Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Stranger Crisis of the Early 1590S

Chapter 1 Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Stranger Crisis of the Early 1590s

Eric Griffin Millsaps College

In 1591, and then again in 1592, the Elizabethan government sponsored the publication of A Fig for the Spaniard or Spanish Spirits, a saber-rattling appeal to national unity issued at a moment during which the threat of a second Spanish Armada was mounting. Given a royal imprimatur and printed by John Wolfe, one of England’s most active stationers and well-connected propagandists, the tract presented a “true rehearsal” devoted to “lively portraih[ing] the damnable 1 deeds, miserable murders, and monstrous massacres of the cursed Spaniard.” As significantly, the polemic was authorized by an approved “counterfeit” of Elizabeth Tudor that promised a royal welcome, “for Christes sake,” to any displaced 2 refugees who might be seeking sanctuary in her “happie Realme.” During the final decade of the sixteenth century, Elizabeth’s “gracious” reception of strangers was becoming a trope of both state-issued propaganda and court poetry, which bade all, in the manner of Sir John Davies, “B ehold her in her virtue’s beams, / E xtending all sun-like to all realms” (1876: 136).3 Insofar as A Fig for the Spaniard represents a typical rehearsal of England’s “official” (or at least its public) orientation toward immigrant refugees and exiles, or “strangers,” the publication also brings into relief a number of the social tensions that were mirrored in the English drama of the early 1590s. This is especially true as regards three works attributed (whether wholly or in part) to William Shakespeare—The Comedy of Errors, Sir Thomas More, and Titus Andronicus— as well as several plays, most obviously, The Jew of Malta, written by the then more publically acclaimed Christopher Marlowe. By situating these dramas within the context they share with A Fig for the Spaniard, and alongside several

1 G. B. (1591, 1592), A Fig for the Spaniard, title page; sig. A5v. On the pamphlet’s government sponsorship, see Kamen (1997: 310). For a more extended discussion of A Fig for the Spaniard, especially in its Marlovian context, see my own English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire (2009: 103–9). 2 Ibid. Like many Black Legend tracts of the 1580s and 1590s, A Fig for the Spaniard draws parallels between the French monarchy’s troubles and those that could erupt should religio-political heterogeneity prevail over English unity of faith. See Parmellee (1996). Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 3 Hymns to Astraea, XIV, “Of the Sunbeams of Her Mind.” See also Hymn VIII, “To All the Princes of Europe” (Davies 1876: 136).

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expressions of popular resistance, this essay will draw out some of the humors that typified England’s late-century stranger crisis. For as does this often overlooked historical episode, the plays Shakespeare, Marlowe, and their associates were composing during this period lay bare a number of the attitudes, contradictions, and inconsistencies that characterized English postures respecting the stranger communities in their midst. And while revealing the hardening attitudes toward ethnicity, race, and religion that were emerging in this troubled historical moment, a consideration of the plays that were composed during this time of crisis also discovers both the degree to which England’s theatrical community became implicated in the era’s public unrest and how far the Elizabethan government was prepared to move against individual dramatists in their effort to maintain order. For Shakespeare, who apparently came through the crisis unscathed, increasing popularity, patronage, and his most highly regarded works were still to come. For Shakespeare’s playwriting contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe and his unfortunate roommate Thomas Kyd, the consequences of association with the stranger crisis of the early 1590s could not have been more dire.

This Town is Full of Cozenage

Laura Hunt Yungblutt has observed that the English government “seems to have been of two minds about the role of immigrants in matters of national security and about virtually all other aspects of their position in English society. From the earliest years of Elizabeth’s reign she and her councilors had simultaneously welcomed strangers and felt threatened” (1996: 94). If crown policy advertised public welcome, popular attitudes toward London’s growing immigrant community were characterized by profound ambivalences and anxieties. Oscillating between sympathetic identification and outright contempt, English citizens were discomfited by the presence of “strangers” in their midst, even when they understood why they ought to be offering support. As Lien Bich Luu notes, “the 1590s were a difficult decade for Londoners, with severe inflation, unemployment, plague epidemics, disruptions in overseas trade and war” (2000: 18). Poor harvests and high unemployment brought many “foreigners”—that is, native inhabitants of distant English shires—to an already crowded London in search of relief. Upon arrival, they jostled with émigrés who were busily establishing a vibrant economic sector in the city. Shopkeepers especially complained that London’s resident aliens had been “illegally trading in the retail of foreign goods” (Freeman 1973: 45). Aware of these internal trends, Elizabeth’s government struggled to maintain an uneasy equilibrium in which citizens and denizens might continue to coexist (Archer 1991: 259).4 It was a situation fraught with difficulty and ripe for exploitation, political and theatrical.

Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 4 According to Archer, by hearing popular grievances the courts gave the appearance of ruling “for the benefit of all citizens” (1991: 259).

