54, 57, 60, 151–52. See also ordnance Armoury Office, 43 Arte of English Poesie, The, 3 Arthurian legend, 40 Askew, Anne, 47 astronomy, 117 Avenon, Sir Alexander, Lord Mayor of London, 53

243

244 B Babington Plot, 111–12, 114; conspirators’ executions, 122–24 Bale, John, 20 Baliol, John de, see de Baliol, John “Ballad on the Want of Corn,” 15 Ballard, John, 122 Bancroft, Richard, Bishop of London, 74 Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, 117 barons, 33, 38, 41, 43 Barron, Caroline M., 41 Bartels, Emily Carroll, 5 Basilikon Doron, 64 Bayley, John, 18 Beauchamp Tower, 36, 52 Becket, Thomas à, 35, 48, 147 Bedford, Earl of, 97 Bell Tower, 32 Belsey, Catherine, 7 “Bess of Hardwick,” see Talbot, Elizabeth Bishops’ Ban, 74, 77, 114–15 Blackfriars, 12 blood, 32, 75, 85, 87, 109, 111, 113, 116, 122, 125, 127, 128–29, 130, 131, 135, 140, 142, 148. See also anatomy; body and soul; body imagery; humoural fluids Bloody Tower, 33, 74–75, 127, 147, 152 blue dash chargers, 108–109, 110 Blount, Sir Christopher, 97 Blount, Sir Michael, Lieutenant of the Tower, 19, 93 Boar’s Head Theatre, the, 12 Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 25, 102, 103, 148 body and soul, 116. See also anatomy; blood; body imagery; humoural fluids body imagery, 26, 36, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 124, 125–26, 127–29, 130–31, 132, 134, 135–46. See also anatomy; blood; body and soul; humoural fluids body natural and body politic, 116 Boleyn, Anne, queen consort of Henry VIII, 45, 46, 47, 110, 147; character in The Life of King Henry the

Index Eighth (Anne Bullen), 144, 145, 146; mentioned in When You See Me You Know Me (Anne Bullen), 67, 143 Bolingbroke, Henry of, see Henry IV Bonner, Edmund, Bishop of London, character in The Life of the Dutches of Suffolke, 72; character in When You See Me You Know Me, 67–68, 143 Book of Martyrs, see Actes and Monuments Borg, Alan, 30 Boulogne, 57 Bowyer Tower, 34 boy companies, Brackenbury, Sir Robert, Lieutenant of the Tower, character in Richardus Tertius, 127 Brandon, Charles, Duke of Suffolk, 57 Breaknock-Castle, see Brecknock Castle Brecknock Castle, 86 Brick Tower, 34 Brigis, William, 41 Bristow, Richard, 111 Britannia, 55 Broad Arrow Tower, 34, 52 broadside ballads, 7, 25, 102, 148 Brutus, 135 Buckingham, Duke of, see Stafford, Edward; Stafford, Henry; Villiers, George Bullen, Anne, see Boleyn, Anne Burbage, James, 2 Burley, Sir Simon, Lord Chancellor, 39 Bye Plot, 61 Byward Tower, 36

C Cade, Jack, 92; character in The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth, 90–92 Cade’s Rebellion, 91, 99 Cadiz, 147 Caesar, Julius, 26, 29, 41, 55–56, 59, 60, 66, 76, 113, 114, 115, 134–35, 148, 150, 151 calendar, Christian vs. modern, 25, 109, 171n130 Calvinism, 15

Index Cambridge, 117. See also St. John’s College Hall Camden, William, 119 Campion, Edmund, 17, 26, 58–59, 110 Canterbury, Archbishop of, 33. See also Cranmer, Thomas; Sudbury, Simon; Whitgift, John Carr, Robert, Earl of Somerset, 61–62 Castel of Helth, The, 117 Catesby, character in Sir Thomas More, 132, 135 Catherine of Aragon, queen consort of Henry VIII, 46; mentioned in The Life of King Henry the Eighth (Queen Katharine), 145 Catholicism, 15, 42, 50, 51, 52, 61, 63, 85, 106–107, 111, 112, 130, 136, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143. See also Catholics; CounterReformation; Jesuits; Latin; Purgatory Catholics, 10,11 15–18, 22, 24, 25, 26, 44, 49, 50, 51, 52, 58, 61, 67, 68, 70, 71, 78, 79–82, 84–88, 93, 107, 110–12, 113, 120, 121, 122–24, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 142–43, 144, 147, 151. See also Catholicism; Counter-Reformation; Jesuits Cecil, Sir Robert, 19 censorship, 62, 84, 88, 90–91, 94, 100, 111, 182n41. See also Master of the Revels Censure of a Loyall Subiect, The, 111, 123 Chandos, Lord, 98 Chapel of St. John the Evangelist, 39, 45, 50 Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, 29, 45, 104 Charles I, 2, 10, 54, 62, 72–73, 97 Charles, Duke of Orléans, 40 Chelsea, 118, 120 Christian IV, King of Denmark, 61 Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, A Strange Truth, The, 2, 73, 130– 31, 132, 153 Chronicle of King Edward the First, Surnamed Longshanks, with The Life of Luellen Rebel in Wales, The, 1, 70

245 Chronicles of England, Ireland, and Scotland, The, 48, 76, 111 Clarence, Duke of, see George, Duke of Clarence Claudius, Emperor of Rome, mentioned in Richardus Tertius, 134 Cockpit, the, 12, 73, 97, 131 cognitive theory, 8–10, 22–23 Common Council, 14 “Complaint of the Yeomen Weavers against the Immigrant Weavers,” 15 Connaught, 105 Conqueror, the, see William I Constable of the Tower, 34; character in If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, or The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth, 69, 80–81 Constable, Sir William, 98 Constable Tower, 35 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 117 Cornish Rebellion, 43 coronation, 32, 38, 39, 42, 45–46, 59, 62, 66 coronation procession, 27, 38, 39, 44, 45, 46, 49, 50, 51, 62, 150. See also James I: triumphal entry Corporation of the City of London, 82 count palatine, see Frederick, count palatine Counter-Reformation, 107. See also Catholicism Court of Star Chamber, 93 Cradle Tower, 37 Cranmer, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, 50; character in The Life of King Henry the Eighth, 72, 144, 145–46, 150 crime, see social problems Cromwell, see The Life and Death of Thomas, Lord Cromwell Cromwell, Lord, supporter of Essex, 98 Cromwell, Thomas, 47, 48; character in The Life and Death of Thomas, Lord Cromwell, 67, 136–37, 142; character in The Life of King Henry the Eighth, 145 Crowmer, 92; character in The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth, 92

