Shakespeare's Crab

Bought from my local Tesco supermarket: an Old Ordnance Survey Map of the Vale of Evesham & Stratford, dating from 1892.

What caught my eye about this little map was the presence of a landmark - the so-called Shakespeare's Crab.  It is marked on the map about a mile outside the village of Bidford, on the road towards Stratford, very close indeed to Hillborough.

The story goes that the young Shakespeare and his mates were disposed to walk to Bidford one day and challenge a group known as the "Topers" to a drinking competition.  When they arrived, however, they discovered that the "Topers" had gone to Evesham Fair.  But they were invited to drink with another group, this one known as the "Sippers".  Even this proved too much for the Stratford lads, who drank so heavily that, on the way home, they all fell asleep under a crab apple tree on the wayside.  The next morning, Shakespeare's friends were eager to pit themselves against the "Sippers" again.  They roused young Shakespeare who, rather than heading back into Bidford to resume the drinking match, composed an impromptu epigram on the surrounding villages:

Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston,
Haunted Hillboro', hungry Grafton,
Dodging Exhall, papist Wixford,
Beggarly Broom, and drunken Bidford.

Frankly, I've never believed that this little rhyme was made up by Shakespeare.  And when we find that the earliest known use of the word "Toper", meaning a heavy drinker, came from 1661, we have to query the factuality of the legend of Shakespeare and the Crab-tree.

What fascinates me about the legend is that, as with so many local traditions regarding the Bard, it might be a polished and prettified account of something more intriguing.

For a start, Shakespeare's Crab is just a field or two away from Hillborough Manor.  In previous posts, and of course in Who Killed William Shakespeare?, I have suggested that Will Shakespeare's first Anne - Anne (or Agnes) Whateley - was a resident of Hillborough Manor.  This is indeed what local lore remembers: Shakespeare's "White Lady", his jilted lover, eked out her existence as a sorrowful recluse in the secluded manor house which belonged to a man with whom Shakespeare would later do business.

What is more, I have argued that Shakespeare fell in love with Anne ("Agnes") Whateley when he was recovering from an accident, as he seems to have indicated in his poem, A Lover's Complaint.  Anne, I believe, was a sort of unofficial or "underground" nun, serving the local Catholics in much the same way that her brothers, John and Robert, served as secret priests in their hometown of Henley in Arden.  Essentially, Anne Whateley nursed the young Shakespeare back to health.

It is worth noting that the marriage licence issued by the Bishop's court at Worcester to allow William Shakespeare to marry Anne Whateley referred to Anne as being "de Temple Grafton".  Hillborough Manor is indeed in the parish of Temple Grafton, the manor of which belonged to the Sheldon brothers of Beoley (there is a very important Shakespearean connection there, involving a skull, and the surname Whateley is much associated with Beoley and its church).  The vicar of Temple Grafton at the time was John Frith, "an old priest and Unsound in religion".  Frith's main interest in life, it would seem, lay in curing injured or diseased hawks.

My theory goes, then, that sometime in 1582, when Will was eighteen, he suffered an accident and was taken to the Catholic safe house of Hillborough Manor, a short distance downriver from Stratford, to recuperate.  His nurse on this occasion was the "sacred nun", Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton, who fell for the winning ways of the young poet.  They arranged to marry, but Shakespeare found himself dragooned into marrying another local woman, Anne Hathaway of Shottery.

The "accident", I always suspected, was the result of violence.  For the first part of 1582, young Shakespeare was on the run, hiding out (probably at Earl's Common in Worcestershire) and avoiding the government crackdown on Catholics who were suspected of having trafficked with the Jesuit priests, Father Campion and Father Persons.  By the late summer, though, he was back in the Stratford area, where he got Anne Hathaway (and possibly Anne Whateley) pregnant.

If Anne Whateley was a Catholic, as were most of her family, then Anne Hathaway was almost certainly Protestant, her father and brother expressing rather puritanical inclinations in their wills.  In the light of this, it might be worth reconsidering those twin gangs, the "Topers" and the "Sippers", especially as the word "Toper" does not seem to have been in use at the time.

