SERMONS IN STONES
SHAKESPEARE’S DANGEROUS THRESHOLDS
The very first words by Shakespeare I ever spoke in public were the lines in As You Like It about
‘Sermons in stones’. Likely added for the inauguration of the Globe theatre, the Duke’s speech of
welcome to the Forest of Arden, encouraging us to substitute talking ‘brooks’ for books, and find
‘Sermons in stones’, gets a cool response from educationalists, who point out that when it comes
to making such a virtue of necessity, only politicians pretend that ‘we are all in this together’. But
in 1968 the austerity message that ‘less is more’ seemed the perfect slogan for a production of
Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy set in the birch grove of a New Age commune, and performed by
the would-be Woodstock tribe of Thomas Bennett Comprehensive School, Crawley. Sir Thomas
had been the planner of this New Town ‘subtopia’; and the Duke’s egalitarian poetry about a ‘life
more sweet’ in ‘these woods’ than the ‘envious court’, struck a chord with the post-War babyboomers of a car-free garden city, as it echoed sweetly enough with a concrete campus in the
leafy Sussex Weald.1 So, when the red Duke sermonised that these stones told us our vita nuova
was ‘more free from peril’ than our former existence, because here we would discover ‘good in
everything’, the paternalistic old lord was whistling up a mateyness about brotherhood and equal
opportunity that spoke directly to our Welfare State generation, whose free milk and orange juice
had indeed given every reason to imagine had ‘never had it so good’. And when the Duke also
preached how it was his ‘old custom’ of noblesse oblige that validated this simple life, he was
doling out a sense of entitlement like that which no one lucky enough to benefit from the
plateglass schools and universities of the 1960s would ever quite forget:
1
Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The season’s difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile, and say,
‘This is no flattery. These are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am’.
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
[As You Like It, 2,1,1-17]
When Peter Hall blessed the raw foundations of the Rose Theatre with a long-awaited As
You Like It in December 2004, reviewers were dismayed that his Arden turned out to be ‘a cold
cheerless forest where you wouldn’t want to spend a second longer than necessary’. The critics
had clearly fallen for the Duke’s rosy prospectus, for Hall’s ‘chillingly realistic’ vision was not at
all the ‘magical happy comedy’ as they liked it.2 But the director had long insisted Shakespeare’s
2
forest was ‘a place of terror’; and on these same boards in 2010 his Elizabethan A Midsummer
Night’s Dream again took journalists aback by the starkness of its setting, and the fierceness with
which Judi Dench decried the climate change of ‘childing autumn, angry winter’ [2,1,112] in the
person of an ageing Queen Elizabeth.3 Similarly, when the plan to create a teaching theatre with
Kingston University, that Sir Peter had developed with Frank Whateley, was realised in Stephen
Unwin’s 2011 As You Like It, the Telegraph objected that ‘the transition from repressive state to
the open air of freedom that is one of the greatest pleasures of Arden is lost here, where branches
aren’t changed to suggest approaching summer’.4 What these reviews betrayed, of course, was
the gulf between journalistic sentimentality about Shakespeare and the dark reading the directors
took from scholars like Anne Barton, who sees the comedies as equivalents of Poussin’s painting
Et in Arcadia Ego, in which the stone that so disconcerts the shepherds who stumble on it in the
forest is a tomb that says there is no paradise which is not already lost.5 From this perspective, the
Duke’s sermon on liberty, equality and fraternity is truly whistling in the wmter wind. And with
its imagined beating by churls to remind him he is mortal, his speech does, in fact, seem to be the
kind of rite of passage at which Shakespeare’s rulers are adept, a calculated act of self-abasement
to forestall opposition by pretending to ‘shun ambition’ and surrender ‘wealth and ease’, which
the satirical Jaques calls gypsy cant: blarney ‘to call fools into a circle’ [2,5,46-53].
If Shakespeare inserted the Duke’s communitarian sermon to bless the foundations of the
house, when the players were forced in 1599 to cross the Thames and build a new theatre outside
the City walls, on Bankside in suburban Surrey, he was obeying a ritual practice that punctuates
his plays, where characters regularly sweeten adversity by marking how ‘men that stumble at the
threshold / Are well foretold that danger lurks within’. They all make the best of ‘their exits and
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their entrances’ [As You, 2,7,140]; but this is Richard talking about the stones of York, when he
warns Edward in 3 Henry VI that finding gates ‘made fast’ against their arrival spells trouble:
‘Brother, I like not this’. Literary theorists tell us that, like some endless game of ‘knock, knock,
who’s there?’ with its perpetual arrivance or uncanny ‘to-effect’, Shakespeare’s art is structured
around such thresholds, doors and walls.6 For as anyone who directs or acts in these plays soon
realises, this is a dramaturgy that prefigures the idea of liminality developed by anthropologists
like Arnold van Gennep: that the process of initiating a project by crossing a threshold, carrying
the bride, toasting New Year, or leaving the house, ‘is both a danger and opportunity, testing our
ability to grow and change’.7 So the Yorkist usurper is unfazed when the Mayor bolts Bootham
Bar: ‘Tush, man, abodements must not now frighten us. / By fair means or foul we must enter in’.
And sure enough, this knocking on the gates of York turns out to be purely symbolic, like the
hammering of the Queen’s messenger Black Rod on the door of the Commons. For Edward is
handed the keys to the city after he eats humble pie, and purporting to ‘forget / Our title to the
crown’, is allowed to proceed into York as a loyal subject of the king, ‘being well content with
that alone’. Once across the dangerous threshold, of course, the interloper can be proclaimed king
himself [4,8,10-46]; and we are reminded of Shakespeare as poacher turned gamekeeper, when,
in Dominique Goy-Blanquet’s sardonic commentary, ‘Fortune smiles’ upon the gatecrasher.8
In Shakespeare’s consensus politics, the price of office is to wear ‘the gown of humility’,
and ‘ask it kindly’ [Coriolanus, 2,3,36;69]. But the cynical Machiavellian moral Richard draws,
that this ‘stooping duty’ [Richard II, 3,3,47] of mock modesty is an empty form, because ‘when
the fox hath once got in his nose, / He’ll soon find means to make the body follow’ [3Henry VI,
4,8,25-6], I also suspected, when my 1968 came to its abrupt end, with an arrogant but abortive
4
interview to enter York myself to study History. Like the clown Costard in Love’s Labour’s Lost,
I could say I ‘fell over the threshold and broke my shin’ [3,1,106]. So I will always be grateful to
my teachers who, during that heady summer of the ‘Events’, spared me a lifetime in insurance, by
allowing me to return to school, a supernnuated Sixth Former, to follow the nose of the fox by
reapplying as a displaced historian, so ever slightly out of sync, to York’s legendary Department
of English and Related Literature instead. Barred from History at York, I learned there instead
that, as the founding Chair of English Philip Brockbank wrote magisterially in his essay on the
Henry VI epic, Shakespeare dispenses with the vulgar historicism ‘that truth is co-extensive with
facts’, to reveal a ‘more significant movement’, of the way the facts are dressed.9 This emphasis
on story over history, acting over actuality, was New Historicism avant la lettre; for which I had
already been primed by my history teacher David Whittaker, who, whether flashing the red tie on
election day, or hamming up the Queen’s Speech in drag and regalia at the ‘State Opening’ of our
school debating society, had shown us how ‘All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women
merely players’ [As You, 2,7,138]. Both these inspirational teachers were therefore in tune with
the Shakespeare interpretation that more than any other reflected Britain’s cultural politics in the
1960s, and that is arguably the reason we are here today, Peter Hall’s epoch-marking Stratford
production of the Histories, The Wars of the Roses.
