The Givenness of Things

SERVANTHOOD

So late in my life I have learned that theological writings of John Wycliffe survive in significant numbers, a substantial part of them never to this day translated from his Latin. My interests being what they are, I have done more than most people to put myself in the way of knowing this, but the discovery came as a complete surprise to me. I was aware of Wycliffe’s influence on Hus and Luther, assuming that the example of the fourteenth-century vernacular Bible associated with him was the reason for his importance to them and to the Reformation in general. Now I have a collection of Wycliffe’s and his followers’ writings published in the valuable Masters of Western Spirituality series, and I find that there is much more to be surprised about. Despite its obvious importance, the treatment of religion by historians and critics as an element in the English Renaissance is odd and unsatisfactory.

The influence of earlier Reformation and Renaissance on the Continent, especially in France, tends to go unmentioned before the massacres of St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. This is true despite the fact that the French Reform was indisputably the greatest contemporary influence on religious thought and literary culture in Renaissance England. Given the importance of French literature for Chaucer, Gower, and the writer of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and for the later Morte d’Arthur of Thomas Malory, this influence might be assumed to be established and continuous, and absorbed into the English vernacular tradition.

Even if they arose among Oxford scholars and were influential in the universities, dissident movements in England tend to be dismissed by historians and critics, including our contemporaries, on the basis of polemical associations with the lower orders, peasants in the case of the Lollards, shopkeepers in the case of that important group history has taught us to call Puritans. Of course it is very much to the credit of both Lollards and Puritans that there were a great many peasants and shopkeepers among them, as well as scholars and aristocrats. But these associations with the lower orders tend to obscure the fact that in both cases the impetus they gave to the culture was literary and intellectual. Worse, these conventional views of Lollards and Puritans are effectively dismissive on grounds that should themselves have been discredited long since, because they enlist the historical enterprise in a hermeneutics of snobbery, neither more nor less. In 1394 twelve “Lollard Conclusions” were anonymously posted on the door of Westminster. They were objections to the special spiritual status claimed for the Catholic priesthood, to priestly celibacy, to the doctrine of transubstantiation and the veneration of the host, to exorcisms, to the holding of clerical and secular offices simultaneously, to prayers for the dead that give preference to those who have left money for this purpose, to icons as encouraging practices amounting to idolatry, to auricular confession, to manslaughter in war or through judicial process, to celibacy of women religious, to the costly material elaboration of the churches. The leading humanists of the Reformation, men of great learning, raised objections very similar to these more than a century later. In other words, we know enough about this sect, despite all efforts to suppress and destroy it, to see that it was intellectual as well as popular, neither of these excluding the other.

From the thirteenth century until the eighteenth century, Western civilization expended enormous wealth and energy in suppressing ideas that were considered by religious and political authorities to be disruptive or heretical. Lollardy, the movement associated with Wycliffe, which continued and grew after his death, moved Henry IV and his parliament to pass De Haeretico Comburendo, a law whose object was to destroy this sect utterly. The law required that their books be surrendered, that their preaching and teaching cease, and that those who persisted in this heresy should be burned. Words meant to stigmatize do have this very potent effect over centuries, “Lollard” and “heretic” being two excellent examples. The extraordinary severity of the punishments suffered for heresy, defined by its prosecutors as the entertaining of questions, and of opinions different from those taught by the church, has caused heretics to be thought of as egregious misanthropes and fanatics. But the beliefs of the Lollards or Wycliffites are so unobjectionable, at least to those who consider it no crime to read a Bible in English or to doubt certain doctrines and practices of medieval Catholicism, that allusions to them stand little chance of being noticed by modern readers. Lollards believed that the image of God in any human being, themselves included, is properly the basis for all Christian life and worship, as well as charity and personal integrity. Charity should go directly to the needy poor, confession should be made directly to whomever one has wronged. This made them regard themselves as sufficient to the requirements of Christianity, and capable of its joys, with minimal dependency on the rites of the church, including even for the sacraments of marriage and baptism. Their piety centered on the Ten Commandments, enlarging on them to make them the core of a strongly articulated ethics and ecclesiology.

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Suppression tends to obscure evidence of its own failures, since fear is as likely to inspire ingenuity and stealth as it is compliance. Lollardy persisted in England until it merged with the Reformation. The Protestant writer John Bale, in his preface to The Examinations of Anne Askew, written in 1546, the year of the young woman’s death at the stake, says, “Great slaughter and burning hath been here in England for John Wycliffe’s books, ever since the year of our Lord 1382. Yet have not one of them thoroughly perished. I have at this hour the titles of one hundred and forty-three of them, which are many more in number.”