Shakespeare’s emergence as a London playwright coincides exactly with this uneasy cultural moment. Already alert to popular sentiment and the exigencies of state power, five of the six plays he apparently wrote during this period—the three parts of Henry VI, The Comedy of Errors, and Titus Andronicus—suggest that, much in the manner of his contemporary Marlowe, Shakespeare was learning to tap this vein of social disquietude. If later works like The Merchant of Venice and Othello more obviously capitalize on antistranger undercurrents, 1–3 Henry VI (c. 1590–91) trade upon deep-seated English anxieties regarding their storied entanglements with the French, even as The Comedy of Errors (c. 1592), a play some scholars believe to be Shakespeare’s first,5 places the problem of the immigrant at center stage. As Shakespeare’s younger contemporary and sometime collaborator Thomas Heywood (1570–1641) would observe of the English tragedian’s practice, “If we represent a foreign history, the subject is so intended that in the lives of Romans, Grecians or others, either the virtues of our countrymen are extolled or their vices reproved” (1999: 494–5). The same was often true of Shakespearean comedy. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to take an obvious example, an English genius loci clearly overlays the play’s Grecian setting, as signaled by the presence of Oberon, Titania, and Peter Quince’s troupe of mechanicals in the Athens of Duke Theseus. The transposition allows the playwright to “intend” the English court, English religio-political dynamics, and English theatrical culture while ostensibly referring to the world of classical Greece. Though presumably set in Ephesus, The Comedy of Errors’ explicit reference to contemporary geopolitics reveals that Shakespeare, much in the manner Heywood suggests, represents the Anatolian hub of Hellenistic culture in order to extol or reprove aspects of Elizabethan England. Within the larger Greek world Ephesus held a particularly important significance for English Protestants. Identified in the book of Revelation as first of the seven churches of Asia for whom it was revealed, in “a great voice, as if it had been of a trumpet,” that Christ is “the Alpha and the Omega, that first and that last” (1: 10–11), Ephesus had also been the place, as the book of Acts recalls, where Saint Paul had ministered and “kept backe nothing that was profitable” (20: 20).6 There the apostle had “shewed” and “taught” the Ephesians “openly and throughout every house, Witnessing both to the Jews, and to the Grecians the repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20: 20–21). Within a community of believers being taught from the pulpit that, on the authority of “Sainte Paul,” they were “the elect and chosen people,” a “holy nation,” and “a particular people of God” (Church of England 1563)—as the English heard each year in their state-authorized Christmas sermon—the applicability of the example is apparent enough. But Ephesus could also be understood as representing a

5 See Shakespeare (1972: 5). Although several recent editions decline to enter the dating argument, the chronologies offered in Shakespeare (2008: 3324), Shakespeare Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. (2005: ix–x), and Shakespeare (1974: 48–56), are notable in their disagreement. 6 All Bible quotations are from the Geneva translation (1599).

community of backsliding idolaters and profiteers. For the book of Acts also recalls that among the Ephesians arose “a certaine man named Demetrius a silver smith, which made silver Temples of Diana” that “brought great gaines unto the craftesmen” (19: 24). Whereas the “workemen of like things” argued “by this craft we have our goods,” Saint Paul, “not alone at Ephesus, but almost throughout all Asia,” had “perswaded, and turned away much people” from idolatry. Preaching “[t]hat they be not gods which are made with hands,” the apostle went so far as to prophesy “also that the temple of the great goddesse Diana should bee nothing esteemed, and that it would come to passe that her magnificence, which all Asia and the world worshippeth, should be destroyed” (Acts 19: 25–7). Not surprisingly, the promoters of the Elizabethan cult typically declined to recall Paul’s Ephesian remonstrance. As we shall see, for a court culture advertizing its Protestantism on the one hand, and on the other an ever more intense identification with the cult of Diana, these twin Ephesian associations—the one open to the Word, the other dependent upon a heritage of paganism—suggested a gap between representational practice and ethical presumption. The important point to underscore with respect to England’s identification with Ephesus, as well as Shakespeare’s deployment of an Ephesian setting, is that in addition to being national and multivocal, it is also ambivalent. Over and against the universalist associations and aspirations of Rome’s imperium, the Roman Catholic religion, and the Spanish Empire, which had taken up the mantle of both, England’s Grecian turn attempted to set the nation and its church apart from rivals trumpeting their Latin lineage. This was, of course, a rather dubious project for a culture that had its origins in Roman colonialism and owed an extensive inheritance to its Roman legacy. Indeed, the very genre in which Shakespeare chose to compose The Comedy of Errors derived from a Roman author and source. But his transposition of Plautus’s Menaechmi from Adriatic Epidamnum to Anatolian Ephesus gives the Grecian and biblical association primacy of place.7 In other words, in The Comedy of Errors—as in Edmund Spenser’s Shepeardes Calender (1579) and Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (c. 1579–81), as well as in the works of many English writers who followed in their wake—Latin inheritances, though obviously present, are subordinated to an earlier Greek heritage that is constructed, both in national and spiritual terms, as more pure than its universal successor.8

7 On the adaptation of Plautus’s Menaechmi and Amphitruo, as well as the play’s Pauline associations, see Stephen Greenblatt’s introduction to The Comedy of Errors in Shakespeare (1997: 683–8). See also Arthos (1967). 8 In figuring England in relation to ancient Greece, Shakespeare joins company with his nation’s leading literary figures. After Richard Helgerson, we have listened with new ears to remarks like Edmund Spenser’s 1580 remark to Gabriel Harvey, “Why a God’s name, may not we, as else the Greeks, have the kingdom of our own language?” (quoted 1992: 1). Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar and Philip Sidney’s Arcadian experiments in the Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. romance novel are tokens of a nationalist typology that was deployed again and again by Elizabethan writers.

