Books: Shakespeare’s Restless World

After the success of The History of the World in 100 Objects and its accompanying BBC radio programme, British Museum director Neil MacGregor has turned his attention to 20 objects contemporary to William Shakespeare’s world.

It’s through these objects – ranging from the grandiose (Henry V’s funeral achievements at Westminster Abbey) to the personal (an iron fork excavated from the site of the Rose Theatre in London) that MacGregor initiates what he calls “a threeway conversation between the objects themselves, the people who used them, and the words of the playwright, which have become such an embedded part of our language and our lives”.

Museum curators invariably select objects to tell stories, but often need to place them within fairly static contexts. MacGregor has a historian’s fine-tuning for an object’s mobility of meaning between contexts and it’s this sense that makes the lavishly illustrated Shakespeare’s Restless World such a romp of a read.

Object lessons

We may not know much about Shakespeare’s own life, but his writings reflect much about the time he lived in.

Political uncertainty and royal succession were not just plots of plays, but a source of tremendous anxiety in this period; so what can an object as prosaic as a pedlar’s trunk tell us about the history of late 16th-century England?

The answer is plenty: while Elizabeth I did not pursue Catholics as vigorously as her father or half-brother, the Protestant reformation in Britain was still hugely contentious and there were certainly plots, instigated by Catholic monarchs, against her. It was a dangerous time to adhere to the old faith and so what was needed to celebrate it had to be disguised.

In the trunk, underneath the lady’s pink bonnet, were the vestments used to celebrate the mass. Pedlars – with their freedom to roam – are much like the Shakespearean characters that make disguise an integral motif in plays. (The danger Catholic priests were in is vividly illustrated in a later chapter about the Jesuit Edward Oldcorne.

MacGregor speculates, in tones of real horror, what Oldcorne’s eyes, one of which is now encased in a reliquary at Stonyhurst, saw as their final vision.) MacGregor is adept at moving backwards and forwards between objects and Shakespearean text.

What seems like a simple communion chalice from Stratford-upon-Avon is a reminder that the way you accepted or refused a drink in Shakespeare’s time was of huge significance.

MacGregor, of course, mentions the poisoned cup in Hamlet, but the symbolic link between a cup of wine, the blood of Christ and the different communion practices of the Church of England is also paramount.

Mirror to the past

One of the most fascinating chapters is about Dr John Dee, magus, mathematician and scientist and his magical obsidian mirror, an object from the British Museum.

The link between science and magic in Shakespeare’s time was a matter of fact, and Dee (who was once arraigned on charges of witchcraft) was a formidable figure who stood, rather like Prospero, with one foot in the world of men, the other in the spirit world.

MacGregor is not the first scholar to link the magical island of Prospero’s exile to the European discovery of North America, but he is right to point out Shakespeare’s antipathy to bondage: one of the most poetic passages in all of his plays relates to Ariel’s anticipation of emancipation. MacGregor rarely moves his speculations far from the factual.

He makes good links between the Italian settings of many Shakespearean plays, Londoners’ taste for Italian fashions and finds around the Bankside theatres. And he paints a persuasive picture of young blades crossing the Thames for a night’s roistering in the inns there.

There’s one curious absence in this book: that of women and their work. MacGregor reproduces bills of mortality from plague years without mentioning that the job of checking the dead was left to women.

Also unmentioned is the excavation of 685 late 16th-century pins and 58 aglets (the metal points of laces) on the site of the Rose Theatre in the 1980s.

In the Shakespearean period, when few off-the-peg items were available, objects were hugely important, for they spoke about both consumers and the possibility of consumption – and it’s this, and the creation of an early modern self, that is the theme here.

Louise Gray is a freelance writer and editor