In England, literature in the vernacular at least from the time of John Wycliffe is associated with religious dissent. For this reason, I propose, the concerns and the loyalties of the movement crossed the lines of class and economic status. To challenge the dominance of Latin was to diminish the potency of a great distinction among social strata. “Benefit of clergy,” that is, some acquaintance with Latin, could save one from hanging. To challenge it was also to broaden access to knowledge and understanding of the texts that were said to provide the theological basis of the existing order. Again, though the word “Lollard” was derisive, suggesting the speech of the uneducated, Wycliffe, an Oxford professor, was supported by Oxford faculty and members of the gentry and nobility, including John of Gaunt, the father of King Henry IV. Geoffrey Chaucer was associated with figures called the “Lollard knights,” or “hooded knights,” adherents and protectors of the sect’s preachers. Some of these knights were also close to Richard II, a fact that sheds interesting light on Henry IV’s attempts at suppression. Certainly it demonstrates that the sect’s having adherents in the highest ranks of society did nothing to secure its safety or its acceptance. Though the emphasis of the critique offered by the movement fell largely on evil in the form of the impoverishment of the lower classes by an abusive established order, civil and religious, nevertheless some who enjoyed the privileges of that order seem to have seen beyond their own worldly interests. Despite whatever wisdom is contained in our darkest hermeneutics, this does happen. Many of the surviving Wycliffe Bibles are beautiful and would have been costly, the property of wealthy people. Yet the movement was much broader than its learned and aristocratic expressions. The Piers Ploughman tradition arose at this time and flourished for generations, until the boy who followed the plow could serve as William Tyndale’s ideal reader.

The English vernacular movement had its great resurgence in the Renaissance, which was simultaneous with the Reformation and hardly to be distinguished from it. This time the forbidden Bible in English translation was Tyndale’s New Testament, and when it arrived, the Geneva Bible as well. Under Mary Tudor the De Haeretico Comburendo, in relative abeyance under Henry VIII and Edward VI, was again enforced. People in those days were of course inured to horrors. There were always plenty of decapitated heads on London Bridge. English monarchs were never at a loss for means to terrorize and execute, and suppression and extermination of sects as government policy was hardly novel in England or Europe. So this return to the burning of heretics might not have had the impact it did if it had not called up an earlier era, extraordinary for the literature it left and inspired, a rich religious and secular literature written in the popular tongue. The second-largest-selling book of the sixteenth century in England was Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. This continuously larger, beautifully printed and illustrated compendium of accounts of the suffering and death of the heroes of dissent made an unbroken narrative of executions of fourteenth-century Lollards and sixteenth-century Protestants. The exhumation and burning of the remains of John Wycliffe are as vividly realized as the famous sixteenth-century torture and burning of the young gentlewoman Anne Askew.

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My intention is to open the question of the mind-set of Shakespeare’s audience, a self-selecting crowd of Londoners with no more in common than a free afternoon and the price of admission. The argument that Shakespeare was actually someone else, the Earl of Oxford, say, is based on his apparently extensive knowledge of court life. But what we know of court life is largely what Shakespeare tells us about it. And, for the most practical reasons, the knowledge that was actually crucial to him was the kind that would make his plays intelligible and engrossing to his public. This would place him closer to the man or woman in the street than to more rarefied circles, a perspective that would have come naturally to him, if Shakespeare was Shakespeare. Obviously his career depended on his making a sound estimate of their interests and capacities. And here we are, centuries on, granting him more weight and subtlety than we grant any theologian or philosopher, on the basis of his estimate of his audience. There seems to be an assumption among critics that the deep parts of his plays were written for that small class trained in the universities or sophisticated by some other means, while the groundlings were there for the clowns and the sword fights. But what if there was an intellectual tradition shared by Shakespeare and his larger audience, so strong and well established that it was capable of serving as a medium for ideas of great complexity, yet so long stigmatized as subversive or heretical, and still, rightly, so much a source of anxiety to those in power, that allusions to it are oblique and implicit? What if this tradition, unacknowledged by modern scholars and critics, was a robust conceptual frame, brought to the plays by the audience and shared and explored by the playwright? If there is a continuity of thought and perspective between William Langland’s Piers the Ploughman, written in the fourteenth century, and John Bunyan’s seventeenth-century Pilgrim’s Progress, both masterpieces of the vernacular tradition, an ongoing vernacular culture accounts for this continuity.

