Religion Around Shakespeare

Chapter 5: Religious Community

5 religious community “Fickle Changelings” Literary Historian Stephen Greenblatt recently time-traveled to the streets of London and conjured up an “unprecedented concentration of bodies jostling, crossing and recrossing the great bridge, pressing into taverns and theaters and churches.” He suggests that the clutter may be the “key to the whole spectacle” of crowds in Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies. To be sure, the playwright prowled around Plutarch, Stow, and Holinshed to learn more about “fickle changelings and poor discontents” who nourished passions for “hurleyburly innovation.” But Greenblatt maintains that “the sight of all those people—along with the noise, the smell of their breath, their rowdiness and potential for violence—seems to have been Shakespeare’s first and most enduring impression of the city” in the 1580s, and the impression was inspiration for the “tag-rag” rabble’s “greasy aprons” and “gross diets” in a few plays.1 Perhaps, as Greenblatt insinuates, the grit of fifteenth-century English history and the glory that was Rome were, onstage, “suffused { 158 } r e l i g i o n a r o u n d s h a k e s p e a r e less with the otherness of the past” than with “the coordinates” of the playwright’s present—specifically, with his contempt for “the sweaty multitude.”2 He knew that mobs were dangerously unpredictable or, like Jack Cade’s crowd in the second part of his Henry VI, just plain dangerous. In the text, Cade stirs his cronies to kill the city’s cultured citizens (4.2), and it might have occurred to Shakespeare that he would have been one of the casualties of the commoners “lightly blown to and fro” (4.8.54–55). Their Roman “cousins,” so to speak, were blown about as well. The proles in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, that is, were easily manipulated. Sinisterly self-interested tribunes swayed the crowd against Rome’s most noble soldier, the darling of affluent, politically influential citizens, and the play’s protagonist. Was Shakespeare warning the Jacobethan aristocracy about anarchy ? Was he counseling contemporaries against trusting ordinary citizens or trusting manipulative agitators who led them into trouble? Fifty years ago Brents Stirling believed he was; he believed the playwright “damned” the rabble and ragtag “with tragic thoroughness,” which Stirling attributed to the “climate of public apprehension” created by late Tudor conformist religious literature. It was “clear” to him that Shakespeare attacked “the common mass for excesses of leveling , bungling, and instability” and that the attack “was typical of a conservative position that sought to discredit moderate and extreme dissent.” Conformist critics of nonconformity supplied the recipes. Shakespeare let commoners’ grievances simmer before bringing them to a boil, while playgoers “habitually” (and “unconsciously”) “sensed” that the commoners’ insolence and violent fantasies in the theater substantiated what, offstage, could be heard from many of the city’s pulpits.3 Yetthereligiousattitudesofconformistsandnonconformistsalike werevastlymorecomplicatedthanStirlingassumed.Indeed,thepublic apprehension he identified signaled an ambivalence that, we shall see, was fundamental to early modern religious reform in England; the “thoroughness” of Shakespeare’s contempt for the crowd is too often overstated, as are his “populism” and his characters’ fondness for or affinities with “the poor discontents.”4 We will begin to make that case with Coriolanus and Coriolanus, the protagonist and play, R e l i g i o u s C o m m u n i t y { 159 } which was composed and performed by 1609. Frank Kermode has noted its “daunting ambiguities,” calling it “probably the most difficult in the canon.”5 Yet the drama’s apparent ambiguity can, in reality, be ambivalence. And Coriolanus looks to be a splendid illustration of the ambivalence toward commoners among the laity in the realm’s religious communities that were just then pondering proposals to redistribute authority and new ways to maintain exemplary discipline. Coriolanus, “Never a Worthier Man” ShakespearesometimeshasCoriolanusstruggletocontrolhisdisdain for Rome’s proles, yet the protagonist simply cannot keep it in the vault. He thinks that hard times turn commoners into “dissentious rogues”(1.1.162)andthatwarturnsthemintocowards,“soulsofgeese that bear the shapes of men” (1.4.34–35). But he is their contrary; his valor and the contempt for ordinary citizens, which he shares with fellow patricians, make him the senate’s choice for consul. Yet Rome had become a republic, so the senate’s nominee would have to get the crowd’s consent. Simple enough, save that Coriolanus put himself above...