A toper is a heavy drinker.  A sipper is someone who drinks one sip at a time (and yet, somehow or other, Shakespeare and his friends lost their drinking match against the "Sippers").  Could it be that these innocent-sounding names - "Topers" and "Sippers" - have been substituted for something else?

Let us suppose that the legend really recalls a kind of gang warfare - something along the lines of the deadly rivalry between the Capulets, and their retainers, and the Montagus, along with their retainers, which is dramatised in the opening of Romeo and Juliet.  Those two families are, respectively, Protestant (the Protestants wore little black caps in church) and Catholic (the Montagu family, from which Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, was descended, were notable Catholics).  The gang warfare between those two tribes reflects the situation in and around Stratford during much of Shakespeare's lifetime.  It should be remembered that Richard Quiney, Shakespeare's "loving good friend and countryman", the mayor of Stratford and father to Shakespeare's future son-in-law, was murdered in Stratford by thuggish members of the puritanical Greville family in 1602.

In addition to the Greville gang, there were Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote and his men.  The Lucys and the Grevilles deliberately made life very difficult indeed for anyone tarred with the "papist" brush, and it is not too difficult to imagine Shakespeare and his little gang having various run-ins with either mob - the Grevilles or the Lucys.  Any such sectarian violence would not have reflected too well on the Bard, and so his battles with the Lucys and the Grevilles were remembered, a little more bucolically, as hard drinking competitions with groups known as "Topers" and "Sippers".

That may or may not have been so.  But I find it intriguing that young Shakespeare was long said to have taken shelter, while very much the worse for wear, under a crab-tree a mere stone's throw from Hillborough, where I have argued that young Shakespeare was patched up after an "accident".  He was already torn between two different sorts of gang - the Catholics, which included his own family and the "sacred nun", Anne Whateley, and the Protestants, including the woman he was destined to marry.  In that regard, "Sippers" might refer to Catholics, who sipped communion wine, while "Topers" might be a code word for Protestants, who showed contempt for the Catholic mass.

Of course, if Shakespeare had taken a fall, or been knocked on the head, he might have seemed a little drunken when he was found sprawled beneath the crab-tree.  I know of at least one scar, running immediately above his left eyebrow, which was there for much of his life, and which caused his left eyebrow to droop somewhat.  He also referred to his lameness in his poems, and so we have to entertain the possibility that he was so badly beaten at one stage that he spent the rest of his life with a limp and a pronounced facial disfigurement.

Finally, I find it interesting to note that the word "crab" can mean to criticise or to grumble, or to do something which spoils something else - the term originally having been used of hawks fighting (from the Middle Low German krabben).  John Frith, the "old priest" of Temple Grafton, was renowned for setting the broken bones of hawks.  And the inn where Shakespeare and his mates are alleged to have suffered at the hands of the "Sippers" was known as the Falcon.

The hawks in question were surely troublemakers.  Like today's "hawks", they went looking for a fight.  Their enemies were rivals in religion and local politics.  And Shakespeare, it would seem, took a pasting.  He had to be nursed back to health nearby at Hillborough, where his "White Lady" fell in love with him.  But he bore the scars for the rest of his days.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Bard?

I came across a recent comment piece in the Telegraph, entitled There is no reason to be afraid of the Bard.  Well, that's a relief!

The commentator, one Harry Mount, began by explaining that many an actor is utterly terrified of Shakespeare.  Michael Gambon, for one.  Christopher Ecclestone and Zoe Wanamaker can't get their heads round iambic pentameter (or "blank verse", as they called it in Shakespeare's day).  Ralph Fiennes admits that he doesn't really understand King Lear.

Fortunately, Harry Mount was on hand to dole out some advice on how Shakespeare should be spoken.  This advice boils down to "avoid the theatrical and keep it real" - which sounds to me a bit like the summary of a PowerPoint demonstration given by a management consultant.  Or pretty much anyone, for that matter.  E.g.: "We in the West Highland Mountain Rescue Service have one motto, and that is - 'Avoid the theatrical and keep it real.'"

It so happens that Nicholas Hytner, the outgoing artistic director of the National Theatre, seems to agree with Mount (for the record, the incoming artistic director of the National Theatre, Mr Rufus Norris, was once crucified, naked, in one of the very first stageplays I had produced in London, so we've got a bit of history, me and the National's new Mr Big.  Anyway ...)  Nicholas Hytner has said that Shakespeare should be acted in "spontaneous, comprehensible, natural speech patterns".