Under Edward VI there was indeed a surge of interest in the works of Chaucer, Langland, Lydgate, and Gower. Then the fashion changed, and they, together with contemporary writers in the popular style, were ridiculed by Elizabethan critics such as Philip Sidney. But Spenser was among those who emulated the old style. Shakespeare foregrounded “ancient Gower” in the late play Pericles, Prince of Tyre. With archaisms of verse and language, he drew explicit, even emphatic, attention to his source. This might account for the great popularity of the play as well as the fact that it was omitted from the First Folio. Again, if Shakespeare’s view of Shylock and Othello seems anomalously generous and complex in a culture from which Jews had been expelled in 1290 on the pretext of blood libels, and which they would not be permitted to enter again until 1657, Piers the Ploughman may shed light on popular feeling toward them. Perhaps cynicism about the motives of a king who made himself wealthy by this expropriation preserved an unofficial memory of the Jews among the people, as having been wronged in a way that was familiar to them. Or perhaps there were Jews who remained in England and were not betrayed to the authorities. Repression discredits law, after all, and dignifies resistance. A century after the expulsion, William Langland wrote this:

“But all the clergy of the church,” I said, “say in their sermons that neither Saracens nor Jews nor any other creature in the likeness of Christ can be saved without baptism.”

“I deny it,” said Imagination, frowning, for the Scripture says, “The just man shall scarcely be saved on the Day of Judgment. Therefore he shall be saved … For there is a baptism by water, a baptism by the shedding of blood, and a baptism by fire, which means by steadfast faith — The divine fire comes not to consume, but to bring light.

“So an honest man that lives by the law that he knows, believing there is none better (for if he knew of a better he would accept it) — a man who has never treated anyone unjustly, and who dies in the same spirit — surely the God of truth would not reject such honesty as this. And whether it shall be so or not, the faith of such a man is very great, and from that faith there springs a hope of reward. We are told that God will give eternal life to His own, and His own are the faithful and true.”

And this: “Faith alone is sufficient to save the ignorant. And that being so, many Jews and Saracens may be saved, perhaps before we are.”

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Here Langland compares the spiritual state of Muslims, whom he takes to have strayed from an original Christianity, to that of good Christians who are misled by incompetent priests. Clearly there is no reason to think of the dominant classes in fourteenth-century society as more generous and sophisticated in their thinking than the popular audience of Langland’s book, nor to suppose that the past is more naive or intolerant than the present. This is certainly relevant to the question of Shakespeare’s audience.

It is usual for scholars to say that these old writers were inappropriately made to serve the purposes of Puritanism — there may be no meaning at all in the fact that the Puritan Oliver Cromwell negotiated the return of the Jews to England, many of whom had by then found refuge in the tolerant and Calvinist Low Countries. In any case, it is difficult to know what such an assertion means, since scholars never offer a definition of Puritanism. If the movement was so diffuse as to make definition impossible, then statements that treat it as unitary, as this one does, are misleading. We can say that Puritanism was a popular political movement, whatever else. History is unambiguous on this point. Phenomena of its kind, broad-based and durable, never simply fall from the sky. If the old masterpieces of the vernacular style seemed to English readers of the Reformation period to be in harmony with then contemporary grievances and aspirations, this should surely be taken as good evidence that they were indeed in harmony with them. Modern critics cannot claim equal standing. And of course those who identified with these books would also have been formed by them. The strongly biblical language in Piers the Ploughman, Langland’s emphasis on the concern for the poor that is so strongly insisted upon in both Testaments, and on the poverty of Christ, would make the English Bible, Wycliffe’s, then Tyndale’s, the text that created continuity between the earlier writers and the Puritans. Beyond question, if one were to venture a definition of Puritanism, it would include their deep interest in the Bible and deep knowledge of it. The meaning of the existence of the Bible in English, the assertion of the dignity and beauty of the language of the common people implicit in these works of translation, as in original works, is consistent through the centuries, and religious and political in its implications.