That we are gathered, like Jaques’s fools, within the circle of this ‘wooden O’ [Henry V,
Pro,13], that while ‘reproducing the dimensions’ of a playhouse of 1587 has been ‘built as a
flexible building with modern materials and the capacity to change’, that he calls his ‘ideal acting
space and auditorium’, and says he has been imagining all his life, is a lasting testimony to Sir
Peter’s persuasive faith in what he terms the ‘pressure of now’ pulsing through Shakespeare’s
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language, plays and world.10 For in this theatre modelled on the excavations of the Bankside
Rose, the populist playhouse where the Henry VI cycle was first performed, we can recognise the
final material shape of Hall’s lifelong mission to present Shakespeare as our contemporary. Jan
Kott’s 1964 book of that title was, of course, the cue when he and John Barton rewrote the text to
create The Wars of the Roses. For Hall was famously stunned by Shakespeare Our Contemporary
when he read a proof on the train to Stratford. And I too recall my wild teenage surmise on first
looking into this ‘amazing and modern’ work of criticism, not only in reaction to its horror comic
graphics of the ‘Grand Mechanism’ of history, but to the machine-like rhetoric with which the
Polish émigré traced the ‘recurring and unchanging circles’ that always terminate in ‘a monarch’s
death and a new coronation’.11 As Carol Rutter and Stuart Hampton-Reeves admit in their fine
performance study of the Histories, we academics have underestimated Hall’s radicalism; for
through Kott he was discovering just how ‘the same “sanctions” – “God”, “the king”, “the
Church” – survived in 1960s Whitehall’, as the ‘legitimating fictions politicians used to mask
their naked ambitions’.12 So it is telling that my own most intense memory of the televised Wars
of the Roses is of Ian Holm’s Richard flinging aside both his prayer book and false humility, and
then kicking his heels in childlike glee, after the Citizens had been bamboozled into begging him
to submit to the solemn sanctimoniousness of a coronation:
BUCKINGHAM: Tomorrow, may it please you to be crowned?
RICHARD GLOUCESTER: Even when you please, for you will have it so.
BUCKINGHAM: Tomorrow then, we will attend your grace.
And so, most joyfully, we take our leave.
RICHARD GLOUCESTER: Come, let us to our holy work again –
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[Richard III, 3,7,232-6]
In Peter Hall’s Richard III, the ‘holy work’ of crowning and consecration was demystified
as merely the most histrionic of what he called the ‘contortions and seductions’ practised by
‘anyone who wields power’, when the bishops instructing the devilish monarch were unmasked
as his own thugs.13 Hall was taking a hint from his Tudor namesake, who considered Richard’s
coronation a joke. Goy-Blanquet again: in Hall’s Chronicle ‘the monks sing the Te Deum “with
faint courage”, but soon everyone gets into the spirit’ of the party, ‘and a good time is had by
all’.14 So the director’s iconoclasm was by way of stripping the plays down to expose how ‘the
mechanism of power had not changed in centuries’; a forensic analysis he attributed less to
Brecht than his lecturer F.R. Leavis, when he recounted that ‘influenced by Leavis, we were not
asking if something nice was dialectically honest, but whether something nice was necessary.
Cambridge rigour. We were taking away scenery, costumes, plumminess, music from the text,
and crowns from the princes’.15 Knocking the hollow crowns off princes was, indeed, still Doctor
Leavis’s rigorous scientific method when I sat in on his dawn seminars at York in the 1970s, and
listened in frozen fascination to his boasting yet again how, when Olivier wrote to thank him for
his essay on Othello’s insincerity, he had slapped the insolent mummer down.
A weather-beaten exiled Duke if there ever was one, Leavis’s contempt for the falsity of
theatre was notorious; and his scorn for ‘mere players’ makes it all the more striking that so many
directors have shared Hall’s ambition ‘to think like Leavis’, by scrutinising ‘why a line is
structured as it is; what is underneath it; what is it all about?’16 But when I hear my York
contemporary David Thacker earnestly quizzing actors at Bolton Octagon, ‘What does it mean?’
I realise that while no one in the university now reads his books, Leavis’s legacy lives on in the
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theatre, in the belief Hall says those wintry lectures taught, ‘that art is more important than
religion’, as ‘the only way of passing the past on to the future’.17 So, I don’t believe the turbulent
priest who sermonized at York was, in the Stephen Fry’s elegant phrase, ‘a sanctimonious prick
of only parochial significance’.18 Instead, I think it was Leavis’s manic preaching that let us take
ourselves so seriously in the University Drama Society, even when a production like Bill Pryde’s
gold lurex Timon of Athens, where we crossed all bounds of taste, was inspired by Fellini. So, it
is certainly ‘comical that he hated the theatre and never went to it’, when he had ‘more influence
on the British stage than any other critic’, as Hall wrote in his diary on the day the doctor died.19
But having been initiated into ‘the icy fang / And churlish chiding’ of those puritanical seminars,
we can say it was no coincidence that this was the narrow door through which we came.