Turning from a literary context to a more openly religio-political one, this ambivalence is yet more pronounced. Whereas the Anglican preacher John Ainsworth would argue that “the church of Ephesus [had been] in Paul’s time the pillar and ground of truth” (1615: 64), affirming the identification of Ephesus with English Protestantism, his coreligionist William Barlow cautioned that the pagan devotion to “Great … Diana of Ephesus, whome all the world worshippeth,” could “serve Turkie as well as Rome, their church being as apparant in shew, as ceremonius for rites, as superstitious in devotion, as glorious in temples, and as auncient for succession as the Romish Synagogue (since that faithfull citie became an ha[r]lot)” (1601: 28). Linking Ephesus to “Turkie as well as Rome,” Barlow, associates the city not with Pauline “truth,” but with the profit-motivated harlotry of “the Romish Synagogue.” Of course, the Elizabethans’ elevation of their own Diana gave Roman Catholic apologists ample cause to counter, in the manner of William Allen, that the English had fashioned their queen “a verie national idol” (1588: 6). “Ephesus” thus signified in such as way as to evoke a number of competing nationalist and internationalist associations. This ambiguous and ambivalent multivocality provided Shakespeare with a field of dramatic possibility.9 If an audience had failed to note The Comedy of Errors’ Ephesus-London connection in earlier scenes, Shakespeare drives the relationship home in act 3, where Syracusan “strangers” Dromio and Antipholus discuss the physical virtues of Nell “the kitchen wench.”10 “She is spherical,” says Dromio, “like a globe. I could find out countries in her” (3.2.114–15). Their prosaic exchange is worth lingering over, as it describes fairly precisely England’s place in Europe’s geopolitical contest:

S. Ant. In what part of her body stands Ireland? S. Dro. Marry, sir, in her buttocks, I found it out by the bogs. S. Ant. Where Scotland? S. Dro. I found it by the barrenness, hard in the palm of her hand. S. Ant. Where France? S. Dro. In her forehead, armed and reverted, making war against her heir. S. Ant. Where England? S. Dro. I looked for the chalky cliffs, but I could

9 Contributing to England’s ambivalent attitude toward Ephesus may be the fact that, owing to the 428 C.E. resolution of the Nestorian controversy at the Council of Ephesus, which affirmed the Virgin Mary as theTheotokos (God-bearer), Christendom had traditionally associated the city with her cult. As Ruben Espinosa (2011) observes, “Mary’s value was validated in a setting renowned for its historical connection to the Greek goddess Artemis / Diana” (5), a connection Shakespeare will again play upon in Pericles. Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 10 All Shakespeare quotations, including those from Sir Thomas More (available as a PDF download from books.wwnorton.com), are from Shakespeare (2008).

find no whiteness in them. But I guess it stood in her chin, by the salt rheum that ran between France and it. S. Ant. Where Spain? S. Dro. Faith, I saw it not; but I felt it hot in her. breath. S. Ant. Where America, the Indies? S. Dro. O, sir, upon her nose, all o’er embellish’d with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining their rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain, who sent whole armadas of carracks to be ballast at her nose. S. Ant. Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands? S. Dro. O, sir, I did not look so low … (3.2.115–37)

While its masculinist sexual humors are obviously designed to engender a mix of attraction and revulsion, they also interpolate an outsider’s perspective on the contemporary European geopolitics. Surveying the international relationships the English ship of state was navigating, circa 1592, Shakespeare constructs a context for The Comedy of Errors that could never have implicated classical Ephesus. Embodying in Nell “the bogs” of Ireland, “the barrenness” of Scotland, a France “making war” on itself, and feeling “the hot breath of Spain” (twice emphasized) to whom the riches of “America, the Indies” are “sent whole armadas of carracks to be ballast,” the playwright does indeed evoke “a globe.” But against expectations—and contra the official line advertized in A Fig for The Spaniard—he does not do so in a way that places England at some virtuous nationalistic center within the ongoing global conflict. His immigrant strangers look “for the chalky cliffs of Dover”; but, rather than glimpsing a prospect of welcome, they “find no whiteness in them.” And yet Shakespeare’s Pauline improvisations on his Plautine source material clearly elevate a number of English concerns to the foreground. In the context of the stranger crisis, the financial difficulties and unwelcomeness experienced by merchants like Antipholus of Syracuse and his sons would have had much contemporary resonance, especially for a London audience experiencing a steady flow of immigration traffic. When Antipholus asks of Ephesian Dromio in act 1, “We being strangers here, who dar’st thou trust / So great a charge from thine own custody?” (1.2.60–61), the Syracusan outsider’s anachronistic plea—“Now, as I am a Christian, answer me / In what safe place you have bestowed my money, / … Where is the thousand marks thou hadst of me?” (1.2.77–81)—draws attention to the shared religious heritage that linked the English with many among the immigrant population, as well as to the tenuous position in which strangers fleeing continental strife could find themselves upon arriving in London. As act 1 comes to a close, Dromio reflects upon this vulnerability:

Upon my life, by some device or other The villain is o’er-raught of all my money. They say this town is full of cozenage,

Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. As nimble jugglers that deceive the eye, Dart-working sorcerers that change the mind,

Soul-killing witches that deform the body, Disguisèd cheaters, prating mountebanks, And many suchlike libertines of sin. If it prove so, I will be gone the sooner. I’ll to the Centaur to go seek this slave. I greatly fear my money is not safe. (1.2.95–105)

As Antipholus imagines navigating a world very like the one Thomas Dekker will discover “by lanthorne and candle-light” (1612), a “town” characterized by “many suchlike libertines of sin”—or “liberties,” in the Folio text11—we cannot but notice that Shakespeare’s Ephesus holds up a mirror to contemporary, “stranger beware” London. By staging the gaps between the promise advertized by England’s government, the Pauline center of true belief, and the treatment strangers were likely to encounter when they arrived on English shores, Shakespeare is also, much in the manner Heywood suggests, extolling the English toward virtue by reminding them of their vices.