Roger L’Estrange, censor to Charles II after the Restoration, called for the proscription of older as well as current books and pamphlets, on the grounds that “being Written in times of Freedom, and Menag’d by great Masters of the Popular Stile, they speak playner and strike homer to the Capacity and Humour of the Multitude.” Suppressions were to be accomplished by means of the suite of penalties usual at the time—“Death, Mutilation, Imprisonment, Banishment,” etc. Penalties were to fall upon anyone involved in the dissemination of proscribed material, including sailors, ballad singers, and carters, unless they informed on others. It is reasonable to wonder what was lost, and interesting to note that writers for the multitude could be acknowledged masters of their style. L’Estrange says, “For the Authors, nothing can be too Severe, that stands with Humanity, and Conscience. First, ’tis the Way to cut off the Fountain of our Troubles. Secondly, There are not many of them in an Age, and so the less work to do.” The demand for the kind of literature to be suppressed is reflected in the difficulties L’Estrange anticipates in banning it. Printers would be expected to fail if they could not sell it, and therefore would be inclined to sell banned books for the greatly enhanced value they would have as a consequence of their being banned. As the merest aside, I will mention here that the writer most widely read in England while Shakespeare wrote was the French theologian John Calvin. This is a fact of such obvious significance that its eclipse amounts effectively to another proscription. It is no accident, after all, that the revolutionary side in the civil war were and are called Calvinists.

Considering the variety of Protestantisms already active on the Continent, it is striking that Calvin should have had so singular an impact among the English. Arthur Golding, uncle by marriage to the Earl of Oxford, best known now for his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was also an important translator of Calvin’s sermons and commentaries from French and Latin, including a three-volume Commentary on Psalms. Golding’s Metamorphoses is, of course, the book most frequently alluded to by Shakespeare after the Bible, typically the Geneva Bible. And there were a number of important printers and booksellers in London at this time who were French Protestant refugees, including Shakespeare’s first publisher.

More important, I would suggest, is the similarity between Lollard or Wycliffite theology and Calvin’s theology, for example, in their interpretation of Communion or Eucharist. Many critics, taking transubstantiation to be the one understanding of the sacrament that realizes the presence of Christ in the Supper, repeat the canard that for Protestants the rite is symbolic only. In fact the rejection of transubstantiation had to do with the role it asserted for priests, the teaching that they uniquely are capable of making the presence of Christ real, in effect interposing themselves between the faithful and the Lord’s gift of Himself. The twentieth-century Reformed theologian Karl Barth describes Calvin’s conception of the Eucharist as of a high and holy mystery. “We must listen to the words. We are told to take, and that means that it is ours; we are told to eat, and that means the other thing that we cannot see or take or eat becomes one substance with us. The whole force of the sacrament, says Calvin, lies in the Word: ‘given for you,’ ‘shed for you.’ Those who take in the language of the sign truly take the thing signified.” A poem attributed to the young Queen Elizabeth expresses the same understanding:

Hoc est corpus meum

’Twas Christ the Word that spake it.

The same took bread and brake it,

And as the Word did make it,

So I believe and take it.

I pause over this because Puritanism especially is treated as having been a stripping away of the poetics of the traditional faith, out of some supposed shopkeeperish impatience with the beautiful. This notion in turn occludes the indisputable fact that much of the literature and poetry of the English Renaissance was the work of people who were Puritans and Calvinists. Here I will mention only Spenser and the Sidneys, Milton and Marvell, though it is relevant that Arthur Golding translated Abraham’s Sacrifice, the first play written on the model of classical drama in a modern European language. Its author was Théodore de Bèze, Calvin’s closest associate in Geneva. The play went through twenty-three editions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Calvin himself was a famous stylist in French and Latin, though the way historians and critics speak of him makes his reputation for eloquence seem an anomaly. His dozens of volumes might as well have “predestination” and “depravity” inscribed in blackletter on every page for all the information these scholars offer, or have, that might be more sufficient to the subject. In any case, it is true that the arts of English Renaissance culture were markedly weighted toward the literary rather than the visual. A dispassionate appraisal might not find the world poorer for this fact.

To say that Calvin was widely read is by no means to say that everyone who read him agreed with him. Nor is it to say that there was a considerable overlap of his readership and Shakespeare’s audience. Still, it seems arbitrary to dismiss the significance of this readership. The society was moving toward civil war, and the insurgent and militarily successful side was called Puritans or Calvinists or Roundheads, the last a derisive term for the lower classes. This would imply that Calvinism was popular in the way Lollardy was popular also, despite and because of the learning and prestige of their great theologian and the power of his thought. The affinity between Wycliffe and Calvin, Lollardy and Calvinism, is strong enough to permit the thought that Calvinism, from an English popular point of view, was less an innovation than a restoration, a boldly public assertion of beliefs it had been perilous to utter for generations. The source of this affinity is not obvious. I know of no mention of Wycliffe by Calvin, though if Hus and Luther were aware of him, no doubt he was aware of him, too. In some sense Wycliffe and Calvin may have had a common source. The Reformers were not the first European critics of priestly celibacy or of transubstantiation. Long before the Reform there were the Waldensians in Italy and southern France, a persecuted egalitarian sect whose piety, like the Lollards’, was formed around vernacular Bibles and who also merged with the Reformation. Before Calvin joined the Reform, his cousin Pierre Robert had made a new translation of Scripture for the Waldensians. Since celibacy and transubstantiation became doctrine and dogma only in the thirteenth century of the life of Christianity, isolated communities or groups committed to another experience of the church might have continued to adhere to the customs and teachings of those earlier centuries. The claim these movements made to having origins in the primitive church, often dismissed as crude biblicism, may have had a real basis. When beliefs are driven underground, it is difficult to gauge their actual importance. When their adherents are persecuted they tend to scatter, taking their faith with them into new territories and populations, as for example the Huguenots in Renaissance London had done.