The one time I performed in Leavis’s presence, for a York recital of ‘The Waste Land’ in
‘different voices’, he stood beside the podium shaking his head throughout my rendition of the
Shakespeare parts, ‘trippingly on the tongue’ [Hamlet, 3,2,2], as our tutor, the Eliot scholar David
Moody had coached. I see him shaking his head now; because what I had to contend with was a
signal of the trouble Leavis’s anti-theatricalism caused Shakespeareans: his acid scorn for ‘the
pretensions of the music’ he derided in ‘what Sir Laurence Olivier, say, does to Shakespeare’.20
So the journey to the Rose could be described as one long retreat from Richard’s Leavisite sneer
about performance as an empty form, towards appreciation that, as Sir Peter countered in his own
lectures, Exposed By the Mask, Shakespeare presents a ‘perfect expression of creative tension
between form and feeling. The feeling must be there; but the form must contain it. Here is the
paradox: by hiding feeling, you reveal it’. Thus Hall came to regret the liberties he took with the
text, when he understood how ‘Shakespeare’s verse is his quickest means of communication’.21
8
And that was why the Rose foundations became his template here, when excavations ‘revealed
not a thrust stage but a traverse’; because ‘the form of a play’, he came to think, is shaped by ‘the
physical conditions that gave rise to it’, and so only in a theatre constructed like the people’s
Bankside playhouse would the exits and the entrances ‘work with the rhythm of the text’:
Shakespeare is adept at making entrances and their rhythm is always crafted into what is
spoken. Sometimes there is a sudden appearance from one of the doors; sometimes there
is a long preparation as actors walk down to take possession of centre stage. This is why
the Rose is a stage that is easy to keep hot. As one scene ends and the actors leave the
commanding acting space, the characters of the next scene possess it. There are no pauses
between scenes, because no pauses are needed, and certainly no illustrative music.22
‘All modern Shakespearean theatres are too large’, Peter Hall believes; and he admits his
dream is ‘a small theatre with a vast sum of money so I could teach Shakespeare by performing
him’.23 In practice, the new Rose is a culmination of Hall’s resistance to the thrust stage, typified
by the Stratford Swan, ‘where it is impossible for the majority of the audience to see the actor
when he is downstage’, a platform he likens to ‘a diving board: memorable for the entrance, but
anticlimactic’.24 By contrast, enthusiasts predicted Kingston’s ‘Rosy Future’ would spring from
its encouragement of a ‘bold, frontal, presentational’ style of acting, since, as Peter Holland
reported, its traverse asks the audience ‘to watch a broad sweep of drama’ unimpeded.25 ‘This
wide and universal theatre’ [As You Like It, 2,7,136] is therefore itself a challenging threshold
that requires performers to rise to the occasion; and it is for this reason that its creator has become
such a vocal critic of the pillars at the reconstructed Globe. For according to Hall, the actors who
9
designed the original Globe ‘did not build a theatre where large pillars hide them completely on
their first entrance’; so nowhere in the plays, he maintains, is there any mention of the obstructed
sightlines that come with such a monumental construction.26 Here, however, I have to disagree
with Sir Peter; because in my new book, Free Will: Art and power on Shakespeare’s stage, I look
intently at the inaugural speeches delivered at the Globe, and conclude that of all the dangerous
thresholds the dramatist imagined crossing, it was the grand portico of this classical tiring-house
which caused him deepest worry. In fact, the text of the foundation Globe tragedy, Julius Caesar,
can be decoded at a technical level, I conclude, as a theatre professional’s sceptical survey of the
architectural features of the 1599 playhouse, and a warning that ‘Their shadows seem / A canopy
most fatal, under which / Our army lies ready to give up the ghost’ [5,1,86-8].
If Julius Caesar was devised for the gala opening of the Globe as the upmarket rival to
the democratic Rose, the surprising subtext of its theatre imagery is that Shakespeare’s company
found their grandiose new home disspiriting. For by cementing as its ‘inescapable visual focus’ a
backdrop that would always symbolise ‘the stones’ and ‘gates of Rome’ [3,2,269], even when a
comedy was staged, the concave Globe repeated the old confusion between the people’s circus
and a political forum.27 So no wonder the Duke’s merry men crown the boy that kills the deer
‘like a Roman conqueror’, in the blooding ritual which comes as such a shock in As You Like It
[4,3,4-9], since scholars do trace the Globe façade to pictures of the Roman victory parade, like
Mantegna’s at Hampton Court, showing the ‘wheeled seat of great Caesar’ windowed [Antony,
4,15,72-5], as Antony objects, by way of the arches erected for Renaissance imperial processions.
‘Most of all’, they assert, the Globe had the ‘look of a triumphal arch’; a claim recently restated
by the British Museum Director Neil MacGregor: ‘Shakespeare’s plays were performed in front
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of a permanent temporary triumphal arch’.28 In his classic study Shakespeare’s Festive World,
however, Francois Laroque describes the fantastic Baroque arches put up for the coronation of
King James in 1604 as gateways to a new age of ‘pomp and ceremony’, when public festivals
would exclude popular participation to become ‘purely formal spectacles’.29 So specialists debate
whether Shakespeare’s tiring-house had an equalizing pair of openings or was centrally ‘threenooked’ [4,6,4]. For if the consensus is that the Globe’s proscenium effect derived from such
royal entries, Andrew Gurr points out that in Julius Caesar this framing is expressly identified
with absolutist tyranny, when it is said Caesar bestrides ‘the narrow world / Like a Colossus, and
we petty men / Walk under his huge legs, and peep about’ [1,2,137-8].30
‘Stay for me in Pompey’s Porch… repair to Pompey’s Theatre’ [1,3,120-52]: the Globe’s
foundation story keeps harping on the fact that it takes place in Rome’s original playhouse, which
Caesar’s rival also built for the Senate to meet in the giant foyer, thus making theatre literally a
political lobby.31 Likewise, experts calculate that with ‘huge legs’ supporting ‘the wide arch / Of
the ranged empire’ [Antony, 1,1,40], topped by a statue of ‘Hercules and his load’ [Hamlet,
2,2,345], the massive tiring-house that bestrides ‘the narrow world’ of the 1616 Globe in Hollar’s
illustration would have thrown the actors into permanent shadow.32 No wonder, if this was how it
stood in 1599, that Shakespeare’s Romans argue over the direction of the sun, Casca insisting,
‘Here, as I point my sword, the sun rises’ [2,1,160], since the scale of this ‘most excellent
canopy’ [Hamlet, 2,2,289] would put them all in the shade. Indeed, ‘the extent of the heavens
would seem to make extra lighting imperative’.33 So, while the Globe’s ‘majestical roof fretted
with golden fire’ [291] may have been equipped for spectacular special effects, like the descent
of the god Hymen in As You Like It, it would be understandable if the actors forced to peep about
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its ‘Pillars of Hercules’ felt troubled by this glorified fly-tower, with its marbleised busts,
caryatids, obelisks, pilastars and urns, ascending to the dazzling polychromatic ‘heavens’ that
Caesar vaingloriously associates with his divine right kingship, as the deus ex machina:34
The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks
They are all fire, and every one doth shine…
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshaked of motion…
[3,1,63-70]
Architects stress that a classical theatre design is always politically loaded, since ‘Roman
theatre positioned actors in front of a façade that dominated the stage’.35 So, when Shakespeare’s
players wonder ‘Who ever knew the heavens menace so?’ and answer, ‘Those that have known
the earth so full of faults’ [1,3,44-5], it is tempting to hear these faults as trouble with the Globe.