246 Crown Jewels, 37, 54. See also Jewel House cultural historicism, 4–10. See also cultural materialism; historicism; new historicism cultural history, 7. See also cultural historicism; cultural materialism; historicism; new historicism cultural materialism, 7. See also cultural historicism; historicism; new historicism Curiosities in the Tower of London, 152 Curnow, P. E., 127 Curtain, the, 12, 14

D Dance of Death, 116, 138 danse macabre, see Dance of Death Danvers, Sir Charles, 97 Davenport, Robert, 2, 72 David, Biblical King of Judah and Israel, 60 David, King of Scotland, 38 Davies, Sir John, 97–98 da Vinci, Leonardo, 116 de Baliol, John, King of Scotland, 37 “Declaration of the fauourable dealing of her Maiesties Commissioners appointed for the Examination of certaine Traitours, and of tortures vniustly reported to be done vpon them for matters of religion, A,” 18 Declaration of the Sentence and Deposition of Elizabeth, A, 11 de Critz, John, the Elder, 105 De Humani Corporis Fabrica, 117 Dekker, Thomas, 1–2, 66, 79, 138, 151 de Lara, Don Manriquez, Duke de Najera, 48 delftware plate, see The London Plate Deloney, Thomas, 15 de Mandeville, Geoffrey, 31 de Montfort, Simon, Earl of Leicester, 33 Denten, Iack, character in The True Tragedie of Richard the Third [ . . . ], 128 De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, 117 Dering, Edward, 51 Descriptio Londoniae, 32

Index Develin Tower, 36 Devereux, Robert, second Earl of Essex: coconspirators, 20, 97–98, 100; Elizabeth’s favorite, 19–20, 101, 109; execution of, 25, 26, 63, 101, 102, 104, 105, 109, 110, 111, 112, 147, 148; faction of, 20, 25, 97–98, 101, 105; and Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, 100, 105; imprisonment of, 25, 101, 102, 148; insubordination of, 20, 101; military campaigns, 20, 101, 147; patron of literature and drama, 100; and poetry, 109, 111; popularity of, 101–102; and religion, 63, 98, 110, 148; revolt of, 25, 63, 98, 100–101, 104, 112; trial of, 98, 101. See also “A Lamentable Ditty, Composed upon the Death of Robert Lord Devereux, Late Earle of Essex, Who Was Beheaded in the Tower of London, on Ashwednesday in the Morning, 1600. To the Tune of Welladay” Devereux Tower, 34 Digby, Lieutenant of the Tower, mentioned in The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, A Strange Truth, 131 Digges, Sir Dudley, 72 Dighton, character in Richardus Tertius, 127 disease, see social problems disorder and riots, see social problems. See also apprentice riot; Evil May Day riot; Shrove Tuesday (Shrovetide) riots dissection, see anatomy Doctor Parry, character in If You Know Not Me, You Know No Body. The Second Part, 70–71. See also Parry, Dr. William Doctor Shaw, character in The Second Part of King Edward the Fourth, 134 Douai, 17 Downman, Edward Andrews, 108–109

Index Dr. Lewis, character in Richardus Tertius, 85 Drayton, Michael, 1, 67, 81, 83, 115, 136 Drue, Thomas, 2, 72 Dudley, Guildford, 49, 50, 51, 141; character in The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat (Guilford), 138–42; mentioned in If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, or The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth, 80 Dudley, John, Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland, 49, 50; mentioned in The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat, 138 Dudley, Robert, first Earl of Leicester, character in If You Know Not Me, You Know No Body. The Second Part (Lecester, Lester), 70, 71 Dunbar, William, 41 Durham, Bishop of, 32 Dutches of Suffolke, see Willoughby, Catherine

E Earl Henry, see Henry VII Edinburgh, 59 Edward I, 34, 36, 37 Edward II, 37, 38; character in Edward the Second, 89 Edward III, 37, 38, 66 Edward IV, 42, 79, 82; character in The First Part of King Edward the Fourth, 70, 98, 99; character in The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth, 65 Edward V (uncrowned), see Princes in the Tower Edward VI, 48, 49, 50; character in When You See Me You Know Me (Prince Edward), 144; mentioned in The Life of the Dutches of Suffolke, 72 Edward, Prince of Wales (uncrowned Edward V), see Princes in the Tower Edward the First, see The Chronicle of King Edward the First, Surnamed

247 Longshanks, with The Life of Luellen Rebel in Wales Edward the Second, 1, 65–66, 79, 89–90, 97 Eleanor of Provence, queen consort of Henry III, 33 Eliot, Sir John, 72–73 Elizabethan Settlement, 15–16. See also adiaphora; Protestantism; Reformation Elizabeth I, 66, 95, 109, 110, 115, 123, 132; character in If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, or The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth (Princess Elizabeth), 69, 79–80, 150; character in If You Know Not Me, You Know No Body. The Second Part, 70–71; and the cult of the virgin, 10; death of, 68, 69, 79, 109; decline in popularity near end of reign, 10, 105; and Essex, 19–20, 26, 100, 101–104, 110, 111; excommunication, 10, 11, 16, 17, 107, 115; imprisonment in the Tower as a princess, 180n10; 11, 51, 55, 56, 63, 64–65, 76, 79–81, 109–10; and Mary, Queen of Scots, 84–86; mentioned in The Life of King Henry the Eighth (Princess Elizabeth), 95; opposition to, 14, 15, 25–26, 87, 89–90, 93, 97–98, 101, 102–107, 111–12; reign of, 1, 23, 52, 57–59, 79, 87, 120; and religion, 15–16, 58–59, 63, 71; on representation, 64, 124; restricting access to Tower prisoners, 74, 77; and the Tower, 2, 52–53, 54, 56, 60, 61, 65, 83, 110 Elizabeth of York, 43, 45, 110 Ely, Bishop of, see Longchamp, William, Elyot, Thomas, 117 emblem books, 3–4 emblems, 3–4; Tower as an emblem, 5, 7, 78, 89, 113, 119 empowerment, see playgoers