At Your Own Perils

If The Comedy of Errors looks to Hellenistic Greece in order to render the plight of the stranger somewhat sympathetically, the play that survives as The Book of Sir Thomas More, first drafted at virtually the same moment, turns to comparatively recent English history in order to offer a more complicated (and no doubt more accurate) portrayal of the milieu into which late-Elizabethan immigrants arrived. As early as 1586, Burghley had been made aware that certain apprentices were “conspiring an insurrection [in] this cittie [London] against the Frenche and Dutche” residing there (quoted Long 1989: 51). Raising the specter of the infamous “Evil May Day” of 1517, “when 2000 apprentices sacked the shops and houses of aliens, particularly Italian merchants, perceived to have been unfairly privileged by the king” (Luu 2000: 2), Burghley’s informant warned that “all things as lyke unto Yll May Day could be devised in all manner of circumstances, mutatis mutandis; they wanted nothing but execution.”12 As the Anglo-Spanish conflict continued to grow more intense, uneasiness about the increasing stranger presence was magnified by rumor of the political intrigues in which some of England’s immigrants were allegedly involved.13 In several quarters, simmering resentments, suspicion, and intolerance were being brought to a boil.

11 See Shakespeare (2008: 731n1). 12 William Fleetwood, Recorder of the City of London, qtd Long (1989: 51). 13 Luu notes, “Immigration declined in the early 1580s, when the Pacification of Ghent and the brief period of peace in France caused the exodus from these areas to tail off, and encouraged some refugees in London to return to their homelands. The scale of immigration into London soared again from the mid-1580s, as a result of the Spanish reconquest of the southern Netherlands and the continuation of warfare and persecution in Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. France. By 1593, the number of aliens in London may again have reached its 1571 level, of approximately 10,000” (2000: 9).

It was in this context that Anthony Munday conceived Sir Thomas More (c. 1592–93), a drama that famously failed to meet—in spite of substantial revisions by Heywood, Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, perhaps John Webster, and probably by Shakespeare himself—Edmund Tilney’s censorship requirements.14 It is a representation that sits uneasily against the nativist sentiments of which Burghley had been apprised. Indeed, the uprising staged in Sir Thomas More’s opening scene, which begins with the reading of a “bill of our wrongs, and the strangers’ insolencies” (1.95–6) drawn up by one John Lincoln (which my note appends in full),15 alleges “that aliens and strangers eat the bread from the fatherless children, and take the living from artificers, and the intercourse from all merchants, whereby poverty is much increased that everyman bewaileth the misery of other; for craftsmen be brought to beggary, and merchants to neediness” (1.119–24). English grievances thus aired, Lincoln’s co-conspirator George Betts threatens “on May Day next in the morning we’ll go forth a-Maying, but make it the worst May for the Strangers that ever they saw” (1.137–9). Enter “Master Sheriff” More, sent by the Lord Mayor to quell the revolt. In the addition attributed to Shakespeare, More informs his “friends” that their “innovation” is “a sin / Which oft the apostle did forewarn us of, / Urging obedience to authority” (6.104–6). “What country, by nature of your error,” Sheriff More asks the crowd rhetorically, “Should give you harbour?” (6.141–2). “Why you must needs be strangers,” he reasons. “Would you be pleased / To find a nation of such barbarous temper / That, breaking out in hideous violence, / Would not afford you an abode on earth [?]” (6.145–8). More’s intervention prompts a confession from Lincoln, who tells his fellow citizens: “now I can perceive it was not fit / That private men should carve out their redress / Which way they list,” and that they should “learn it now by me: / Obedience is best in each degree” (7.55–60).

14 The Book of Sir Thomas More’s major critics, Freeman and Honigman, agree with McMillan, that the play “was originally written for Strange’s men between the summer of 1592 and the summer of 1593 and that the representation of the Ill May-Day uprising was intended to reflect the crisis over aliens that was troubling the City in those months” (1987: 72). Based on the various hands evident in the manuscript, Chillington argues that “a more compelling occasion for Tilney’s injunction” was “the Essex rebellion of 1601” (1980: 444), which would seem to discount the overwhelming external evidence suggesting the earlier date. See Taylor (1989) on the problems in Chillington’s argument. 15 LINCOLN (reads) “To you all the worshipful lords and masters of this city, that will take compassion over the poor people your neighbors, and also of the great importable hurts, losses, and hindrances whereof proceedeth extreme poverty to all the King’s subjects that inhabit within this city and suburbs of the same. For so it is that aliens and strangers eat the bread from the fatherless children, and take the living from all the artificers, and the intercourse from all merchants, whereby poverty is so much increased that everyman bewaileth the misery of other; for craftsmen be brought to beggary, and merchants to neediness. Wherefore, the premises considered, the redress must be of the commons, knit and united to one part. And as the hurt and damage grieveth all men, so must all men set to Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. their willing power for remedy, and not suffer the said aliens in their wealth, and the natural- born men of this region to come to confusion” (2.113–32).