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It is broadly assumed that the Elizabethan population subscribed to an ideology that enshrined the existing order of things. I have seen a recent history that invokes in all seriousness E.M.W. Tillyard’s old variant on Arthur O. Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being. Tillyard asserts that the resourceful Elizabethan mind simply could not think beyond the manifest goodness and necessity of the divinely established hierarchy that ordered not only physical nature but also human social and political relations. Again, this was a society drifting toward civil war, toward the startlingly modern trial and execution of a reigning king. In their own recent history, the English had seen repeatedly that notionally hereditary monarchy with all its uncertainties and complications could and did untune the string of social order to disastrous effect. Shakespeare opens his first history play with the hero king Henry V dead on the stage, leaving as successor an infant who would live into adulthood yet never really come of age. The conquests in France, which were unsustainable, in the plays and in fact, left England overextended and impoverished, without authoritative leadership. In more recent history the boy king Edward VI died too young to have left an heir. His half sister Mary, whose father had declared her and his daughter Elizabeth illegitimate in order to bar them from succession, did succeed Edward, and in turn left no heir. Elizabeth, famously, did not marry. Monarchies and dynasties in dissolution, the disintegration of powerful persons, are subjects to which Shakespeare returns persistently. If there was a divinely ordained and inviolable order of things, it was in fact violated so continuously and so profoundly as to disappear in the endless turmoil of the actual world. It is hard to imagine how God’s will could be inferred from a system that at best constantly threatened collapse even while it sustained a violent order. When at his trial Charles I invoked the sacredness of hereditary succession, his judges could reply that half the kings of England after the Norman conquest were not in fact lawful heirs to the throne. I will concede that William Shakespeare might have looked in at a bear baiting. With a little difficulty I grant the possibility that he sometime danced around a May pole. But I draw the line at the thought that he, the most brilliant mind in a brilliant age, could have given a moment’s actual credence to a Tillyardian Great Chain of Being, a God-ordained social order intrinsic to reality like the relative status of oysters and angels. Certainly this view of things is not to be found in Wycliffe, or Aristotle, in Raleigh or even in Hooker. The list of writers in whom it is not affirmed or reflected would be very long, but one or two are sufficient to dispel the notion that Elizabethans could only imagine the world in these terms. And one on any list should be Elizabeth herself. She said, “I know the inconstancy of the people of England, how they ever mislike the present government and has their eyes fixed upon that person that is next to succeed; and naturally men be so disposed: ‘More to adore the rising than the setting sun.’” She said this in reply to the urging of those who believed that by bearing a child, producing a clear successor, she would ensure political stability and order.

On the subject of royal authority, the historian Christopher Hill quotes Calvin’s commentaries on the Book of Daniel. “Earthly princes deprive themselves of all authority when they rise up against God, yea, they are unworthy to be counted among the company of men. We ought rather to spit in their faces than to obey them when they … spoil God of his right.” While assumptions now prevailing might lead to the thought that Calvin’s influence would have been conservative, monarchical, in fact Calvin says a great deal more that makes clear his opinion of kings, with unmistakable contemporary relevance, this for example:

In the palaces of kings we often see men of brutal dispositions holding high rank, and we need not go back to history for this. In these days kings are often gross and infatuated, and more like horses and asses than men! Hence audacity and recklessness obtain the highest honors of the palace … we ought to weep over the heartlessness of kings in these days, who proudly despise God’s gifts in all good men who surpass the multitude in usefulness; and at the same time enjoy the society of the ignorant like themselves, while they are slaves to avarice and rapine, and manifest the greatest cruelty and licentiousness. Since, then, we see how very unworthy kings usually are of their empire and their power, we must weep over the state of the world, for it reflects like a glass the wrath of heaven, and kings are thus destitute of counsel.