Editors note, for instance, that the scene where Brutus and Cassius imagine the citizens ‘Choose
Caesar for their king’ [79] is the only time in Shakespeare where onstage action depends on
unseen space, as if the true subject of this tragedy is how its actors are upstaged.36 Considering
the story has such global impact, it is indeed ironic how little anyone can see.37 So Hélène Cixous
is not alone in sensing that history is at the door in Julius Caesar, even if we are kept in the dark
about who it is that knocks.38 But Elizabethan tourists in fact assumed that because they imitated
‘the imperial splendour’ of the Colisseum, London’s amphitheatres were designed to welcome a
‘Roman emperor of the modern kind’, like the autocratic King James.39 So with this Globe
opener we are never allowed to forget the arena had been a place where ‘so many Romans came
12
smiling’ [2,3,78] to feast on blood; a troubling heritage that Andreas Höfele thinks was what
confused the artist Hollar into mislabelling the Globe a place for ‘bear-baiting’.40 And
Shakespeare’s characters truly shake in trepidation at crossing this dangerous threshold. ‘Danger
knows full well / That Caesar is more dangerous’, the dictator therefore brags, when he
announces he ‘will not stay at home’ on his coronation day, since ‘Caesar will go forth’ [2,2,4456]. His whole career has involved crossing such Rubicons, as when he raced Cassius across the
Tiber. But troubled as this tragedy of doors and portents is by its own liminality, in light of the
superstititious importance attached to all portals, casements, corners, doorsteps, gates, lintels or
sills, Shakespeare’s trouble in blessing the foundation stone is itself portentous:
Disrobe the images
If you do find them decked with ceremonies…
Let no images be hung
With Caesar’s trophies.
[1,1,64-8]
One of the difficulties about glorifying ‘Shakespeare’s Globe’ is that his references to the
Bankside playhouse are so negative. Sometimes these are actors’ criticisms, such as Achilles’ in
Troilus and Cressida about an echo ‘formed in th’applause’ by the arch, which has a tendency to
‘reverb’rate the voice again’ [3,3,110]. Others are audience complaints like Hamlet’s disgust that
the ‘brave o’erhanging’ traps a ‘foul and pestilent congregation of vapours’ [Hamlet, 2,2,291-7].
But the objections all come back to the way that old stagers struggle in what the Prince calls ‘this
distracted Globe’ [1,3,97]. For as David Thacker once said to me, you will never see a production
at the Globe more interesting than the place. And the 1599 opening spelled out the politics of that
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distraction, when it had Antony ‘go up into the public chair’ [3,2,60], the balcony of the tiringhouse, to exploit this ‘pulpit’ and create havoc ‘with a monarch’s voice’ [3,1,275], by inciting a
riot that seems an eerie premonition of how ‘The great globe itself’ [Tempest, 4,1,153] would
burn to the ground. Historians describe the early modern pulpit as a royal mouthpiece and symbol
of empire that amplified absolutism.41 So it is significant that this is the only time Shakespeare
ever introduces this ideological apparatus, and that its intrusion demonstrates how theatre is about
to be taken over by incendiary preaching.42 Its wooden circle made the Globe ‘an extraordinarily
efficient’ machine, we are assured, ‘for propagating sound’.43 But if this premiere Globe play is
believed, Shakespeare’s stage had also been converted into a medium for the political violence
that would eventually ‘Pluck down’ the ‘benches, forms, windows, anything’ [3,2,246-8], of the
playhouse itself.
To anyone brought up on Olivier’s Henry V, with its romance of a democratic Globe, the
shock of Shakespeare’s inaugural is its refusal to bless the house, which is shown to be haunted
by evil spirits, with the phantom of the playhouse a spectre of theatre perverted by demagogues
like Antony.44 Thus the Cobbler who jokes at the start that he comes to stick his big ‘awl’ in this
hole, looks like a portrait of the artist as naughty young Will of the Rose, the glover’s son and
‘mender of bad souls’, claiming the best dressed walk on his goats’ leather [1,1,21]. Intellectuals
obsess on shoes and shoemakers, like Hans Sachs in Meistersinger, theorises Jacques Ranciére in
The Philosopher and His Poor, because these true fundamentalists radicalise old forms.45 So, if
Shakespeare’s troupe had proceeded on these foundations the myth of monarchy would have
been treated like the cobblers the ‘tag-rag people’ make of Caesar’s crowning, when they ‘clap
and hiss him… as they use to do the players in the theatre’ [1,2,256-8]. For Caesar’s crown is no
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authentic regalia, but ‘one of these coronets’ [237], of a piece with the ‘hollow crown’ [Richard
II, 3,2,156] in the Histories Shakespeare wrote for the Rose and the Theatre in Shoreditch, where
he was reminding audiences ‘’tis you thoughts that now must deck our kings’ [Henry V, Pro,28]
just as men like Raleigh were arguing that when the queen died, ‘the wisest way’ was to establish
a republic.46 As Roy Strong laments, in these plays ‘demystification of monarchy was taken to an
almost puritan extreme with the rejection of the fabricated image and its ritual’.47 Yet no sooner
has the revolutionary Cobbler trespassed onto the stage of the Globe as its first-footer than this
clown from the Rose is told he is out of bounds and ordered home. So Julius Caesar proceeds
instead with the tragicomedy of Cinna, the type of court artist Shakespeare must have feared he
would become, if he crossed the threshold of power, a poet as political propagandist:
I dreamt tonight that I did feast with Caesar,
And things unlucky charge my fantasy.
I have no will to wander forth of doors,
Yet something leads me forth.