248 enclosures, see social problems “England’s Caesar,” 59 English nationhood, see national identity Essex, Earl of, see Devereux, Robert Essex Revolt, see Devereux, Robert Evil May Day riot, 90 excommunication, see Elizabeth I executions, 17–18, 26, 37, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 61, 84, 85–86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 94, 96, 110, 111, 112, 118, 119, 121, 122–26, 132, 135, 136–40, 141, 142–43, 144, 147; as performances, 121–22; rituals of, 121, 125–26; spectator responses to, 114, 121–24; within the Tower walls, 28, 39, 42, 47, 51, 101, 110, 124, 126– 31, 145, 148. See also anatomy; Tower Hill exploration, 115

F Falconbridge, see Neuille, Thomas Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat, The, 2, 66, 138–42 Fasciculus Medicinae, 116 Fawkes, Guy, 61, 81 Ffoulkes, Charles J., 57 First Part of King Edward the Fourth, The, 1, 70, 98–99 First Part of King Henry the Sixth, The, 1, 66, 135–36, 153 First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII, The, 100 First Part of the True and Honorable Historie, of the Life of Sir John Old-castle, the Good Lord Cobham, The, 1, 67, 81–82, 115, 136 Fisher, John, Bishop of Rochester, 17, 46; character in Sir Thomas More, 135 Fitter, Chris, 90 Fitzstephen, William, 32 Flambard, Ranulf, 31 Fleming, Abraham, 123 Fletcher, John, 2, 72, 95, 142, 144

Index Flint Tower, 34 Florentine ambassador, 56 Fontaine, Jean, 55 food shortages, see social problems Ford, John, 2, 73, 130–31, 132 Forest, Myles, character in The True Tragedie of Richard the Third [ . . . ], 128 Fortune, the, 12, 97 Foucault, Michel, 5, 6 Foxe, John, 11, 48, 119, 121 France, 33, 37–38, 40, 62, 67, 117 Frederick, count palatine, 48 Frederick, Duke of Wirtemberg, 57 Frier Anselme, character in The Second Part of King Edward the Fourth, 134 Fry, Plantagenet Somerset, 30

G Gage, character in If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, or The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth, 69 Gardiner, Stephen, Bishop of Winchester, 49, 50; character in The Life and Death of Thomas, Lord Cromwell, 67, 136–37, 138; character in The Life of King Henry the Eighth, 145; character in The Life of the Dutches of Suffolke (Gardner), 72; character in When You See Me You Know Me (Gardner), 67, 143 Gardner, see Gardiner, Stephen Gaveston, character in Edward the Second, Geertz, Clifford, 5 gentry, 16–17, 97–98, 118, 120 George, Duke of Clarence, 42, 47, 86–87, 119, 124; character in The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, 125–26, 128, 134; character in The True Tragedie of Richard the Third [ . . . ] (Ghost of Clarence), 85, 134 Gerard, John, 82 Gerschow, Frederic, 102 Gheeraerts, Marcus, 109 Ghost of Clarence, see George, Duke of Clarence

Index ghosts, 26, 85, 86–87, 113, 114, 115, 133– 34, 135, 148 Globe, the, 12, 100, 138 Gloster, see Richard III Gloucester, Duke of, character in The First Part of King Henry the Sixth, 66– 67. See also Richard III; Thomas of Woodstock Gorges, Sir Ferdinando, 97 Grafton, Richard, 119 Great Hall: of Hardwick Hall, 118; of Penshurst, 120; of the Tower of London, 46. See also architecture: and room functions Great Wardrobe, 37, 48, 54, 60 Greenblatt, Stephen, 5, 6, 92 Greene, Robert, 4 green leaves, 111–12 Grey, Lady Jane, 48, 49, 50, 51, 110, 126, 141; character in The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat (Iane), 66, 138–42; mentioned in If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, or The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth, 80 Guildhall, 38 Guilford, see Dudley, Guildford gunpowder, 37 Gunpowder Plot, 61, 71, 98 Gurr, Andrew, 7 Gwynevere, Queen, 40

H H8, see The Life of King Henry the Eighth Hales, Robert, Treasurer, 39 Hall, Edward, 48, 75, 119, 127 Hall, Hugh, 87 Hamilton, Donna B., 67 Hand D in the Sir Thomas More manuscript, 88 Harbage, Alfred, 74 Hardwick, Bess of, see Talbot, Elizabeth Hardwick Hall, 118, 120 Hardyng, Iohn, 119 Harpoole, character in The First Part of the True and Honorable Historie, of the Life of Sir John

249 Old-castle, the Good Lord Cobham, 81–82, 83 Harrison, G. B., 25 harvest failures, see social problems Hastings, Lord William, 42, 86–87, 119; character in The Tragedie of King Richard the Third, 124, 126; character in The True Tragedie of Richard the Third [ . . . ], 124, 126 Hathway, Richard, 1, 67 Hayward, John, 100 Headsman, character in The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat, 140, 141 Henry I, 31 Henry II, 32 Henry III, 33, 34, 35, 36, 47 Henry IV (Henry of Bolingbroke), 39, 40, 100, 119; character in The Tragedy of King Richard the Second (Bolingbroke), 66 Henry V, 40, 41, 101 Henry VI, 41, 42, 79, 119; character in The First Part of King Edward the Fourth, 70, 98, 99; character in The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth, 68; character in The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth, 65, 124, 125 Henry VII (Henry Tudor), previously Earl of Richmond, 42, 43, 44, 75, 76; character in The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, A Strange Truth, 73, 131; character in Richardus Tertius (Earl Henry), 84, 85; character in The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (Richmond), 84, 86 Henry VIII, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 57, 83, 110, 119, 122; character in The Life and Death of Thomas, Lord Cromwell, 67; character in The Life of King Henry the Eighth, 72, 142, 144; character in Sir Thomas More, 69, 88; character in When You See Me You Know Me, 68, 143–44