The last sentence expresses Calvin’s belief that even the worst monarchs or figures of power are in place by the will of God, a clear consequence of his understanding of God as both omnipotent and deeply involved in human affairs. And as a consequence of the same understanding, he believes they are overthrown by the will of God. “Whence, then, does it happen that Christ strikes kings with an iron scepter and breaks, and ruins, and reduces them to nothing? Just because their pride is untamable, and they raise their heads to heaven, and wish, if possible, to draw down God from his throne.” Clearly, to other eyes this “iron scepter” would seem to be wielded by ordinary men. On the other hand, times being ripe, ordinary men might feel that they were enacting the will of Christ in taking part in rebellion. Revolution could therefore have the blessing of heaven as surely as any existing order. Calvin does urge obedience under most circumstances to magistrates, a word that refers not only or primarily to kings, but also to elected authority, the kind that governed Geneva. In expressing this degree of ambivalence he is perhaps more conservative than Christopher Marlowe and his roaring audience, for whom the humiliation of kings seems to have been subject enough.

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Some might suspect me of wanting to make a Calvinist of Shakespeare. I would, if I felt that there was good evidence to justify it — though never without reservations. I think it is more faithful to what we can know to think of him as broadly and impartially engaged in a period of then unprecedented intellectual richness, testing one idea, then another. His subscribing to a single theological system and adhering to it would seem to me to be out of character. I would argue that there are important Calvinist elements in Hamlet, and I note that the figures in Cymbelline who want to end England’s ancient tributary relationship to Rome, as, mutatis mutandis, Wycliffe urged they should and Henry VIII saw to it that they did, are grasping scoundrels. The plays could be Reformist in that they never treat virginity as a thing to be valued in itself, only as a kind of fidelity in anticipation of marriage. There is the matter of Sir John Oldcastle, a friend of Henry V in his youth who led a Lollard rebellion against the king and was hanged and burned for it. Oldcastle is the name Shakespeare first gave to Falstaff, strangely enough, given the Lollard knight’s famous courage in war and his piety. He is among Foxe’s martyrs, emaciated in the woodcut of him.

Clichés of English life in Shakespeare’s time feature a great deal of rollicking and ale quaffing and lute strumming. These images stand in the place of the cultural and intellectual life of the Elizabethans, those theology-reading generations, possessed as many of them were, discreetly or secretly, of beliefs they might die for. But there must have been street preaching and disputation and sailors’ tales of alien gods and unimagined coasts, and pamphlets and ballads and books of every kind passed hand to hand among those for whom literacy was a new privilege. Troupes of actors passed through the country, performing plays meant to advocate religious reform. There was the return of the Marian Exiles, the hundreds of Protestants who had gone to the Continent, to Reformed communities in Geneva, Antwerp, Frankfurt, and elsewhere, to escape the persecutions of Catholic Mary, and who brought back the thought and experience of the Reformation in Europe, as well as the epochal Geneva Bible, which they assembled and printed while in Geneva. If Shakespeare’s eye now and then wandered from the text to the margins of this possibly smuggled volume, he found a compendium of interpretation drawn from the leaders of the Reform, British and European. Perhaps he could not have done anything more radical at the time than to stand aloof from the claims of all these contending loyalties.

At the same time, what could have been of greater interest to a dramatist than to see them embodied and articulated, with the resources of thought and language brought into play, and the blindnesses and unacknowledged motives revealed, that enabled or undercut their exponents. The misconstrued Latin and the random scraps of learnedness in his comic scenes must reflect this period, in which the printed book rather abruptly assumed such importance in the consciousness of ordinary people. Shakespeare’s dramatizations of stories from North’s Plutarch, the chronicle histories, Gower, and the rest would be an exploitation of these excitements. I am assuming that truly effective repression of political as well as religious ideas would have been impossible in the culture of the time, and that the horrors of the public executions of Protestants under Mary and Catholics under Elizabeth were meant to accomplish what public authority could not. Friends, the like-minded, the inebriated, the aristocratic, could no doubt say what they thought among themselves without great fear of consequences. And Shakespeare could watch and listen, thinking his own thoughts, his sympathies offered as a moment invited them.

