Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

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.