“Patiently submit[ing]” himself to the law, Lincoln then leaps willingly from the gallows, warning his neighbors, “Henceforth be warned to attempt the like / ’Gainst any alien that repaireth hither” (7.66–7).16 Realizing their error, the citizens bow before the “majestic brow” (7.167) of mercy. The message is clear: chastened by More, the crowd has learned “To shun such lewd assemblies as beget / Unlawful riots and such traitorous acts” (7.163–5).17 Whether or not Lincoln had voiced legitimate concerns, in Sir Thomas More public order trumps private grievance, and state jurisdiction over the commercial sector is reaffirmed. The historical Thomas More’s status as a Catholic martyr notwithstanding— the former Lord Chancellor had been among the sacred dead invoked in 1588 to inspire Philip II’s first Armada, the multinational enterprise scoffed at in A Fig for the Spaniard—it is easy to understand why the story of the internationally renowned humanist wit would have been a figure attractive to Elizabethan playwrights. Still, we might also imagine, with E. A. J. Honigmann, that “a sympathetic portrayal of the most illustrious English ‘recusant’ of the sixteenth century, and of Sir Thomas More’s courageous acceptance of death,” especially coming after a series of highly visible treason executions (1989: 77–8), could have been politically more inflammatory than the “Ill May Day scenes” that inspired Tilney’s strictures. But it was the play’s representation of violence against aliens during the 1517 riots that prompted the Master of Revels’s censure. In fact, Tilney insisted that the playwrights substitute “‘man’ for ‘Englishe’ and ‘Lombard’ for ‘straunger’ and ‘ffrencheman’” (Long 1989: 47). And then, revealing how hard the hand of Elizabethan censorship could sometimes fall, Tilney ordered, “Leave out the insurrection scene wholly and the cause thereof, and begin with Sir Thomas More at the Mayor’s sessions, with a report afterwards of his good service done being Sheriff of London upon a mutiny against the Lombards—only by a short report, and not otherwise, at your own perils.”18 In the extant Book of Sir Thomas More, the events culminating in More’s own execution enter the play’s argument in scene 11. Presented with certain “articles” (which remain conspicuously unnamed), More responds, “Subscribe these articles?

16 Although the reference is to Henry VIII, Freeman (1973) observes that the appeal “can hardly have failed to adduce parallels with contemporary unrest” (1973: 45–6). I would add that the “quality of mercy” so often associated with Elizabeth resounds here as well. 17 Sir Thomas More passages attributed to Shakespeare, Addition II.D.15–17; II.D. On historical context, see Honigmann (1989) and Long (1989). For censorship and textual problems, see McMillin (1989). According the computational stylistics of Watt, “The identification of Hand D with Shakespeare now seems one of the better established facts about his canon, and among the surest facts of his biography” (2009: 161). However, this new analysis also substantiates the claim by Taylor (1989), that the style of Shakespeare’s additions suggests their composition at a later date, c. 1601–1606. If this is the case, it seems clear that the Shakespeare’s lines represent an effort both to recall the language of the Stranger Crisis and to contain its violence, probably in an attempt to clear the play’s Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. censorship strictures. 18 Long (1989).

Stay, let us pause. / Our conscience first shall parley with our laws” (11.72–3). When, failing to heed the logic of Obedience with which he had pacified the Ill May Day rioters, the Lord Chancellor is arrested “in the King’s name of high treason” (13.182), it would appear that Sir Thomas More contains the rebellion toward which it gestured. However, a virtually contemporaneous incident suggests the degree to which Edmund Tilney had presciently gauged the pulse of London’s merchant and artisan resentments. For even as the performance of Sir Thomas More was being suppressed, the posting of a bill much like the one represented in the script confirmed that the playhouse could inspire potentially violent resistance to government policies toward alien immigrants. This bill would also confirm Tilney’s threat that English playwrights could truly find themselves imperiled should their dramatic representations be appropriated to such ends.

Our Swords are Whet

Addressed “Ye strangers yt doe inhabite this in lande,” the Dutch Church Libel of 5 May 1593 provides a veritable inventory of ethnocentric attitudes and popular grievances.19 Far more disruptively than does Sir Thomas More, the Libel communicates bald resentment toward a number of Elizabethan policies, foreign and domestic. Objecting that “our pore [English] soules, are cleane thrust out of dore / And to the warres sent abroad to rome, / To fight it out for Fraunce and Belgia, / And dy like dogges as sacrifice for you” (lines 31–4), one of its major grievances concerns English participation in continental nation-building. As significantly, the document points out that it is the immigrants’ “counterfeitinge [of] religion” that has enabled their “flight” to England from foreign shores (line 42). Accused of being in “thrall” to “coyne” and “infected” with “Spanish gold” (lines 43–5), the Libel apparently accuses strangers of using membership in the Dutch Church as a cover for all manner of nefarious activities, which may account for its striking lack of sympathy for London’s strangers as Protestant coreligionists (Pettegree 1986: 274–5).20 Contemporaries were suspicious that “under their cover and pretence of religion, profane and evil livers should intrude themselves” (Spicer 2005: 92). But perhaps foremost among the Libel’s complaints is that its writers see London’s émigrés as performing as “intelligencers to the state & crowne” while in their “hartes” they “doe wish an alteracion” (lines 15–16). The outsiders are accused of double-dealing: duplicitously supplying the crown with intelligence even as they desire a change of government.

19 The surviving copy, labeled “A Libell, fixte upon the French Church Wall. Anno 1593,” was discovered in 1971 by Arthur Freeman. Although contemporary accounts refer to the “Dutch” libel, the surviving transcription reads “fixte upon a French Church wall.” See Freeman (1973: 48–51); Marlowe (1994: 115–18). 20 The inconsistency may suggest that these émigrés were alike considered an “un- Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. English” presence. On the ethnic composition of the Stranger church community, see Cunningham (1897: 155–8).