250 Henry of Bolingbroke, see Henry IV Henry Tudor, see Henry VII Hentzner, Paul, 55, 56, 57, 146–47 Heywood, Thomas, 1, 2, 69, 70, 73, 75, 76, 79, 98–99, 113, 121, 129, 132, 133, 134, 135, 150, 152 Hilliard, Nicholas, 19 Historical Account of the Tower of London and its Curiosities, A, 152–53 historicism, 5–6, 9, 11 . See also cultural historicism; cultural materialism; new historicism History and Antiquities of the Tower of London, The, 18 History of King Richard the Third, The, 48, 119 History of the World, The, 119 Hobs the Tanner, character in The First Part of King Edward the Fourth, 70 Holborn, 90, 122, 124 Holinshed, Raphael, 48, 75–76, 111, 119, 122–23 Homilie Agaynst Disobedience and Wylful Rebellion, An, 10–11 House of Commons, 72 Howard, character in If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, or The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth, 69 Howard, Catherine, 47 Howard, Frances, 61 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, 47 Howard, Thomas, fourth Duke of Norfolk, 17 Howes, Edmond, 147 Hubbocke, William, Chaplain of the Tower, 59–60, 64, 68, 69, 71, 73, 75 Huguenots, 111 humoral fluids, 116, 129, 139, 145. See also anatomy; blood; body and soul; body imagery Hundred Years’ War, 37, 40 Hurault, André, French ambassador, 15, 19 hypocrisy, 63, 78, 139, 144

Index Iane, see Grey, Lady Jane Icons: A Portrait of England, 153 If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, or The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth, 2, 69, 79–81, 132 If You Know Not Me, You Know No Body. The Second Part, 2, 70 Imperial ambassador, 51 inflation, see social problems Inns of Court, 91 Iohn and Matilda, see King Iohn and Matilda, A Tragedy Ireland, 61, 101, 105 Isabella, queen consort of Edward II, character in Edward the Second, 66 Italy, 116

J

I

James I and VI, 75, 81, 105, 110; reign of, 56, 120; and religion, 61, 68, 71; on representation, 64; restricting access to Tower prisoners, 74, 77; and the Tower, 2, 54, 59–62, 75, 119; triumphal entry, 59–61, 75 James I, King of Scotland, 40 James IV, King of Scotland, character in The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, A Strange Truth, 130 Jesuits, 17, 18, 58–59, 68, 120. See also Catholicism; Catholics; Counter-Reformation Jewel House, 45, 48, 53, 60. See also Crown Jewels jewels, see Crown Jewels Jews, 32, 36–37. See also Judaism John, King, 32–33, 34; character in King Iohn and Matilda, A Tragedy, 72, 97 John the Good, King of France, 38 John of Gaunt, 91 Jonson, Ben, 120 Judaism, 51. See also Jews Julius, Philip, Duke of Stettin-Pomerania, 55, 57, 74–76, 102, 147

Iacke Straw, see The Life and Death of Iacke Straw, A Notable Rebell in England

Kastan, David Scott, 6, 21

K

Index Katharine of Aragon, see Catherine of Aragon Keay, Anna, 58, 83 Keeper, character in The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, 126 Keevill, Graham, 23, 30 Keith, William, 110 Kent, 65, 91–92 Kentell, Monsieur, 53 King Iohn and Matilda, A Tragedy, 2, 72, 73, 97 King’s Men, the, 12 King’s Stairs, the, 59 Kinney, Arthur F., 8, 9 Knights of the (Order of the) Bath, 39, 150 Knowde, James, 63

L laborers, see apprentices Lambarde, William, Keeper of the Records in the Tower of London, 100 “Lamentable Ditty, Composed upon the Death of Robert Lord Devereux, Late Earle of Essex, Who Was Beheaded in the Tower of London, on Ash-wednesday in the Morning, 1600. To the Tune of Welladay, A,” 25, 101–105, 148 Lancastrians, 110 Lanthorn Tower, 33 Latin, 85, 107 Lea, Captain Thomas, 98 Lecester, see Dudley, Robert Legge, Thomas, 1, 73, 84, 131, 134 Leicester, Earl of, see de Montfort, Simon; Dudley, Robert Lester, see Dudley, Robert Levin, Carol, 110 Liberties: of London, 20–21, 82; of the Tower of London, 82–84, 93 Lieutenant of the Tower, 17, 19, 53, 56, 57, 59, 60, 74, 93, 94, 119; character in The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat, 139; character in The First Part of the True and Honorable Historie, of the Life of Sir John Old-castle, the Good

251 Lord Cobham, 83; character in “A Lamentable Ditty, Composed upon the Death of Robert Lord Devereux, Late Earle of Essex, Who Was Beheaded in the Tower of London, on Ashwednesday in the Morning, 1600. To the Tune of Welladay,” 104; character in Sir Thomas More, 135. See also Brackenbury, Sir Robert; Peyton, Sir John Life and Death of Iacke Straw, A Notable Rebell in England, The, 1, 65 Life and Death of Thomas, Lord Cromwell, The, 1, 67, 136–37, 142 Life of King Henry the Eighth, The, 2, 72, 95–96, 97, 144–46 Life of the Dutches of Suffolke, The, 1, 72 Lincoln’s Inn, 4, 15 Line of Kings, 151–53 lion-baiting, 60–61, 153 Lion Tower, 36, 60 Littleton, John, 97 living expenses, see social problems Llewellyn, Gruffydd ap, Prince of Wales, 37 Lluellen, Prince of Wales, character in The Chronicle of King Edward the First, Surnamed Longshanks, with The Life of Luellen Rebel in Wales, 70 Lodowicke, character in The True Tragedie of Richard the Third [ . . . ], 86 Lollards, 41–42, 67, 82 Londinium, 29, 55 London, Bishop of, see Bancroft, Richard; Bonner, Edmund London Bridge, 33, 41, 87, 90, 92, 121, 138 Londoners, 13, 22, 23, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 44, 46, 52, 74, 83, 89, 91, 100, 101, 114, 125, 127, 132, 151. See also playgoers London Plate, the, 7, 25–26, 107–12, 113 Longchamp, William, Bishop of Ely, 32, 33 Lord Chamberlain, character in The Life of King Henry the Eighth, 95, 96