Harry Mount helpfully provides us with an illustration of how Shakespeare's dramatic words should be delivered.  He points to Withnail's sozzled speech from Hamlet which closes that wonderfully actory movie, Withnail and I.  And yes, Richard E. Grant doesn't do a bad job, intoning Shakespeare to some bored and bedraggled-looking wolves.  (Strangely, Harry Mount seems to feel that Shakespeare always works best in the pouring rain - too many outdoor productions, methinks.)

Okay, so Messrs Hytner and Mount think that actors should forget all about the iambic pentameter and just say the lines as if they were written in prose.  Unless I'm very much mistaken, that's what they're saying.  Forget the rhythm.  Just imagine you were having a chat around the watercooler.

Sorry - but that's just about the most atrocious advice I could possibly imagine (short of something really extreme, like "put a couple of quail's eggs inbetween your cheeks and your jaw when you do Hamlet - if one of the eggs breaks, you're doing it wrong").  No.  That is entirely the wrong way to tackle Shakespeare.

Think about it: why, why, why would Will have gone to the trouble of writing in blank verse if he knew that, give it a few hundred years and they'll just speak the words as if they're reading out an autocue?  When Shakespeare wanted his characters to speak in prose, he wrote those speeches in prose!  Indeed, there was a distinct difference between the parts written in prose and those written in verse.  Prose was for comedy, the low-grade characters and the pretty mundane stuff.

Reducing all of Shakespeare to some lazy sort of modern prose is basically rewriting him.  Harry Mount is proposing an outrage almost on a par with Julian Fellowes rewriting Romeo and Juliet on the grounds that most of us scum just won't understand the movie otherwise.

There's nothing that weird about blank verse anyway.  It's essentially our normal speech pattern.  Take a line of Shakespeare (e.g. "The quality of mercy is not strained") and think of something more modern and everyday which fits the same sort of space (e.g. "I wouldn't mind a coffee and some cake").  Was that difficult?  Does the rhythm of either of those two quotations strike you as odd, or do both sound fairly natural when spoken in English?

Where actors really go wrong with Shakespeare is when they try to make him sound perfectly normal by abandoning the verse.  Why so?  Well, first of all, because the lines weren't written in prose.  Blank verse offers a very effective guide to the rhythm of the words and (roughly) where the stresses should fall (e.g. "To be or not to be, that is the question"), and once we throw that to the four winds, anything goes (e.g. "To be, or ... not ... to be - that is the question!").  At that point, actors start indulging.

I caught part of a production of Hamlet on TV, not so long ago (I won't identify which production, so as to protect the guilty).  It was horrendous.  Everybody seemed to be moving in slow motion.  And when they weren't moving, they were strangely still, like bad extras.  Whenever an actor had a line to speak, he seemed to think about it for a while before actually saying anything.  Then the next actor would gather his thoughts before opening his mouth.  The result was that the scene seemed to drag on and on till the crack of doom.  It was turgid, pretentious and boring.  And that's not what Will Shakespeare had in mind!!!

Shakespeare, I believe, spent much of his career trying to persuade his actors to speed up a little.  As a dramatist and occasional director, I know how difficult it can be to get actors to have their thoughts and utter them as rapidly as people do in real life.  Something happens when they step on stage: everything slows down.  Shakespeare described one of his plays as a "two-hours' traffic".  They're usually performed these days like a three-and-a-half-hour traffic jam.

The blank verse actually works like a kind of metronome.  It effectively tells the actor how fast he or she should be speaking, and how quickly they should respond to the previous speech.  If Shakespeare had wanted an actor to take a pause, he would have worked in a space by not completing the line.  If the rhythm remains unbroken, then there is no pause.  That keeps things fairly snappy and - I would hasten to add - more realistic.

When I edited The Tempest for a production in Germany recently, I had one rule: keep the rhythm!  I cut out almost half of the text, but did my utmost to make sure that there were no ragged lines.  It wasn't meant to be spoken in prose, or some sort of loose collection of random quotations.  Rhythm matters in Shakespeare, and even if you cut a speech down, you need to keep that rhythm.  It's what's needed to keep the actors on their toes.  Without it, they go all "natural", and it sounds hugely unnatural.