Most jarring, from a literary-historical perspective, is the fact that the writers of the Dutch Libel engineer multiple associations with popular resentments as they perceived them to have been represented in Elizabethan drama—not in this case by Shakespeare, but by his fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe. Their gesture of resistance suggests more than mere theatrical flourish. Between the Libel’s threat of an English slaughter to answer the “paris massacre” (line 40)—which recalls Marlowe’s representation of the dark incident thought by Protestants to have been the ultimate application of “policy,” and its astonishing conclusion, which warns that “our swords are whet” as “per Tamberlaine” (lines 52–3)—the discursive parallels between the Marlovian texts and the issues voiced in the handbill reveal that its writers (and presumably its audiences) were acquainted enough with the plays to interpret them in terms relevant to current social conditions. Those who posted the Dutch Libel wanted to appropriate both Marlowe’s rhetorical force and his popularity; they borrowed from his plays because they were certain that their borrowings would be recognized (Riggs 2004: 319–21). The incident confirms what Tilney and the government he represented feared, that theatrical representation could inspire resistance to policy and foment disorder among the public. It also demonstrated the peril an Elizabethan playwright could find himself in should it be judged that his work had moved an audience toward said resistance and disorder. While those who posted the handbill referred to three of Marlowe’s plays, it is especially in The Jew of Malta that we find portrayed a set of postures apposite with the confluence of stranger groups and paranoid xenophobia given off in the Dutch Libel and The Book of Sir Thomas More. In terms nearly identical to those employed in the More play, the posters of the Dutch Libel accuse the stranger community of gaining economic advantage by harboring “Machiavellian Marchant[s]” who practice dubious or unethical business practices. Specifically, the immigrants engage in “usury” and “ingross[ing],” which enable them, “like the Jewes,” to “eate us [i.e., London’s ‘native’ population] up as bread” (lines 6–9), even as crown protection allows the outsiders to live in England “farre better then at [their own] native home” (line 30). As in The Jew of Malta, or perhaps because of The Jew of Malta—which exploited nativist sentiments more completely than any previous Elizabethan drama21—the Dutch Church Libel slides Machiavellianism and Jewishness one into the other in ways for which there seems no obvious precedent.22 Further, the connections the document makes with specific plays

21 It is likely that The Jew of Malta (c. 1589) was first staged shortly after the death of the Duc of Guise, 13 December 1588. Henslowe records 17 performances by Strange’s men between 26 February 1592 and 1 February 1593. Sussex’s, the Queen’s, the Admiral’s, and the Chamberlain’s men all seem to have performed the play between 4 February 1594 and 23 June 1596, which attests to its continuing Elizabethan popularity, as does a further revival in 1601. See Chambers (1923), vol. 3, 424–5. 22 Arguing that the plays of Robert Wilson were more influential than we have recognized, Kermode (2009: 68–84) suggests that the more relevant precedent is The Three Ladies of London (c. 1581). Whether or not the Wilson echo is present, clearly the Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Dutch Libel is shot through with Marlovian references, which seem to me most relevant. Apparently the Elizabethan government also thought so; it wasn’t Wilson who was arrested.

suggest that, like his colleagues who sought to stage Sir Thomas More, Marlowe had tapped into a source of collective anxiety toward which the audiences of the late-1580s and early-1590s felt an urgent attraction.23 By referring explicitly to Marlowe’s plays, those who posted the Libel had guaranteed themselves both public and government recognition. Without commending the sentiments these sources express, we can grant that they may have voiced a number of legitimate grievances. In England as elsewhere in the early modern world—and the Dutch Church Libel and Book of Sir Thomas More apparently recognize this—stranger communities were sometimes offered special incentives and tax breaks in order that they might more readily establish themselves within local economies. As Yungblutt writes,

Perhaps the most enticing and potentially rewarding lures encouraging select alien artisans to settle in England to establish their craft were Crown licenses, usually grouped together as patents and monopolies. These Royal patents were to encourage entrepreneurs and inventors by granting them the sole use of a new technique, or sole manufacturing rights to a product, a grant intended to compensate the immigrant entrepreneurs for the expense of start-up costs, training workers, and the like. (1996: 103)

And yet, while it was probable that most of the foreigners who sought economic or religious sanctuary deserved some degree of English sympathy, several of the more frightening charges the Libel levies may also have been warranted. Among the refugees were undoubtedly some—the Portuguese converso Roderigo Lopez is the most celebrated victim of this enticement24—who were tempted to play all sides against the others, putting personal gain ahead of any group allegiance, working both on behalf of the state and against it. A significant number of the newcomers arriving from France, the Low Countries, Portugal, and Spain would have brought with them intelligence for which a number of concerned governments would have been all too willing to pay. In a time of general dearth, high unemployment, and political uncertainly, the promise of profit would have been tempting, even if double- or triple-dealing were required to realize such gain.25 Whatever the crown’s advertised position, its actual policies, then, were fraught with inconsistencies and contradictions that often left immigrants feeling

23 It has long been recognized that Marlowe cribbed freely from propaganda imports in composing The Massacre at Paris. While he may not employ precisely the same strategy in The Jew of Malta, the latter clearly suggests Marlowe’s willingness to exploit the emotions propagandist rhetorics were calculated to move. As the Dutch Church Libel implies, a key French text—of which both The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris partake—is Innocent Gentillet (c. 1535–95), The Anti-Machiavel (Paris, 1576). See Kocher (1947: 151–73); Tilley (1899: 451–70). 24 On the Lopez case, see Griffin (2009: 114–18) and Shapiro (1996: 71–3). 25 Yungblutt notes, “England’s governors suspected them at the same time, for many were subjects of France and of the Spanish Empire. Owing largely to this perception that Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. aliens constituted a political threat which might outweigh ideological kinship or economic benefit, the government sought to regulate and control the strangers” (1996: 94).