252 Lord Chamberlain’s Men, The, 92, 100, 101–102 Lord Chancellor of Scotland, 56 Lord Mayor of London, 15, 52, 53, 58, 82, 93, 99. See also Avenon, Sir Alexander; Rowe, Sir William; Spencer, Sir John “Rich” Lord Mayor’s Pageant, 58 Ludgate Prison, 14

M Magna Carta, 33 “Magnificent Entertainment: Giuen to King James, Queene Anne His Wife, and Henry Frederick the Prince, vpon the Day of His Maiesties Tryumphant Passage (from the Tower) through His Honourable Citie (and Chamber) of London, being the 15. of March. 1603, The,” 60 Main Plot, 61 Malory, Sir Thomas, 40 Manners, Roger, fifth Earl of Rutland, 97, 100 Margaret of Anjou, queen consort of Henry VI, character in The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth, 68, 81 Marlowe, Christopher, 1, 5, 65, 79, 89, 97 Mars, 41 Marshalsea Prison, 72, 81, 89 Martin Tower, 34 Mary I (Mary Tudor), 49, 50, 51, 63, 109, 142; character in If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, or The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth, 69, 79; mentioned in The Life of the Dutches of Suffolke, 72 Mary, Queen of Scots, 84, 85–86, 87, 110, 111 Mary Tudor, see Mary I Master of the Revels, 62, 88, 100. See also Tilney, Edmund Matilda, Empress, 31 Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 63 Mayor of the City of London, 33 McMillin, Scott, 88

Index Menagerie, 4, 33, 34, 36, 48, 53, 54, 57, 60–61, 153 Meres, Francis, 3 Merrick, Sir Gilly, 98 Mestrell’s engine, 53 Middle Tower, 36 Mint, 37, 48, 53, 54, 60, 98, 110. See also Warder of the Mint mitior sensus, 62 moat, 34, 36 Modred, Sir, 40 More, Sir Thomas, 17, 46, 47, 48, 75, 118, 120, 127; character in Sir Thomas More, 69, 88, 90, 132, 135, 151 Morte D’Arthur, Le, 40 Mortimer, Edmund, character in The First Part of King Henry the Sixth, 153 Mortimer, Roger, 38, 66; character in Edward the Second, 90 Morton, character in The True Tragedie of Richard the Third [ . . . ], 86 Mulcaster, Richard, 51 Mullaney, Stephen, 2, 5, 51 Munday, Anthony, 1, 67, 69, 81, 83, 88, 115, 118, 136 murders, 26, 28, 39, 42, 43, 48, 79, 84, 121, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132 Museum of London, 108–109

N national identity, 5, 23, 24, 26, 31–32, 45, 53, 55, 78, 96, 114, 115, 119, 120, 125, 126, 128, 130, 132, 147–49, 151, 153; physical, 2, 4, 26, 39, 42, 47, 113, 135, 143, 144–46, 147; spiritual, 2, 4, 10, 26, 28, 40, 42, 44, 46, 50, 51, 58–59, 113, 114, 115, 119, 120, 135, 136–49. See also Protestantism; self-fashioning Netherlands, 117 Neuer Too Late, 4 Neuille, Thomas, Lord Falconbridge, character in The First Part of King Edward the Fourth, 98–99

Index Newgate, 87, 131 new historicism, 5–6. See also cultural historicism; cultural materialism; historicism New Testament, 11 nobles, 18–20, 24, 25, 78, 97–100, 101, 118–19 Norfolk, Duke of, character in The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat, 141; character in The Life and Death of Thomas, Lord Cromwell, 137, 138. See also Howard, Thomas Norman Conquest, 29, 30, 119 Northumberland, Duke of, see Dudley, John

O Office of Ordnance, 43, 48. See also ordnance Office of Records, 52 Old-castle, see Oldcastle, Sir John Old-castle, see The First Part of the True and Honorable Historie, of the Life of Sir John Old-castle, the Good Lord Cobham Oldcastle, Sir John, 42, 136; character in The First Part of the True and Honorable Historie, of the Life of Sir John Old-castle, the Good Lord Cobham (Old-castle), 67, 81–82, 83, 136, 150 Old Lady, character in The Life of King Henry the Eighth, 145 old-style dating, see calendar oppression, 16–18, 28, 31, 39, 41, 42, 47, 50, 51, 52, 84, 90–91. See also repression; social problems; tyranny “Oration Gratvlatory to [ . . . ] Iames of England [ . . . ], King, Defendor of the Faith [ . . . ], An,” 59–60, 64, 68, 69, 71, 73, 75 ordnance, 44, 48, 53, 56, 59, 61, 95, 148. See also armour(y); Office of Ordnance Orléans, Duke of, see Charles, Duke of Orléans