Of course, our inability to understand Shakespeare has nothing to do with the rhythms of his verse.  Nothing at all.  It stems from our refusal to understand his life and times.

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you - trippingly on the tongue, said Hamlet to the actors.  Suit the action to the word, and the word to the action, with this special observance: that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature.

In other words, speak the speech as it is written, allowing the iambic rhythm to carry you along (if you turn a speech into prose, you'll cock it up, because many of Shakespeare's sentences are long and convoluted, but if you let the rhythm work through you, you'll get through them without imposing your own ideas on how the sentence should sound).  Don't overdo it, and don't go too slowly.  Just do it as it is.  Cleanly.  Honestly.  Straightforwardly.  Listen to me.  I've shown you how to do it, with as much precision as I can.  It's all in the verse.

And don't pause every time it's your turn to speak!!  Because that gets very, very boring!  It slows down the scene and pretty soon the spectator hasn't a clue what you're on about and has probably lost interest.

(Okay, it was the RSC's Hamlet).

The New Heroic Age

A few posts back, I discussed the new Romeo and Juliet movie, for which Julian Fellowes wrote the screenplay.

Mr Fellowes "updated" Shakespeare's language to make it more "accessible".  I queried whether Julian Fellowes was really the right choice for the job - he's not known for being down with the kids.

Well, Mr Fellowes has endeavoured to explain himself.  Apparently, he feels that he's capable of understanding Shakespeare because he had a "very expensive education" and "went to Cambridge".  Since most of us did not enjoy those advantages in life, it goes without saying that we are terminally thick and can only watch a Shakespeare play with our mouths open and our knuckles dragging on the ground.

In just a few words, Fellowes appears to have rendered the entire Shakespeare industry redundant.  If you didn't go to private school and Oxbridge, the chances of you being able to "get" Shakespeare are nil.  So the greatest dramatic works in the English Language become something that only the social elite can possibly appreciate.  The rest of us have to make do with bookmarks, T-shirts, and "adaptations" which are written down to our educational level.

There's nothing new here.  In the very first section of Who Killed William Shakespeare? I examine the intellectual (and social) snobbery of the late-18th century, which determined that the people of Shakespeare's hometown were congenitally stupid and only Londoners with money could comprehend the genius of the Bard (although, when it came to quoting him accurately, the metropolitan elite were rather lax).

So Julian Fellowes's excuses for wrecking Shakespeare's language are true to type.  Basically, he's saying "I'm posh, you're not.  Therefore, I can understand Shakespeare, while you're likely to struggle with the semiotic intricacies of Fifty Shades of Grey."

Now, bear with me here.  I touched on the work of Giambattista Vico at the end of The King Arthur Conspiracy, but it's so important, so relevant, that I revisited Vico's theories very early on in The Grail; Relic of an Ancient Religion for Moon Books.

Giambattista Vico looked back across history and identified three major phases in the development of civilisations.  The first, we might call the Divine age.  This is essentially a primitive or indigenous society.  The gods are all around us; we walk with them and talk with them, and everything we do is designed to appease them.

Then, certain individuals decide that they are descended from the gods.  They lay claim to certain areas of land and found families or dynasties, which likewise claim direct descent from the gods.  At about the same time, a priesthood appears which insists that it, and it alone, has access to those gods (or God).  The priesthood and the aristocracy work hand in hand, claiming privileges which they deny to the rest of the populace.  This, we might call the Heroic age.

Finally, the people wake up to the fact that they are every bit as human as their self-appointed masters.  They demand an equal share in the decision-making process.  We get democracy (and its corollary, scientific materialism).  We might call this the Human age.

Okay, so far so good.  We start out as "superstitious" primitives startled by thunder.  We invent a single god, so that the more wealthy and powerful can claim that there is a divinely-ordained hierarchy which cannot be challenged.  Then we discover Liberty, Egality and Fraternity.