[Julius Caesar, 3,3,1-4]
What is it about the doorway that makes it so productive for painting and literature, a
‘place where as (Derrida puts it) one may avoid speaking, yet speak’, ask the essayists in the
recent book Thinking on Thresholds, edited by Subha Mukherji. The reason they offer is that this
troubling interface between inside and outside, private and public, sleeping and waking, is such
an apt metaphor for artistic creation.48 Thus the challenge of the liminal as an experience of what
Hamlet calls ‘the readiness’ [Hamlet, 5,2,160] is prefigured in this first Globe play when Brutus
reflects that between thought and action ‘the interim’ is ‘a phantasm’ [2,1,63]; and critics see this
15
suspended consciousness on the eve of a coup as a watershed, when something new emerges in
drama, a mental crisis about performance, as the author weighs the trouble if ‘I cannot heave /
My heart into my mouth’ [King Lear, 1,1,90].49 Each play he wrote after 1599 is interrupted by a
similar prevaricating pause, the hesitation when a speaker dries, and ‘like a neutral to his will
matter, [Does] nothing’, that seems keyed to conditions at the Globe, where it is said ‘we often
see the orb below as hush as death’ [Hamlet, 2,2,461] in ‘patient expectation’ [Julius, 1,1,40] of a
prompt. Shakespeare is transfixed whenever actors ‘throttle their practised accents in their fears’
[Dream, 5,1,102]; and biographers speculate he may have been a stutterer himself.50 Hamlet, on
this view, becomes the longest stammer in history. For from the instant he stepped onto the stage
of the Globe he turned his stage fright to dramatic advantage, with the consolation that ‘silence
shall be most my glory, / Being dumb’ [Sonnet 83]. Thus the troubled temporiser at the door
would suggest a way to speak without speaking. For it is precisely when Cinna ceases to hesitate
on that ominous threshold, and ‘wanders forth of doors’, dreaming of hobnobbing with Caesar,
that this court poet is lynched by Antony’s vigilantes ‘for his bad verses’ [3,3,29].
On May 15 1604 the Lord Chamberlain’s office minuted payment for the scarlet livery
worn by William Shakespeare as a Groom of the Chamber in James’s royal entry into London.
The ‘things unlucky’ he dreaded on the threshold of the new century had all come true, when his
company was incorporated as the King’s Men, and ‘the most democratic organisation in England
came under the patronage of the most despotic figure in the country.’ 51 The new King’s Man had
probably to pose beneath one of the arches heralding James as Caesar. But judging by the sonnets
he penned at this time, which scorn these ‘pyramids’ [123] of ‘smiling pomp’ [124], Shakespeare
felt no glory in this initiation as ‘A serving-man, proud in heart and mind; that curled my hair;
16
wore gloves in my cap’ [Lear, 3,4,79-81]: ‘Were’t ought to me I bore the canopy’, he shrugged,
‘With my extern the outward honouring?... No, let me be… poor but free’ [Sonnet 125]. His
craven stoop in ‘rustling silks’ [88] instead looks to have provided ‘our bending author’ [Henry
V, Epi, 1] with a scenario for his Jacobean plays, in the inauguration problem he now staged over
and again, of someone who feels his title ‘Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe / Upon a
dwarfish thief’ [Macbeth, 5,2,21-2]. So in Free Will I conclude that in his late plays Shakespeare
outfaced Stuart absolutism by dramatising the legend of the Beggar King, where a monarch ‘to
whom all have bowed’, like Leontes, discovers he must kneel himself.52 But in my earlier Secret
Shakespeare I argued that he had already created a song and dance out of his own investiture
crisis, by repeatedly opening his plays with some act of resistance to perform at court:
‘Tis not alone my inky cloak…
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river of the eye,
Nor the dejected havior of the visage,
Together with all the forms, moods, shows of grief
That can denote me truly. These indeed “seem”,
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passes show –
These but the suits and trappings of my woe.
17
[Hamlet, 1,2,77-86]
Like Hamlet, Shakespeare was publicly attacked for refusing to perform on command.
For in 1603, when according to Thomas Dekker’s almanac, ‘The Wonderful Year’, the grieving
poets of England ‘rained showers of tears’ over the body of Elizabeth, Shakespeare’s refusal to
mourn contrasted with royalist hysteria, and within weeks of her death a ‘Mournful Ditty entitled
England’s Loss’ was bullying the poet to ‘Bestow your time to write for England’s Queen’.53 In
the sonnet he did write about ‘the drops of this most balmy time’, when ‘the mortal moon her
eclipse endured’, he shed no tears over Tudor ‘tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass’ in Westminster
Abbey. But he was equally doubtful about James’s coronation there, of which the best he could
say was, ‘Incertainties now crown themselves assured’. Shakespeare had implied in Richard II
how the medieval belief that ‘Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm from an
anointed king’ [3,2,50-1] was as barmy as the ruler who carried the holy chrism around his neck
in the ampulla in which the Virgin was said to have dispensed it to St Thomas. And in Sonnet
107 the drops of olive oil supposed to consecrate James as Christ’s annointed were synthetically
blended with those crocodile tears for Elizabeth. So, despite everything we are told on TV or in
Shakespeare in Love about the Bard and Britain’s ‘balmy’ royals, there was no love lost between
this poet and his prince. For a paradigm shift over recent years has been our realisation that if
Shakespeare was no republican, his theme of ‘proud majesty made a subject’ [4,1,242] positions
his work as one of the intellectual origins of the English Revolution. Critics have therefore gone
back to his references to the arcane political theology of ‘The King’s Two Bodies’, for the reason
set out by historian Ernst Kantorowicz, that without this crucial legal split of the office from the
person, it would have been impossible for the ‘Crown’ to cut off King Charles’s ‘balmy’ head.54
But the question this regicidal turn prompts is this: If Shakespeare was one of the King’s Men,
18
where did he get the freedom to joke so cruelly that ‘The body is with the King, but the King is
not with the body. The King is a thing… Of nothing’ [Hamlet, 4,2,25-8]?