253 Overbury, Thomas, 61 overcrowding, see social problems Oxford, 117

P Padua, 117 Palatine, 32 Palladis Tamia, 3 Pandulph, character in King Iohn and Matilda, A Tragedy, 72 Paris, 111 Paris, Matthew, 34, 35–36 Parker, William, fourth Baron Monteagle, 98 Parliament, 13, 19, 62, 72–73, 91. See also House of Commons Parr, Katherine, queen consort of Henry VIII, character in When You See Me You Know Me (Katherine Parry), 68, 143, 144 Parry, Dr. William, 70. See also Doctor Parry Parry, Katherine, see Parr, Katherine Parsons, Robert, see Persons (or Parsons), Robert Pasqualigio, Peter, 48 Paul III, Pope, 46 Peasants’ Revolt, 23, 38, 91, 99 Peele, George, 1, 70 Penshurst, 119–20 Percy, Sir Charles, 98 Perkin Warbeck, see The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, A Strange Truth personification, 26, 99, 113, 114, 115, 130, 133, 135, 148 Persons (or Parsons), Robert, 17–18, 19 Petition of Right, 97 Peyton, Sir John, Lieutenant of the Tower, 83, 94–95 Philip, King of Spain, 50; character in If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, or The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth, 69 Phoenix, the, 12, 73, 97, 131 Pius V, Pope, 11 Plantagenet, Richard, Duke of York, character in The First Part of King Henry the Sixth, 153; character

254 in The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth, 68, 81 Platter, Thomas, 55, 56, 57 playgoers, 1, 13–20, 79, 85, 92, 118, 121– 22, 126, 131, 135, 136, 138, 153; as affective communities, 21, 26, 89, 114, 126, 132, 148; and empowerment, 20–23, 77, 78, 89, 92, 96, 115; and historical drama, 62–64; and reactions to plays, 6, 7–10, 11, 20–23, 26, 54, 64–74, 77–92, 95–101, 113, 114, 121, 124–30, 132, 136–45, 148, 150; and representation, 64 playhouses, 2, 12, 13, 14, 21, 82, 89–90, 96, 121, 125, 139, 152. See also the Boar’s Head; the Cockpit; the Curtain; the Fortune; the Globe; the Phoenix; the Red Bull; the Rose; the Theatre Poems of Charles, Duke of Orléans, 40–41, 43, 45 Pole, Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, 47 Pomfret, 66 Pope, see Paul III; Pius V; Sixtus V Porter, character in The Life of King Henry the Eighth, 95 Porter of the Tower of London, 52 Porter’s Man, character in The Life of King Henry the Eighth, 95 portraits, 7, 11, 115, 124 poverty, see social problems Princes in the Tower (Edward, Prince of Wales; and Richard, Duke of York), 42, 43, 74–75, 79, 84, 85, 86–87, 119, 127, 147, 152; characters in Richardus Tertius, 74, 84, 127; characters in The Second Part of King Edward the Fourth, 74, 129–30, 133, 150– 51; characters in The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, 74, 126, 128–29, 133, 134; characters in The True Tragedie of Richard the Third [ . . . ], 74, 85, 86–87, 127–28; mentioned in The

Index Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, A Strange Truth, 130 Prince Edward, see Edward VI; Princes in the Tower Prince Richard, see Princes in the Tower Princess Elizabeth, see Elizabeth I prisoners, 14, 15, 81, 91; of the Tower, 31, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 58, 59, 61–62, 74, 79, 82, 87, 89, 92, 93, 100, 102–107, 109–11, 112, 113, 118–19; represented in plays, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 79–82, 124–31, 132, 136, 151, 153 Privy Council, 18, 52, 53, 56, 71, 74, 89–90, 94, 110 Privy Wardrobe, 37, 39, 43 Protestantism, 10, 11, 58–59, 60, 71, 111, 117, 119–20, 123, 130, 136, 139, 140–41, 142, 144, 146. See also Elizabethan Settlement; Lollards; national identity; Reformation Protestants, 44, 50, 69, 108, 110, 124, 136, 138, 140, 141, 142–43, 146 Ptolemy, 117 Purgatory, 85, 86–87 Puritans, 52, 98 Puttenham, George, 3 Q Queen Anne’s Men, 97 Queen, character in The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, 66, 135. See also Margaret of Anjou Queen Elizabeth, consort of Edward IV, character in Richardus Tertius, 85; character in The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, 133 “Queen Elizabeth’s Prayerbook,” 116 Queen Henrietta’s Men, 73 Queen Katharine, see Catherine of Aragon

R R3, see The Tragedy of King Richard the Third rack, the, 42, 47, 48, 51, 52, 58, 87, 150 Rainbow Portrait, 109 Ralegh, Sir Walter, 19, 61, 118–19, 120

Index Ratey, John J., 9 records, 37, 48, 60, 90, 100. See also Office of Records recusants, see Catholics Red Bull, the, 12, 97 Reformation, 26, 44, 46, 49, 63, 89, 113, 119, 121, 135–49. See also Protestantism; Elizabethan Settlement refugees, see social problems Regnans in excelsis, 11 religious persecution, see Catholics repression, 10–11, 14–15, 20, 78, 85, 97. See also oppression; tyranny resistance, 7, 10–11, 14, 15, 16, 19, 28, 30– 31, 33, 36, 38–39, 40, 42, 44, 50, 53, 78, 84, 87–90, 92–98, 100–13, 115, 120, 148, 151; represented in plays, 2, 3, 8, 21, 22–23, 24–26, 64–92, 95–100, 114, 150, 153. See also resistance theory; social problems: disorder and riots resistance theory, 11. See also resistance revenge, 79, 84–88 Richard I, 32 Richard II, 38, 39, 66, 76, 100; character in The Life and Death of Iacke Straw, A Notable Rebell in England, 65; character in The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, 66; character in Woodstock, 68 Richard III, previously Duke of Gloucester, 42, 74–76, 85, 115, 119, 147, 152–53; character in Richardus Tertius, 74, 84, 134; character in The Second Part of King Edward the Fourth (Gloster), 74, 134, 150–51; character in The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth (Gloucester), 125; character in The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, 74, 84, 129, 134; character in The True Tragedie of Richard the Third [ . . . ], 74, 85–87, 134; mentioned in The Chronicle History of Perkin War-