But what happens next?  Giambattista Vico was way ahead of his time, here.  He recognised that all civilisations collapse.  There is what he called a ricorso, a "return" to the start of the process.  From the heights of science and democracy we are rather suddenly propelled back into a state of wonder at the world around us, reliant on the gods for everything.

What causes this ricorso?  Dudley Young, in his wonderful Origins of the Sacred, suggested that democracy is inherently anarchic, and so a period of anarchy results in the demolition of democratic institutions and, inevitably, the end of civilisation.  However, this theory is - I believe - fundamentally flawed.

What destroys civilisations is greed.  Pure and simple.  And how does that greed infect the carefully calibrated mechanisms of science and democracy?  Easy: it does so by reinventing the Heroic age.

In other words, once a society has developed, progressing through the primitive/magical/theocratic Divine age and the religious-aristocratic Heroic age to the democratic and scientific systems of the Human age, a form of regression starts.  Those who always preferred the certainties of the Heroic age (summed up, basically, as a landed aristocracy supported by the Church) begin to fight back against the principles of science and democracy.  They start claiming more - much, much more - for themselves.  And civilisation implodes under the weight of their regressive and selfish demands.

That is what is happening now.  In many ways, we can replace the "Church" with "Corporate Capitalism", because they amount to the same thing.  But anyone seeking enlightenment is recommended to read Naomi Klein's excellent, if chilling, The Shock Doctrine.

The post-war consensus - which was about as scientific and democratic as it is possible to be - began to crumble in the late 1970s.  A small group of fanatical economists sought to undermine the certainties of the Human age.  They argued that the State should have no involvement in everyday life.  Everything should be in private hands.  Their theories (mostly emanating from the Chicago School of Economics, which shall be forever cursed) could only be applied at the point of a gun.  So a clever new step was invented.  Naomi Klein called it "Disaster Capitalism".

Essentially, it works like this.  A group of greedy individuals either invents or quickly moves to exploit a traumatic event (like a civil war, a tsunami or a perceived economic crisis).  While the populace is too shocked to do anything about it, everything they thought they owned is transferred into private hands.  The rich grow immensely richer.  Everybody else suffers - and is tortured or "disappeared" if they dare to speak out.

No end of specious claims are made to justify these atrocities.  Some of these are rather subtle, but they are all part of the ongoing conspiracy to steal from the people what the people once owned.

In cultural terms, we all own Shakespeare.  And though a fairly decent level of education, and an awareness of history, are valuable in making sense of his rich words, there really is no barrier to anybody enjoying his works.

So the new aristocrats seek to claim him as exclusively their own.  Only those who have enjoyed the Heroic age privileges of private education and automatic entry to Oxbridge can understand Shakespeare.  He's not for the likes of you.  He belongs to the rich and powerful.

Shakespeare himself would be utterly horrified by such a suggestion.  He would be mortified.  In fact, he would realise that he was being murdered all over again by such Heroic age fantasists as Mr Julian Fellowes.

(Consider this: Downton Abbey is a worldwide phenomenon, its success proof of the popularity of its cosy vision of the Heroic age in all its pompous finery.  It hit our screens at about the same time as the most right-wing, privileged, "aristocratic" British government in living memory sneaked into office, and shortly before the Heroic age started flexing its muscles in the United States, where federal - i.e. democratic - government has been shut down by a bunch of Bible-bashing conservative fundamentalists from the Tea Party.  In these regards, Downton Abbey is symptomatic of the New Heroic age, which covers up what its real agenda is by flogging us an attractively misleading story of the past.)

Science is under attack, these days (mostly from the fundamenalists of the religious-aristocratic school).  So, too, is democracy - and the assaults are coming from the same direction: the New Heroic age.  Call it jihad.  Call it "Disaster Capitalism".  Call it the New World Order.  It's all the same.

It's the backwards-looking medievalism of the super-privileged eagerly driving us all back into a kind of feudalism.  It's the special pleading of corporate lobbyists and uber-rich tax-avoiders.  It's the old Etonians asserting their rule over the plebs.  It is naked greed masquerading as the remedy to all our problems.

We must, must, must NOT allow such people to lionise William Shakespeare and his works.  They might believe that they hold the exclusive rights to his memory - by dint of birthright and expensive upbringing - but they simply cannot be trusted with it.