As for these thoughts of his. It occurred to me to consider the figure of the servant in his plays, as a sort of sight line for the audience I propose. The word “servant” has always carried a very strong charge in Christian theology, as in the following passage in Piers the Ploughman:

If the poor man is pursued by Sloth and fails to serve God well, then Adversity is his teacher, reminding him that his greatest helper is not man, but God, and that Jesus is truly his servant (for He said so Himself) and wears the poor man’s livery. And even if God does not help him on earth, yet he knows that Jesus bears the sign of poverty, and saved all mankind in that apparel.

Wycliffe writes of a “servant God.” If the phrase is a little startling, I think most Christian traditions would be willing to endorse it. The differences among them, however embattled, generally come down to differences of emphasis. So if, as I suggest, there are theological or political elements that recur with important consistency in Shakespeare’s plays, bearing in mind his speaking within the conceptual terms, and also within the experiential world, of his audience, servants onstage would have had more interest and meaning than might be apparent to a modern audience. In those days anyone who could have servants kept as many as he could afford to maintain. A great many people were or had been servants. They would have had relatives and friends who were servants. Masterless men of the lower orders were treated as vagrants, a criminal class subject to branding and hanging, and this would have given many of the poor reason to seek out and remain in the role of servant, however notional, as Shakespeare and his company were obliged to do. Then, too, the conventional manners that reinforced deference and were the common coin of flattery imposed at least the pretense of humility and obedience throughout society. Shakespeare establishes at some length that Hamlet’s bonnet-doffing water fly Osric is a wealthy man, “spacious in the possession of dirt.” Peers were, ideally, servants of the king or queen, the monarch servant of the commonwealth, priests of the church and faithful, lovers of their idealized beloved, and everyone of Christ, who took the form of a servant and made himself subject to death. So the language and conventions of servanthood were pervasive and value laden. At the same time, while for some these conventions were largely a form of politesse, for most they were tedium and drudgery. Worse, the most brutal and shameful acts seem to have been relegated to servants, leaving the possibility of denial of guilt to Henry IV in the death of King Richard, to King John in the supposed death of Prince Arthur, to Ferdinand in the death of the Duchess of Malfi. Soldiers also confronted the ethical problems of subservience. In the words of a Wycliffite writer, “Manslaughter is committed not only by the hands but also by consent, advice, and authority. And since priests consent to false wars and many thousands of deaths, they are cursed murderers and unfit to perform their duties, by God’s law and man’s, and by reason as well.” Such thinking could well lie behind Henry V, from the fraudulent business of seeking and being given a theological justification for invading France to the haunting questions posed to the disguised king in the night before battle.

The speaker in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 58, in the voice of “slave” or “vassal,” clearly in that of a servingman, says, “I am to wait, though waiting so be hell; not blame your pleasure, be it ill or well.” This metaphor relies on the fact of the morally ambivalent circumstance of the servant, frequently an issue in the plays. The servant is required to be loyal and obedient to, and is deeply dependent on, a master who might put him to uses that are contrary to his own moral feelings and to the good of his own soul, and in doing so might expose him to revenge or to the rigor of the law.

Wycliffe and his followers had an answer for this, asserted in their vernacular moral teaching. The subordinate was indeed guilty who carried out an order to do a sinful thing or who consented to sin, that is, who did not object to or strongly oppose sinful behavior in a superior. “Among all the sins by which the fiend beguiles men, none is more subtle than this consent … But cowardice and lack of love for God makes us start back from doing so [that is, refusing consent] as traitors do.” This kind of teaching is the consequence of the dignity and value of the human person in Wycliffite thought, without reference to status or condition. Wycliffe wrote that though, according to the philosophers, friendship occurs only between equals or near equals, “the simple response is that humanity is in its nature equal,” this in a context which asserts the apostles were the friends of Christ, no less. In a gloss on the commandment “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain,” a Wycliffite writer said, “We should know, first, that both prayer and speech have more to do with action than with words spoken by the mouth. Every man on earth bears the name of God printed in his soul, for otherwise he might not have being. So when any man abandons what he should do, or does what he should not do, on pain of the hate of God, he takes his holy name in vain. For no man is ordained for any purpose but to serve God, and he must take his name if he has being, and so he takes his name in vain when he fails in achieving his proper purpose.” Society has its hierarchies, but, in reality, everyone has the same master. Wycliffe wrote, “One can be saved without obedience to someone superior, since obedience does nothing unless it leads one in obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ. But without obedience to Christ, no one can be saved.” The authority of earthly masters seems to have been reinforced by oaths. Lollards forbade oaths. Loyalty to Christ might bring down affliction. This was a thing Lollards were always ready to accept.