misled and English nationals feeling betrayed. As the expressions of popular resistance audible in Dutch Church Libel and Sir Thomas More make clear, there were among the English those who were not so disposed to extend, as the queen’s government had done in A Fig for the Spaniard, “favor” and “rest” to “Poore strangers” (B1v). To its credit, the Elizabethan regime saw clearly that it could not allow the blame for London’s social ills to fall on its stranger community. England had come to rely on its immigrants for financial backing, technical know- how, and troop levies (Pettegree 1986: 293–4), which must have accounted for both the suppression of Sir Thomas More and the severity of the government’s response to the Dutch Libel’s posting. The latter had an even more direct impact on the Elizabethan theater than the former. For within a week of its appearance, Shakespeare’s slightly older colleague Thomas Kyd had been taken into custody and submitted to the torture that famously produced evidence of “Marlowe’s monstrous opinions” (Riggs 2004: 337). Only 34 years old, Kyd survived the “bitter times and privy broken passions” little more than a year, emerging from the interrogation a man broken in body and in spirit. By 20 May an arrest warrant had gone out for Christopher Marlowe, who, like Shakespeare, was then only 29 (Freeman 1973: 46). Ten days later Marlowe was dead. If the stranger crisis did not lead directly to his demise, it was undeniably a precipitating factor. For even if the quarrel in which he was slain was simply about le recknynge, it was via association with the Dutch Libel that Marlowe had been drawn fatally into the final intrigue of his life, which, in addition to Thomas Kyd, implicated prominent Elizabethan courtiers and his Deptford killers alike.26

Mingled with Mores

Performed repeatedly in this era of unrest, Shakespeare’s first Roman play, Titus Andronicus, which many scholars now believe to have been coauthored with George Peele, returns to the problem of the stranger from an altogether different angle. It also demonstrates that the playwright was not above exploiting the climate of fear the Dutch Church Libel had fueled with its obvious Marlovian borrowings.27 Like the Dutch Church Libel, Titus Andronicus, as Emily Bartels has recently observed, “points obviously back to Marlowe,” and “to a play

26 Nicholl lays the blame for Marlowe’s death at the feet of the Earl of Essex, identifying the perpetrators as “Essex’s operatives” (1992: 323), though he stops short of claiming that Essex “actually ordered Marlowe’s murder” (328). Riggs argues, “The facts surrounding Marlowe’s death suggest that … all the relevant evidence leads back to the Palace,” and that the evidence against Marlowe had been altered so that it “concealed the quarrel between Marlowe and the court” (2004: 334–8). 27 Henslowe records performances of Titus Andronicus in 1592, 1593, and 1594, a year that also saw the play published. See Shakespeare (1997: 3377–9). On Peele’s coauthorship Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. see, for example, Bartels (2008: 66) and Keller (2003). For an extended discussion, see Vickers (2002: 148–243).

(The Jew of Malta),” in order to “capitalize self-consciously on the production and performance of stereotypes” (2008: 66). Indeed, Titus may condense the negative stereotyping of England’s outsiders in ways that surpass even the paranoid vision contemporaries associated with Marlowe. For if Shakespeare’s play and its villain Aaron point back to The Jew of Malta, they also point outward, to a society in which fear of immigrant strangers had reached a flashpoint. If Marlowe’s Jew had condensed the fears of a culture suspicious of the aims and interests of immigrants so effectively that it could be evoked to stir both public passions and government intervention, Shakespeare’s Moor exhaled yet more fully the alarmist airs of the early 1590s. As Shakespeare’s villain Aaron insinuates himself behind the scenes to undermine Imperial Rome, much in the manner that Barabbas’s scheming had plagued the island of Malta, his horrendously delicious recitation of “policy and stratagem” (2.2.105)—prefigured in act 2, but not fully unfolded until act 5, scene 1—collapses the fiendish maneuvering of Marlowe’s Jew and the devilish delight of his Turkish Ithamore into a nightmare performance of the stranger’s alleged capacity to undermine a community from within. As he rehearses “murders, rapes, and massacres, / Acts of black night, abominable deeds, / Complots of mischief, treason, villainies / Ruthful to hear yet piteously performed” (5.1.63–6), Aaron’s revelation recalls both the Dutch Church Libel’s accusations of Machiavellianism and A Fig for the Spaniard’s litany of Spanish abuses. Not only does Aaron recount the “wondrous things” playgoers had seen him perpetrate on the Roman body politic during the previous four acts, but he also rehearses “heinous deeds,” though presumably “not done,” of the kind they feared could constitute a virtual second front, working in the nation every manner of “notorious ill”:

kill a man or else devise his death; Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it; Accuse some innocent and forswear myself; Set deadly enmity between two friends; Make poor men’s cattle break their necks; Set fire on barns and haystacks in the night, And bid the owners quench them with their tears. (5.1.128–34)

Bent on subverting the very underpinnings of the Roman (read: English) social order, Shakespeare’s Moor upends basic community bonds such as the patriarchal family and the system of laws. As he wreaks havoc from the rural countryside to the imperial center, destabilizing the agrarian economic base and the body politic alike,28 Aaron may represent the quintessential embodiment of the era’s anti- immigrant paranoia. But Titus Andronicus stages more than nightmarish otherness. Shakespeare’s deployment of contemporary religio-political discourse pushes into the foreground social anxieties of yet another kind. Indeed, there are far too many anachronistic

Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 28 On the relationship of Titus to the early modern patriarchal family, see Kahn (1997: 48–57).