Early in his 2004 series In Search of Shakespeare, on which I was lucky to work, Michael
Wood took viewers to the River Ribble in Lancashire, where he pictured the future dramatist as a
teenager out on the cold dark estuary, ‘Like one that stands upon a promontory / And spies a faroff shore where he would tread… And chides the sea that sunders him from thence’ [3Henry VI,
3,2,135-8]. The theory that the Warwickshire boy served as a tutor in the Catholic household at
Hoghton Tower in Lancashire, which was aired in the TV series and my Secret Shakespeare, was
attacked with livid aggression by the editorial establishment, which seized on a verdict of ‘not
proven’ from Stratford’s archivist to wish it into oblivion.55 But five of Stratford’s Elizabethan
schoolmasters came from the Ribble Valley; and imagining their pupil on a dangerous threshold
in this recusant Lancashire provided the most plausible context yet for the existential choice that
is a starting-point for so many of his plays, of whether ‘to take arms against a sea of troubles, /
And, by opposing, end them’ [Hamlet, 3,1,61-2]. So the research project Alison Findlay and I ran
at Lancaster University was to relate Shakespeare’s theatre of resistance to the Northern venues
of travelling players, and the non-metropolitan culture, founded in the independent educational
and legal structures of the Duchy of ‘time-honoured Lancaster’ [Richard II, 1,1,1], that were still
sermonised in stones on the Bailrigg campus. It was no accident, we discovered, that so many
players, such as the star of the Rose, Richard Alleyn, came from this heartland of religious noncomformity. For there was a direct line tying the subversive question, ‘Is it not passing brave to
be a king?’ posed by Ferdinando Stanley’s or Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose, with the resistance
politics of their Lancastrian sponsors.56 So nor, perhaps, was it chance that the first person to
19
record the alternative constitutional tradition commemorated here at Kingston was from the same
North-West, and that the original chronicler of the King’s Stone which stands today outside the
Rose should have hailed from a redoubt of the Stanley country, at Farndon in Cheshire.
John Speed’s interest in Kington’s megalith was perhaps piqued by the fact that the first
Saxon king consecrated on it, Edward the Elder, died in 924 in his own village of Farndon, the
only significant thing to happen there. But when he annotated in his 1627 atlas that ‘At Kingston
stood the chair of majesty whereon Athelstan, Edwin and Ethelred sate at their coronations and
first received their Sceptre of Imperial power’, the cartographer had a more urgent spur, in the
coronation of Charles I.57 According to Strong, Charles’s 1626 crowning ‘touched the heart of the
constitutional conflict’ of the age, when Divine Right was ritualised by Archbishop Laud with a
new mix of the holy oil, compounded of orange, jasmine, cinnamon, benzoin, ambergris, musk
and civet, an asiatic concoction even James would have hesitated to apply to his head, and a new
amendment to the oath, requiring the king to obey only laws ‘agreeing to the prerogative’.58 It
was for this alteration that both Charles and Laud would eventually be condemned to death. For
Parliament had wanted the king to take his oath on the Gospel on which the Anglo-Saxon kings
swore theirs, but on the day this was mislaid, and the oath was sworn on the Bible of the Chapel
Royal. Thus, by evading the Gospel, Charles was able to disavow the Anglo-Saxon history of
elective monarchy, and base his right on the usurpation of William the Conqueror, ‘the bastard of
Normandy’ who ‘made himself king by force with a mighty army’, in James’s words, and ‘gave
the law and took none’.59 As the historian Christopher Hill and David Whittaker taught me, this
debate about the ‘Norman Yoke’ was crucial in the battle of ideas before the Civil War. And it
meant that when Speed recorded ‘the chair of majesty’ at Kingston he was confronting Charles’s
20
sacred kingship with a different contractual and consensual politics, evolved by the oppositional
Society of Antiquaries, and based on the myth that ‘Before 1066 the Anglo-Saxons lived as free
and equal citizens, governing themselves through representative institutions’.60
Until the twentieth century few seem to have doubted the significance of Kingston’s socalled Coronation Stone as a foundation of parliamentary democracy. But its migration from All
Saint’s Church, to the Town Hall in Market Place, to a traffic island outside Clattern House, to its
shadowy obscurity behind bushes at the Police Station, is a sorry tale of the gradual eclipse of the
Whig myth of the ancient constitution by the mystique of hereditary royalty. When in 1850 the
sarsen was mounted in railings, beside coins of the seven Saxon kings said to have been installed
upon it, its relocation was organised by the Freemasons of Surrey, and celebrated with a day of
sports and fireworks on the river. In 1889 Jerome K. Jerome came ashore in Three Men in a Boat
to ‘muse upon the days when Saxon “kinges” were crowned’ on it; and as late as 1908 Highways
and Byways in Surrey could misinform travellers that the Stone was a throne, ‘on which the Chief
sat in council with his great men; predecessors of Anglo-Saxons Chiefs, the Arch-Druids’.61 But
the coronation of Edward VII in 1902 relaunched the House of Saxe-Coburg with the invention
of modern monarchy; and in the twentieth century the idea of elective sovereignty was pushed so
far out of sight the sandstone lump became a seeming embarrassment to the Royal Borough, its
authenticity questioned by local historians, and its function downgraded to that of an Elizabethan
footscraper. Tellingly, in Michael Wood’s most recent TV series, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
was cited stating that in 925 ‘Athelstan was consecrated at Kingston’, but an image of the Stone
flashed across the screen without comment.62 Sarsen meant ‘trouble stone’ in Anglo-Saxon; and
Kingston’s Anglo-Saxon sarsen is assuredly a troublemaker. I hear that trouble stone rumbling
21
whenever I read Martin McQuillan’s Savonarolan sermons in the THES. But what light can the
researchers of Kingston’s University shed upon its most troubled monument? And what sermon
would be most meaningful here at the Rose on the subject of its troublesome neighbour?