Why?  Because they don't understand him at all.  They are only too quick to misrepresent him to us (see previous posts).  They bend him to serve their own ends.

So Julian Fellowes has Downton Abbeyed Romeo and Juliet.  He's selling you a false image of Shakespeare, one that surely suits his ideal of a New Heroic age in which the landed aristocracy - in cahoots with the Church of Corporate Wealth - look down from their charmless heights on the rest of us, who are just there to wash the dishes and make the beds for them (on zero-hour contracts, of course).

Remember the ricorso.  If you want our civilisation to fall apart, that's the way to go.  And everything Shakespeare was telling us will have gone unheeded, because we weren't considered capable of understanding him, and so we allowed our social "superiors" to interpret him for us. 

And they lied.  Because they always do.

Hot Off the Press

A big feature in the Stratford Herald this week, thanks to Sandy Holt, Arts Editor of that periodical.  We got about half a page: significantly more than a piece about the furore over Julian Fellowes having tinkered with Shakespeare's text in his script for the Romeo and Juliet movie, which was also covered in a recent post on here.  Seems that controversy is the name of the game in matters pertaining to Shakespeare right now!

But better still, in many ways, is the fantastic spread in The Village magazine this month.

I have much to thank The Village and its editor for, seeing as it was the photographs of the skull at Beoley, reproduced in an issue of that magazine from October 2009, which allowed me to compare the skull with the various images of Will Shakespeare.

The magazine covers the area around Alvechurch, including such gloriously named places as Lickey End and Cofton Hackett (we do village names really well here in Worcestershire).  It also covers Beoley, the quaint village which deserves to be more famous.  Shakespeare's skull is there.

Now, I'm aware that many of the occasional readers of this blog don't live in or near Alvechurch.  But The Village magazine has a very good online presence, and so I am able to share the main features of the story published in their most recent edition with you:

http://villageonline.co.uk/village/features/feature/who_was_will

So, while Stratford writhes with contention, Beoley and its satellites get to enjoy a bit of notoriety.  Which, as they say in these parts, or near enough, is "bostin"!

M- M- M- My Verona!

Okay, so now we're going to try to be very clever by linking the previous post ("Shakespeare's Dark Lady") to a forthcoming post (about Shakespeare and the Cobbe Portrait) by way of something that's in the news.

There's a new Romeo and Juliet movie heading our way (see poster, credit: Relativity Media).  Apparently, it's less like Baz Luhrmann's hyperkinetic William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (which came out 17 years ago, can you believe?) and rather more like Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 version.

That said, the script has lately come under fire.  Julian Fellowes, who adapted the original for the screen this time around, has been accused of "dumbing down" the language of Shakespeare so that modern audiences can understand it.

Now, I'm not all that surprised that there's a bit of a backlash here.  It's been due for a while, not least of all because (for all its international success) Downton Abbey is an impossibly rose-tinted and soapy work of historical revisionism, in which the upper classes are generally marvellous and the First World War lasted all of two weeks.  At least Gosford Park had Robert Altman at the helm, and so some much needed scepticism and cynicism was brought to the country house dreamworld which Fellowes seems to inhabit.  And it might reasonably be asked, if your intention is to translate Shakespeare's much beloved tale of adolescent longing into today's teenage idiom, whether Julian Fellowes was really the right man for the job.

But in a sense, all that is missing the point.  It's not that Shakespeare's language is impossible to follow (Baz Luhrmann stuck to it, and his flashy adaptation was a huge hit wiv da yout').  The problem isn't the words Shakespeare used.  It's what he was really on about.

The tagline for the latest R & J adaptation is "The Most Dangerous Love Story Ever Told" - which rather puts Antony and Cleopatra, Samson and Delilah, Tristan and Isolde, Francesca da Rimini and Abelard and Heloise in their place!  But what is it that makes Romeo and Juliet the "Most Dangerous Love Story Ever Told"?  After all, the reason why those two households, "both alike in dignity", are at war with each other is never explained.

It didn't have to be.  The audience in Shakespeare's day would have known exactly why the Montagus and the Capulets hate each other so much.