255 beck, A Strange Truth, 130, 131; plays about, 24, 54, 73–76, 79, 84–87, 124–34, 152–53 Richard, Duke of York, see Princes in the Tower Richardus Tertius, 1, 73–76, 84–85, 127, 131–32, 151 Richmond, Earl of, see Henry VII riots, see social problems. See also apprentice riot; Cade’s Rebellion; Cornish Rebellion; Evil May Day riot; Peasants’ Revolt; Shrove Tuesday (Shrovetide) riots Rochester, Bishop of, character in The First Part of the True and Honorable Historie, of the Life of Sir John Old-castle, the Good Lord Cobham, 81. See also Fisher, John Rochford, Lady, 47 Roman occupation of Britain, 1, 29, 55, 119, 134–35 Roman wall, 29, 30, 34 Rome, 32, 41 Rose, the, 12, 136 Rosedale, Dr., 57 Rowe, Sir William, Lord Mayor of London, 58 Rowley, Samuel, 2, 67, 142, 143–44 Royal ideology of the Tower, 24, 26, 27, 30, 54–62, 64, 65, 75–77, 83, 112, 115, 134–35, 146, 148, 150–51 Royal Mint, see Mint Rufus, William, see William II Rutland, Earl of, see Manners, Roger

S Sadler, Sir Ralph, character in The Life and Death of Thomas, Lord Cromwell, 137 sanitation, see social problems St. Bartholomew’s Massacre, 111 St. John’s Chapel, see Chapel of St John the Evangelist St. John’s College Hall, Cambridge, 73, 84 St. Martin’s, 14, 90 St. Paul’s Cathedral, 30, 90 St. Peter, 106, 107

256 St. Thomas’s Tower, 36, 80, 109, 147 Salt Tower, 34 Sandys, Lord, 98 Savoy Palace, 91 Saxon England, 29 Saye, Lord, 92; character in The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth, 92 Scales, Lord, character in The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth, 92 Scavenger’s Daughter, The, 47 Schönbub, Louis, 55 Scotland, 57, 117 Second Part of King Edward the Fourth, The, 1, 73–76, 129–30, 132, 133, 134, 135, 150 Second Part of King Henry the Sixth, The, 1, 68, 81, 90–92 self-fashioning, 5, 27, 29, 115, 118, 119–20, 125. See also national identity Sermon Preached at the Tower of London, the Eleuenth Day of December, 1569, A, 51 Servants 1, 2, and 3, characters in The First Part of the True and Honorable Historie, of the Life of Sir John Old-castle, the Good Lord Cobham, 82 Settlement, see Elizabethan Settlement Seymour, Edward, Duke of Somerset, Lord Protector, 49, 109 Seymour, Thomas, Lord Admiral, 109 Shakespeare, William, 1, 2, 26, 55, 65, 66, 68, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 81, 84, 85, 88, 90–92, 95, 100, 101, 105, 113, 115, 121, 124, 125, 128, 132, 133, 134, 142, 144, 146, 150, 152, 153 family’s history with the Tower, 87, 92, 124; First Folio, 152; and religion, 87, 120, 191n35 Sherborne, 118, 120 showplace, Tower as a, 23, 28, 30, 33, 34, 44–45, 46, 47, 48, 52–53, 54–61, 119. See also visitor attraction Shrove Tuesday (Shrovetide) riots, 92, 97 Sidney, Sir Henry, 120

Index Sidney, Sir Philip, 19, 20, 119–20 Simpson, Cut[h]bert, 48 Sir John, Parson of Wrotham, character in The First Part of the True and Honorable Historie, of the Life of Sir John Old-castle, the Good Lord Cobham, 136 Sir Thomas More, 1, 69, 84, 88, 118, 132, 135 Sixtus V, Pope, 11 Smithfield, 87, 124 social problems, 92; anti-alien protests and riots, 14, 93; crime, 14; discharged and deserting soldiers, 15; disease, 13; disorder and riots, 14, 23, 88–90, 92–97, 100–101 (see also apprentice riot; Cade’s Rebellion; Cornish Rebellion; Evil May Day riot; Peasants’ Revolt; Shrove Tuesday [Shrovetide] riots); enclosures, 13, 90, 91; food shortages, 13, 91; harvest failures, 13; inflation, 13, 91; living expenses, 13; overcrowding, 13; poverty, 13–14, 91; refugees, 13; religious persecution, see Catholics; riots, 14, 23 (see also apprentice riot; Cade’s Rebellion; Cornish Rebellion; Evil May Day riot; Peasants’ Revolt; Shrove Tuesday [Shrovetide] riots); sanitation, 13; taxation, 14, 20, 91; unemployment, 13; vagrancy, 14; wage regulation, 13; wars, 13, 14 soldiers, discharged and deserting, see social problems Somerset, Duke of, character in The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth, 68, 81. See also Seymour, Edward Somerset, Earl of, see Carr, Robert Somerville, John, 87, 92, 110, 124 Southampton, Earl of, see Wriothesley, Henry Southwark, 51, 81, 93 Spanish ambassador, 57

Index Spanish Armada, 10 Spencer, Sir John “Rich,” Lord Mayor of London, 93 Spenser, Edmund, 19 Stafford, Edward, third Duke of Buckingham, 47; character in The Life of King Henry the Eighth, 144–45 Stafford, Henry, second Duke of Buckingham, character in Richardus Tertius, 84–85; character in The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, 84, 134; character in The True Tragedie of Richard the Third [ . . . ], 86 Stafford, Sir Humphrey, character in The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth, 92 Stanley, Lord, character in Richardus Tertius, 84, 85; character in The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, 84 Stephen, King, 31 Stettin-Pomerania, Duke of, see Julius, Philip Stow, John, 13, 55, 56, 83, 119, 147 Straw, Jack, 38, 99 Stuart, Lady Arabella, 61–62 Stuart, Mary, see Mary, Queen of Scots Stubbs, John, 52, 112 Succession Act of 1544, 49 Sudbury, Simon, Chancellor, Archbishop of Canterbury, 39 Suffolk, Duke of, 51. See also Brandon, Charles Surrey, Earl of, see Howard, Henry Sussex, character in If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, or The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth, 69 Sussex, Earl of, 97

T Talbot, Elizabeth “Bess of Hardwick,” Countess of Shrewsbury, 118, 120 taxation, see social problems Taxis, Monsr., 57 Terrill, see Tyrrel Thames, 33, 36, 41, 43, 96, 138