In the coronation play he wrote for his Scottish ruler Shakespeare cast a cold eye on the
mystical foundation of authority, the belief that meaning can be ‘whole as marble, founded as the
rock’ [Macbeth, 3,4,21] of some King Arthur. Dubious of ‘unswept stone besmeared with sluttish
time’ [Sonnet 55], he knew the Globe itself would ‘Leave not a rack behind’ [Tempest, 4,1,156],
that no ‘brass, nor stone but sad mortality o’ersways their power’ [65]; and as my student Johann
Gregory has just shown in his PhD thesis, placed little faith in the promises they inspire, ‘When
water drops have worn the stones of Troy’ [Troilus, 3,2,173]. So my own first book Will Power
opened with the satire in 2Henry VI where Jack Cade sits ‘upon London Stone’ promising that
the ‘Pissing conduit’ will ‘run claret wine’ [4,6,2]. But Shakespeare’s Scottish play turns on an
uncanny sense that there are special promising places, like a church or a theatre, where language
is performative, being, as Peter Hall believes, shaped by the space. So, in a most troubling scene,
Malcolm insults himself with false accusations before Edward the Confessor’s throne in the
Abbey, the better to become his ‘country’s to command’ [Macbeth, 4,3,133]. The episode defers
to Scotland’s Stone of Scone, placed beneath the throne at James’s coronation. Wood tells us that
something similar occurred at Kingston, where a deal was brokered prior to Athelstan’s anointing
with the oil, and in the church the king performed acts of humility, freeing a slave and prostrating
himself to signify his oaths were not just pious hopes. The king’s unmarried status and adoption
of handsome youths provoke our anachronistic query, ‘Was Athelstan gay?’ But Wood deciphers
his self-subjection as symbolic of a new separation of the office from the man.63 And this fits the
22
latest thinking that the King’s Stone was in fact the threshold of Kingston’s Saxon minster,
demarcating the division between church and state, the kingdom and the glory, that philosopher
Giorgio Agamben sees as the inception of Western democracy, encoded in the legend of the weak
or Fisher King, who ‘goes fishing’ because he does not rule but reigns.64
So Athelstan made himself a liminary, and subjected his body to his crown, by lying face
down on the stone threshold at his inauguration. The Anglo-Saxon king was lucky, because in
Celtic Ireland kings were inaugurated by being led from the installation stone to have sex with a
white mare that was then slaughtered, to provide the cauldron of horse-stew in which the new
monarch was required to sit and bathe as he ate and fed the broth to his supporters. Anyone who
wants office ‘must be prepared to suffer’ these troubling rituals seem to say.65 But were these
demeaning inaugurations simply legitimating fictions, the cunning tricks of King Ubu, as Michel
Foucault termed all such performances of what he insisted was merely a pretended weakness?66
Were the Duke’s progressive sermons in stones all a cheat, and the New Town promise of
Crawley only another name for the politics of Downton Abbey? The promising place where I am
inaugurated permits its incumbent to answer these troubling doubts by speaking ex cathedra,
swearing in the democratic tradition Shakespeare took from the people’s Rose, and that Peter
Hall gave to its successor here in Kingston, to strive to make this office greater than the man;
because, in the words I bring this house from from the last threshold I crossed, and which shine
out from the Millennium Centre in Cardiff: ‘In these stones horizons sing’.
23
SERMONS IN STONES
Notes
‘Subtopia’: David Kynaston, Modernity Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 28.
Steve Orme, British Theatre Guide, online.
3
‘Place of terror’: Peter Hall quoted in David Bevington, This Wide and Universal Theatre:
Shakespeare in Performance Then and Now (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2077), p. 52;
Michael Billington, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Rose Theatre, Kingston’, The Guardian,
February 16 2010.
4
Charles Spencer, ‘As You Like It, Rose Theatre, Kingston’, The Daily Telegraph, March 12
2011.
5
Anne Barton, ‘As You Like It and Twelfth Night: Shakespeare’s Sense of an Ending’, in
Shakespearean Comedy: Stratford-on-Avon Studies 14, ed. D.J. Palmer and Malcolm Bradbury
(London: Edward Arnold, 1972), p. 162.
6
Nicholas Royle, ‘The poet: Julius Caesar and the Democracy to Come,’ The Oxford Literary
Review, 25 (2003), 39-6, here p. 41.
7
Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 8.
8
Dominque Goy-Blanquet, Shakespeare’s Early History Plays: From Chronicle to Stage
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 123.
9
J.P. Brockbank, ‘The Frame of Disorder: Henry VI’, in John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris
(eds.), Stratford-upon-Avon Studies: 3: Early Shakespeare (London: Edward Arnold, 1961), pp.
87-8.
10
Peter Hall, Exposed By the Mask: Form and Language in Drama (London: Oberon, 2000), p.
69; ‘pressure of now’: Peter Hall quoted in Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Carol Chillington Rutter,
Shakespeare in Performance: The Henry VI plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2006), p. 55.
11
Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (London: Methuen, 1964),
pp. 6 & 75.
12
Rutter and Hampton-Reeves, op. cit. (note 10), pp. 59-60.
13
Peter Hall, programme note for Henry VI, quoted in Stephen Fay, Power Play: The Life and
Times of Peter Hall (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995), p. 166; Scott Colley, Richard’s
Himself Again: A Stage History of ‘Richard III’ (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), pp. 226 &
228: ‘Richard sat alone after the charade with the two religious men – who were, in fact, two of
his soldier-henchmen comically disguised – and kicked his heels like a child’.
14
Goy-Blanquet, op. cit. (note 8), p. 223.
15
Peter Hall programme not for Henry VI; and interviewed by Irving Wardle, 3 August 1981,
both quoted in Fay, op. cit. (note 13), pp. 152-3.
16
‘Think like Leavis’: Peter Hall interview with the author, in Sally Beauman, The Royal
Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p.
268; Fay, op. cit. (note 13), pp. 48 & 66.
17
Peter Hall interview with the author, ibid., p. 48.
18
Stephen Fry quoted in Nora Crook, ‘Dis-CRIM-in-A-shun’, Times Literary Supplement,
October 18 2013, 13.
19
Peter Hall, Peter Hall’s Diaries: The Story of a Dramatic Battle, ed. John Goodwin (London:
Hamish Hamilton, 1983), p. 347: 18 April 1978.
1
2
24
F.R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit, p. 13; ‘Reading Out Poetry’, in Valuation in Criticism and
Other Essays, ed. V. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 260. For a
critique, see Barbara Hodgdon, ‘The Critic, The Poor Player, Prince Hamlet, and the Lady in the
Dark’, in Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts, ed. Russ McDonald (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1994), pp. 259-94, here p. 259.
21
Hall, op. cit. (note 10), pp. 45 & 49.
22
Ibid., pp. 62 & 67-8.
23
Ibid, p. 64; Peter Hall quoted in Ralph Berry, On Directing Shakespeare (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1989), p. 214.
24
Hall, op.cit. (note 10), p. 65.
25
Michael Billington, ‘Rosy Future’, The Guardian, December 4 2004; Peter Holland, ‘Peter
Hall’, in John Russell Brown (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Director’s Theatre (New York:
Routledge, 2008), pp. 140-59, here p. 155.
26
Hall, op. cit. (note 10), p. 70.
27
‘Inescapable visual focus’: John Ronayne, ‘Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem: The Interior
Decorative Scheme of the Bankside Globe’, in J.R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring,
Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 124. For the
ancient confusion between the theatre and the circus, see Richard Beacham, Spectacle
Entertainments of Early Imperial Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 8-9 &
139-42.
28
George Kernodle, From Art to Theatre: Form and Convention in the Renaissance (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1944), p. 151; Neil MacGregor, Shakespeare’s Restless World
(London: Allen Lane, 2012), p. 257.