Let us say no more than that Lollard thinking had had an influence over time on the thinking of England at large, and more particularly on those who felt the condition of subordinate or servant without the compensations that would have come with being served in turn — groundlings, in a word. Or let us say that these teachings reinforced a sense of things congenial to the English people more generally. Then the issue of individual moral dignity in circumstances that would penalize its expression would have been live, even pressing, since this very dignity meant their souls were at stake when obedience to an earthly master would have put them at odds with the will of God. John Webster’s dark play The Duchess of Malfi turns on the pathological obedience of Bosola to Duke Ferdinand, who, in his own defense, can plausibly claim to be mad. Othello is another version of the destructive power of a trusted subordinate. In light of the dependency of anyone having servants on their loyalty and discretion, that is, in light of the master’s vulnerability to the effects of a servant’s disloyalty and indiscretion, or his uncritical obedience, these relationships must have been at least as complex as marriages. Servanthood is strongly foregrounded in King Lear, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale. In each of these plays, disobedience motivated by a higher loyalty is central to the drama. The Duke of Kent takes the form of a servant, disguising himself as what he is in fact, dutiful and loving as would become an ideal liege man, in order to continue to attend on and protect Lear even after he has been banished by him. In the horrific scene of the blinding of Gloucester, only a servant has the courage or the moral sense to attempt to intervene. Other servants, at peril to themselves, care for the old man’s injuries and arrange his escape. The dying thought of the superserviceable Oswald, servant to Goneril, is to attempt to ensure that the letter she has entrusted to him will be delivered, his obedience a consent to evil in Wycliffite terms, in contrast to the refusals of the other servants, whose disobedience is true to their consciences and would mitigate the evil being done. Cymbeline depends altogether on the refusal of a servant to obey an order to kill his master’s wife. In The Winter’s Tale, Camillo refuses to murder a king who is a guest in the court of his master, King Leontes. Another servant carries out the king’s order to leave an infant to die of exposure. He loathes the act, which is to say that he is violating his own conscience in doing it, and he is, famously and remarkably, killed by a bear, and eaten by it, too. As bad befalls the ship he came in. The servant Leonidas in Pericles is ordered to kill the young woman Marina, refuses at first, then resolves to do it. Though she has been carried away before he can act, he is poisoned and dies. Even Nym and Pistol, half the ragtag entourage of Falstaff, recoil from his scheme to seduce two wives of Windsor for access to their husbands’ wealth. They plot to defeat him in it, his little page assisting. Pistol will not become Sir Pandarus of Troy, Nym will keep the ’havior of reputation. Literal servanthood being a widely shared condition, and the expectation of loyal subservience being a powerful social norm, to obey is nevertheless a complex moral choice, equally so when peers or people are forced to decide to whom their obedience is owed. This is an issue that brought England to disaster in the fifteenth century, the period of Shakespeare’s history plays, and more recently threatened or haunted the country in the persons of Lady Jane Grey, Mary Queen of Scots, the Earl of Essex, and other less significant claimants and pretenders.

On the other hand, the servants who are faithful and comforting to Webster’s Duchess, and to Cleopatra, to the boy Arthur, to the imprisoned Richard II, and to Lear as well, bring the audience into the drama, enacting the kindness the audience feels toward these desperate and bewildered souls, the selflessness of ideal servanthood. At the same time they make the sufferers more sympathetic by revealing them as they are in their private and intimate lives. These servants are deeply normative figures, figures of grace. The character Hamlet would be impossible if there were not Horatio, his “poor servant ever,” self-possessed and unpresuming, to whom the prince can speak without feigning or irony or contempt, who in turn can speak the simple and perfect blessing and farewell, and would die with Hamlet, if the prince had not asked him to live on and serve him further. In their servanthood these figures are not so much Christian as they are Christlike. The dignity of their courage and generosity, so costly to themselves, epitomizes the deep core of value the civilization had claimed for a millennium and more, a fierce, barbarous civilization, but with an ember of beauty at the center of it for which our egalitarianism and our pride have perhaps denied us a name. Then again, our egalitarianism was once inspired by this early recognition of the high dignity of servants and the lowly, the saving paradox at the heart of wild old Christendom. To quote again from Piers the Ploughman, “Our joy and our healing, Christ Jesus of Heaven, always pursues us in a poor man’s apparel, and looks upon us in a poor man’s likeness, searching us as we pass with looks of love, and forever seeking to know us by our kindness of heart; and he sees which way we cast our eyes, and whether we love the lords of this earth before the Lord of Heaven.”