Now, a lot of our previous post ("Shakespeare's Dark Lady") referred to events which took place in the year 1594.  Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, turned 21 in October of that year.  He was instantly stung with a huge fine.  His father had died in suspicious circumstances when Southampton was a boy, and he had been brought up under the dubious guardianship of Lord Burghley, the Queen's chief minister.  Burghley was a self-serving Protestant who tried to marry his aristocratic ward to his own granddaughter, Elizabeth de Vere.  Southampton refused, and was hit with a massive fine for doing so when he came of age.

Southampton himself came from a Catholic family.  His father had died in the Tower of London shortly after the Jesuit, Father Edmund Campion, was arrested.  His mother, Mary Browne, was the granddaughter of the defiantly Catholic Viscount Montagu (and so Southampton was, by way of descent, a Montagu, like the fictional Romeo).  Swithin Wells, the first tutor employed by the Southamptons, was hanged for attending a Mass in 1591.  The Jesuit Father Robert Southwell (a distant cousin of William Shakespeare's) acted as a "spiritual adviser" to the young Earl of Southampton before he was captured in 1592.

When Southampton did eventually marry, it was to Elizabeth Vernon in 1598, when Elizabeth was already pregnant.  It is not known when their affair began, but because Elizabeth Vernon was one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, Queen Elizabeth I threw a fit when she found out about the marriage and sent both bride and groom to prison.

It is possible that Southampton was already enamoured of Elizabeth Vernon at the time of his 21st birthday in 1594.  Shakespeare would have spotted the problem immediately: Southampton was a Catholic - a Montagu, no less - whereas Elizabeth Vernon was first cousin to the Protestant Earl of Essex and almost certainly a Protestant herself.  She was, then, a "Capulet" - a "little chapel" person who wore a little knitted cap in church.

The world of Romeo and Juliet was dangerous because of the religious division which was tearing England in two.  It was, essentially, a case of Sunni versus Shia, or Presbyterian vs Episcopalian.  The two households - the Catholic Montagus and the Protestant Capulets - were at each other's throats over their religious differences which, in 1594, when Romeo and Juliet was written, probably as a 21st birthday present for Southampton, were reaching new heights of violent severity.

Romeo is at first in love with Rosalind.  There are several Rosalinds in Shakespeare's plays.  The name was pronounced "Rose-aligned" (think of the rosary).  But when Romeo sneaks into a party at the Capulets' place and sees the lovely Juliet, he falls for a woman from the opposite side of the religious divide (which was also, of course, a political divide, the Protestants furiously persecuting the Catholics because that was how they became rich and powerful).  Their love is doomed, not because they are young and reckless, but because they are caught up in a hideous sectarian conflict.

Put the play back into its context and the language presents fewer difficulties.  "O Rome, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" doesn't mean "Where are you, Romeo?"  It means "Why are you 'Rome-o'?"  Why are you a Roman Catholic, and therefore forbidden to a Protestant girl like me?

"What's in a name?  That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet."  Why these labels - "Catholic" and "Protestant"?  A "Roseley" (see previous post) would be just as gorgeous, whether he were a Catholic or a Protestant.  In Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, a young gentleman protests that he is about to be executed "for a name", the name in that instance almost certainly being "Jesuit".

Shakespeare knew that marriages which crossed the sectarian divide were not necessarily happy ones, having himself been dragooned into marrying a woman from a Puritan family.  It could all end in tears - as it does in the play.

So is it too much to ask that, instead of cheapening or "dumbing down" Shakespeare's language in order to make it easier to understand, we might simply try to understand what Shakespeare was actually saying?  A Catholic might fall in love with a Protestant, and there is no reason at all why their love should not blossom ...

... except that, under Queen Elizabeth I and her ministers (like the egregious Lord Burghley), there was no place for such idealistic and romantic notions.  You were either Protestant, or you were dead.

And so the lovers die, because there is no place for true love under such an embittered, repressive and fanatical regime.

Somehow, though, I can't help feeling that the Julian Felloweses of this world would rather meddle with Shakespeare's text than shine a light on the period in which it was written.  Because if you think Downton Abbey is a fair and accurate reflection of Edwardian England, you're pretty much bound to believe in the "Golden Age" of Elizabeth I.  The very "Golden Age" in which young lovers were likely to die if they fell in love with the wrong people.