Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.
I think it’s important to include these poems, because it’s too easy just to see Shakespeare as the champion of young, romantic love, the origin of the modern updates of Romeo and Juliet, and the hero of the brilliant but unhistorical hit movie Shakespeare in Love. The real author’s views of love and sex are, in truth, a million miles away from the elevation of sexual love as the ultimate good in itself that characterises modern culture. Catholic or not, there is plenty of guilt, self-hatred and personal disappointment wired into Shakespearean attitudes towards love and sex. It’s ‘the answer’. But only sometimes, and for some lucky people. And even then, it’s a subversive, dangerous, society-shaking force.
For the next big lesson Shakespeare teaches us about the differences between his world and that of the twenty-first century is the importance of hierarchy and order, up to – and including – monarchy. Hierarchy governed every aspect of daily life: wives and children were supposed to show respect to fathers and husbands; apprentices were tightly bound to their employers, and faced severe punishments if they broke a host of complex rules; smaller gentry owed loyalty and obedience to the great magnates; and the entire country owed absolute obedience to the monarchy. Alongside this, of course, there was the parallel hierarchy, with its many gradations and pomposities, of the Church. But it’s the monarchy, and the whole business of rulers and ruled, that is central to Shakespeare’s notion of society.
In many ways Shakespeare invented the British monarchy as such a central component of the national identity. Right from the beginning of his career, with Henry VI Part One, through to its end and The Tempest, Shakespeare believes in order, and that order, properly understood, derives from a wise monarch. The weak, deluded or self-pitying ruler spreads discord and misery throughout the kingdom. The good ruler is not simply a morally attractive figure, but a political blessing on all under his authority.
There were very good reasons for this. Murder rates in early modern Britain were higher than we can begin to comprehend today. There was a good chance of being robbed and killed if you travelled; domestic violence was very high and tolerated; this was an armed and pressurised society in which the most significant social division was between those legally allowed to carry swords or pistols, and those forbidden to. Violence was everywhere. Shakespeare may have had his first chance at becoming an actor because a row between two more senior players resulted in a fatal stabbing; and Marlowe famously met his end in a Deptford brawl or assassination, with a dagger through his eye.
So it’s hardly surprising that Shakespeare believes in order; and that a highly literate, impoverished young man trying to make his way in the seething chaos of one of the world’s largest cities shows a certain nervousness about the mob. In the second part of Henry VI he portrays the medieval rebel Jack Cade as a deluded, violent and extremely dangerous mob orator, an enemy of grammar schools and learning, prepared to burn down London Bridge and behead his enemies, and whose dream of class victory amounts to slashing the price of bread and beer and declaring that the ‘pissing conduit run nothing but claret wine this the first year of our reign’. Cade’s followers dream of a massacre of lawyers – and indeed, like Maoist revolutionaries, of everyone who can read and write. These are the caricatures of a writer who fears disorder more than anything else, even the brutal punishments of the Tudor state.
Fear of disorder can be found almost everywhere in the Elizabethan theatre, even if the theatre itself was regarded as disorderly and threatening. In the play Sir Thomas More, partly written by Shakespeare, the great statesman confronts a London mob furious about immigration and determined to ‘send them back’ – nothing changes. More says:
Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England.
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
The babies at their backs, with their poor luggage
Plodding to th’ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you use it as Kings in your desires,
Authority quite silenced by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed:
What had you got? I will tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled, and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With selfsame hand, self-reasons, and self-right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.
Underpinning it all is a tough-minded and very unmodern belief in the virtues of hierarchy, class and obedience. Much of the time, these days, we almost pretend in our worship of Shakespeare that it’s not there. But it absolutely is: our greatest playwright was no kind of democrat. In Sir Thomas More, Shakespeare, or one of his collaborators, goes further still, telling the London rebels that to rise against the king is to rise against God. And if they succeed in rebellion, by undoing authority, they undo all order and will succeed only in making the world a still more dangerous place:
… Why, even your hurly
Cannot proceed but by obedience.
Tell me but this: what rebel captain,
As mutinies are incident, by his name
Can still the rout? Who will obey a traitor?
Or how can well that proclamation sound
When there is no addition but a rebel
To qualify a rebel? You’ll put down strangers,
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses …
All of which is to say no more than, in Shakespearean English, ‘the revolution devours her children’. Shakespeare shows again and again his vivid understanding of the utter misery of being outcast from the state. In King Lear, the very greatest of his plays, unsocial man, torn by the storm and by madness, excluded from a functioning society, is merely a ‘poor, bare forked animal’. In the world of the theatre, clothing was very important as a sign of social standing, belonging, authority. Now King Lear rips off his own clothes entirely, to make the point.
In writing about whipped beggars with nowhere to hide, and vividly describing the hunger of people at the bottom of the heap, Shakespeare shows that his sympathies naturally spread to the poor. But nothing, or almost nothing, is as terrifying as anarchy. And it’s simply not true that Shakespeare did not know about democracy.