257 Theatre, the, 2, 12, 14 thick description, 5 Third Part of King Henry the Sixth, The, 1, 65, 124, 125 Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, 39 Throgmorton family, 87 Tichborne, Chidiock, 111–12, 123 Tilney, Edmund, Master of the Revels, 88 Tirill, see Tyrrel “To Penshurst,” 120 “To the City of London,” 41 torture, 17–18, 20, 28, 42, 44, 46, 47, 48, 51, 52, 61, 79, 81, 89, 92, 121, 124. See also the rack; The Scavenger’s Daughter tourist attraction, see visitor attraction Tower Green, 177n85 Tower guides (printed), 152–53. See also Yeoman Warders Tower Hill, 17, 25, 39, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 61, 82, 83, 92–97, 110, 118, 122, 124, 131, 132, 135, 138, 139, 144, 147. See also executions Tower Liberty, see Liberties Tower Menagerie, see Menagerie Tower Street, 93, 93, 95, 96 Tower Street Ward, 93, 95 Tower Warders, see Yeoman Warders Tower Wharf, 36, 37, 58, 61, 77 Tragedy of King Richard the Second, The, 1, 66, 100, 115, 135 Tragedy of King Richard the Third, The, 1, 73–76, 84, 85, 125–26, 128, 132, 133, 150; First Quarto, 125, 125 Traitors’ Gate, 180n10, 56, 109, 147 Tree of Life, 111 Tricomi, Albert H., 6 triumphal entry, see James I Troy, 135 “True and Exact Draught of the TOWER LIBERTIES, Survey’d in the Year 1597 by GULIELMUS HAIWARD AND J. GASCOYNE,” 83

258 True Tragedie of Richard the Third [ . . . ], The, 1, 73–76, 85–87, 127–28, 134 True Tragedie R3, see The True Tragedie of Richard the Third [ . . . ] Tudor, Henry, see Henry VII Tudor, Mary, see Mary I Tudor Myth, 75–76 Tyburn, 47, 59, 124 Tyler, Wat, 38, 99 tyranny, 11, 20, 28, 36, 46, 51, 54, 61–62, 73, 76, 88, 89, 90, 151. See also oppression; repression Tyrell, see Tyrrel Tyrone’s rebellion, 20 Tyrrel: character in Richardus Tertius (Tyrell), 127; character in The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, 128–29; character in The True Tragedie of Richard the Third [ . . . ] (Terrill), 127–28; character in The Second Part of King Edward the Fourth (Tirill), 130, 133, 134

U unemployment, see social problems UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), 153 Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, The, 48 Urswick, character in The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, A Strange Truth, 153

V vagrancy, see social problems Venice, 116 Vergil, Polydore, 119 Vesalius, Andreas, 117 via media, 15 Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham, 72–73, 97 Virgin Mary, 110, 143 visitor attraction, 23, 44, 45, 52–53, 54–58, 65, 74–76, 102, 119, 146, 152, 153. See also showplace

Index von Schaumburg, Wilwolt, 44 von Wedel, Lupold, 55, 57

W wage regulation, see social problems Wakefield Tower, 33 Waldstein, Baron, 55, 56, 147 Wales, 86 Wallace, William, 37 Warbeck, Perkin, 43; character in The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, A Strange Truth, 73, 130–31, 153 Warden of the Mint, 53 Wardrobe, see Great Wardrobe wars, see social problems Wars of the Roses, 42 Warwick, Earl of, see Dudley, John Warwickshire, 87, 120 Wat Tyler’s Rebellion, see Peasants’ Revolt Wayne, Don, 119–20 Webster, John, 2, 66, 79, 138, 151 Well Tower, 36 Westminster, 39, 44, 45, 49, 50, 52, 73 Westminster Abbey, 38, 39, 44, 49, 50 Westminster Hall, 66 Wharf, see Tower Wharf When You See Me You Know Me, 2, 67–68, 142–44, 146 Whetstone, George, 111, 123 White Tower, 1, 23, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 39, 40, 44, 45, 47, 50, 51, 53, 55–56, 58, 59, 60, 61 Whitgift, John, Archbishop of Canterbury, 74 Whyte, Rowland, 100 Wightman, Juliet, 123 William I (the Conqueror), 23, 28, 29, 30, 119, 134 William II (William Rufus), 31 Williams, Raymond, 7 Willoughby, Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, character in The Life of the Dutches of Suffolke (Dutches of Suffolke), 72 Wirtemberg, Duke of, see Frederick, Duke of Wirtemberg Wilson, Richard, 120

Index Wilson, Robert, 1, 67 Winchester, Bishop of, character in The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat, 139–40, 141; character in The First Part of King Henry the Sixth, 66–67, 135–36; character in If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, or The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth, 79–80. See also Gardiner, Stephen Wolsey, Thomas Cardinal, character in The Life of King Henry the Eighth, 143, 144; character in When You See Me You Know Me (Woolsie), 67 Woodstock, 2, 68 Woodstock, Thomas of, see Thomas of Woodstock Woolsie, see Wolsey, Thomas Cardinal Worcester, Earl of, 97 World Heritage Site, 153 Wotton, Sir Henry, 117 Wright, Thomas, 130 Wright, Thomas (priest), 63 Wriothesley, Henry, third Earl of Southampton: and the Essex revolt,

259 97–98, 100, 105, 107; father’s imprisonment, 107; imprisonment of, 25, 105–106; portrait of, 25, 105–107, 110–11; and religion, 105, 106–107; and support of Essex, 97, 105, 107; and the theater, 100, 105, 107 Wyat, see The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat Wyat, see Wyatt, Thomas Wyatt’s Rebellion, 50–51 Wyatt, Thomas, 51; character in The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat (Wyat), 139, 140, 151

Y Yeoman Warders, 43, 54–57, 60, 75, 76, 146 York Commission, 64 York, Duke of, see Plantagenet, Richard; Princes in the Tower Young Man amongst Roses, 19

Z Zimmerman, Susan, 142 Zinzerling, Justus, 55