29
Francois Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the
Professional Stage, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 65,
quoting Glynne Wickham, ‘The Contribution of Ben Jonson and Dekker to the Coronation
Festivities of James I’, in Jean Jacquot, ed., Les fêtes de la Renaissance (2 vols., Paris: 1956), p.
282.
30
Andrew Gurr, ‘Staging at The Globe’, in Mulryne and Shewring, op. cit. (note 27), p. 164:
‘The stage posts figured in the language and images used in the plays more strongly than we now
recognise. Julius Caesar’s power over the conspirators invites a gesture to the two posts when we
are told that he “doth bestride the narrow world / Like a colossus…”’ For the thesis that the
Globe possessed three entrances, with a central ceremonial door, see Andrew Gurr and Mariko
Ichikawa, ‘Stage Doors at the Globe’, Theatre Notebook, 53:1 (1999), 8-18; and Andrew Gurr,
‘Doors at the Globe: The gulf between the stage and page’, Theatre Notebook, 55:2 (2001), 5971; and for the opposing two-door argument, see Tim Fitzpatrick, ‘Shakespeare’s Exploitation of
a Two-Door Stage: Macbeth’, Theatre Research International, 20:3 (1995), 207-303; ‘Stage
Management, Dramaturgy and Spatial Semiotics in Shakespeare’s Dialogue’, Theatre Research
International, 24:1 (1999), 1-24; and ‘Playwrights with Foresight: Staging Resources in the
Elizabethan Playhouses’, Theatre Notebook, 56:2 (2002), 85-116; and Tim Fitzpatrick and
Wendy Millyard, ‘Hangings, Doors and Discoveries: Conflicting Evidence or Problematic
Assumptions?’, Theatre Notebook, 54:1 (2000), 2-23.
31
Bruce R. Smith, Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage, 1500-1700
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 21.
20
25
John Orrell, , The Quest for Shakespeare’s Globe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983), pp. 152-5. Although Hollar’s View depicts the second Globe, as rebuilt in 1613, Orrell
persuasively argues that the dimensions of the tiring-house were identical in the 1599 building: p.
122. See also Andrew Gurr, ‘The playhouses: Archaeology and after’, Shakespeare, 7 (2011),
405-6.
33
Jean Wilson, The Shakespeare Legacy: The Material Legacy of Shakespeare’s Theatre
(Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1995), p. 79.
34
For the Globe’s innovatory flying machinery, see James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of
William Shakespeare p. 254.
35
Smith, op. cit. (note 31), p. 61.
36
Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and
Their Contemporaries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 169-70.
37
See Lisa Hopkins, The Cultural Uses of the Caesars on the English Renaissance Stage
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 41.
38
Hélène Cixous, ‘What is it o’clock? or the door (we never enter)’, trans. Catherine
MacGillivray, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 57-83, esp. pp. 57-63.
39
‘Roman work’: diary of Johannes de Witt, quoted in Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage,
1576-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 132; ‘imperial splendour’: John
Gleason, ‘The Dutch Humanist Origins of The De Witt Drawing of the Swan Theatre’,
Shakespeare Quarterly, 32 (1981), 324-38, here 328.
40
Andreas Höfele, Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 3-12, here p. 6.
41
Peter McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1, 34-42 & 93.
42
David Daniell, note to 3,1,80 (‘Some to the common pulpits’), in William Shakespeare, The
New Arden Shakespeare: ‘Julius Caesar’ (London: Thomson Learning, 1998), p. 238.
43
Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999), p. 208.
44
Thomas Betteridge, Shakespearean Fantasy and Politics (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire
Press, 2005), pp. 119-20.
45
Jacques Ranciére, The Philosopher and His Poor, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster and
Andrew Parker (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 22-3, 46-7 & 58-69.
46
‘Wisest way’: Sir Walter Raleigh, quoted by John Aubrey, in Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Oliver
Lawson Dick (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949), p. 257; Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and
Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For discussions of Raleigh’s
republicanism see Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 150; and C.A. Patrides (ed.), Sir Walter Raleigh: The History of the
World (London: Macmillan, 1971), p. 14.
47
Roy Strong, Coronation: A History of Kingship and the British Monarchy (London: Harper
Collins, 2005), p. 231.
48
Subha Mukerji, ‘Introduction’, Thinking on Thresholds: The Poetics of Transitive Spaces
(London: Anthem Press, 2011), pp. xvii-xviii.
49
‘Something new’: Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare became
Shakespeare (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), p. 301; see also Shapiro, op. cit. (note 34), p. 152.
50
See Marc Shell, Stutter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 169-200.
32
26
51
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 1594-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), p. 88.
52
‘Abasement of the Proud King’: Maynard Mack, ‘King Lear’ in Our Time (Berkeley:
California University Press, 1965), p. 49; ‘a king to whom everyone has bowed’: Meredith Ann
Skura, Shakespeare the Actor and the purposes of playing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993), pp. 145 & 285, n. 94.
53
Thomas Dekker, ‘Wonderful Year 1603’, in The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed.
Alexander Grosart (London: 1884), p. 88; Alexandra Walsham, ‘“A Very Deborah?” The Myth
of Elizabeth I as a Providential Monarch’, in Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman (eds.), The Myth
of Elizabeth (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003), p. 156; Chambers, op. cit. (note 1), p. 213.
54
Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (rep.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 39-41.
55
Robert Bearman, ‘Was William Shakespeare William Shakeshafte?’, Shakespeare Quarterly,
53:1 (2002).
56
Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part One, 2,5,53, in Christopher Marlowe: The
Complete Plays, ed. Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 100.
57
John Speed, The Theatre of Great Britain (3rd edition; London: 1627).
58
Strong, op. cit. (note 47), pp. 240 & 248-9.
59
James VI and I, The True Law of Free Monarchies; or, The Reciprocal and Mutual Duty
Betwixt a Free King and His Natural Subjects.
60
Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English
Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1957), pp. 61-7.
61
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), p. 49; Hugh
Thomson, Highways and Byways of Surrey (London: Richard Clay, 1908), p. 246.
62
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Michael Swanton (London: Dent, 1996), p. 105.
63
Michael Wood, In Search of the Dark Ages (London: BBC, 1981), p. 137; and In Search of
England (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 161.
64
Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and
Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiedss and Matteo Mandarini (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2011), p.p. 68-9 et passim.
65
Annette Kehmel, ‘The Power of Weakness: Machiavelli Revisited’, Bulletin of the German
Historical Institute of London, 33:2 (2011), 3-34, here 9-11 & 33.
66
Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975, ed. Valerio
Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchill (New York: Picador, 2003), pp. 1113.
27