references to both pagans and papists in the play not to give it some measure of late-sixteenth-century significance. From Tamora’s “cruel irreligious piety” to Aaron’s attempt to manipulate his captors’ devotional investments—“Yet for I know thou art religious / And hast a thing within thee called conscience, / With twenty popish tricks and ceremonies / Which I have seen thee careful to observe” (5.1.74–7)—the play points outward to concurrent religio-political conflict and England’s own imperialist aspirations nearly as much as it does backward to the history of Rome.29 Titus Andronicus thus signifies quite as suggestively in relation to both England and its present rival, imperial Spain, as it does in reference to the Roman historical precedent. Although England had barely begun to realize the imperial longings voiced by writers like Richard Hakluyt and Walter Raleigh, English activities on the periphery of the Spanish Empire—the early modern monarchy that most loudly and persuasively claimed to have inherited the Roman imperium—had the secondary effect of producing at home a number of social problems associated with the dynamics of imperial expansion. Upturns in immigration to England could be linked directly to Spain’s efforts to quell the Dutch Revolt, and to England’s either covert or public support of the Dutch Republic, just as they could to the similar displacements caused by the religious wars being waged in France. These patterns of movement underscore the fact that while immigration may sometimes be “voluntary,” a matter of economic or religious will, it may also be compelled, as in instances of expulsion, forced migration, or capture. Titus Andronicus dramatizes precisely these phenomena, and as it does so the play engages contemporary anxieties regarding the reflexive energies of empire building. As with Aaron the Moor in Shakespeare’s Rome, the presence in England of strangers of African descent most commonly would have come as a result of their having been captured during military or privateering engagements with imperial rivals. From John Hawkins’ early, improvised participation in the transatlantic slave trade, to the 1595–96 voyage of Thomas Baskerville, which brought home the “Negar” and “blackamoore” prisoners that would inspire Elizabeth’s now infamous expulsion letters of 1596 and 1601, these “black” subjects had “crept into” the “realm since the troubles between Her Highness and the King of Spain” (Bartels 2008: 113). While it is important to note, as any number of scholars have pointed out, that we can identify in Elizabeth’s two edicts a new racialization of these African subjects,30 “if we can trace in Elizabeth’s open letters a subtle change in attitudes toward the accommodation as well as the alienation of a black population,” as Bartels perceptively argues, “it is a change that we must understand as always under revision, inevitably contingent on the practical, political, and economic needs of the moment and inevitably framed and fractured by those needs” (2008: 117). And, as in the situation of the Dutch and French immigrants who were alternatively objects of invitation and exclusion, the terms

29 See Maschovakis (2002). Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 30 On the presence of Moors in England during the 1590s and the Elizabethan deportations, see Habib (2008: 112–15).

of reference through which these immigrants are othered seem to be primarily economic. On the one hand the royal proclamation asserts that “the Queen’s majesty, [is] tendering the good welfare of her own natural subjects, greatly distressed in these hard times of dearth”; on the other it argues, “that the most of them are infidels having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel.”31 Under the right kind of cultural (or rhetorical) pressure, these monetary and confessional concerns could very easily give rise to political fears—which in turn could be framed in the starkest dichotomizing terms. With respect to the immigration problem of Titus Andronicus, we find an insider- outsider dichotomy much like that expressed in the discourses that converge upon both the stranger crisis of the early 1590s and Elizabeth’s slightly later expulsion edicts. Having been brought to Rome as spoils of war, as soon as they are made “incorporate,” the play’s Goths and its Machiavellian Moor alike begin working to compromise the state. Although Shakespeare renders anachronistically Rome’s relationship with a succession of Gothic enemies, allies, and invaders—to which the empire was ultimately ceded (Wolfram 1988: 150–71)—his introduction of Aaron into this Roman setting also suggests that, typologically speaking, the playwright’s staging of Roman history draws upon a more recent historical exemplum, early modernity’s “New Rome,” the Spanish Empire. It is, after all, a history of desire and miscegenation that Titus Andronicus incorporates (Loomba 2002: 85). And it was the well-known combination of the two that had become in the period’s anti-Spanish polemic indelibly associated with both the historical downfall of Gothic Spain and the resultant ethnic, cultural, and religious impurity of contemporary Iberia as constructed by its ideological opponents. From the 711 victory of the Moors over Rodrigo I, Spain’s last Gothic king, to the culmination of the Spanish reconquista and its attendant expulsion of Spain’s Jewish population in 1492—a history implicitly circulating through the pages of A Fig for the Spaniard—the identity of Spain becomes culturally coded in terms of a miscegenated, mixed, or “mongrel” identity.32 These miscegenation fears were in turn injected into early modern English society by focusing a dichotomizing “it can happen here” formula on England’s former political and dynastic ally.33 This is not to say that the cultural and historical amalgam staged in Titus presents a coherent picture of any Roman, Spanish, or English past, or of a precisely analogous present. Rather, in its incoherence the play offers a veritable stew of contemporary anxieties, which it expresses in an only apparently (or typologically) historical, and thus a transhistorical setting.

31 See 43 Elizabeth 1 (1601), 804.5 Licensing Casper van Selden to Deport Negroes, in Hughes and Larkin, eds. (1969: 221–2). 32 The resulting “fictive ethnicity,” which we now know as the Black Legend of Spanish Cruelty, quite literally “blackened” Spain by insisting upon the nation’s Moorish or African roots—a rhetorical strategy that becomes a fixture of anti-Spanish polemic. See Fuchs (2007), Griffin (2002). “Fictive Ethnicity” is Étienne Balibar’s phrase. See Balibar Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. and Wallerstein (1991: 96–7). 33 For England’s “It can happen here” rhetoric, see Griffin (2009: 44–8).

Heather James has argued that in Titus Andronicus “Shakespeare disturbs the normative uses for Roman authority” in a way that does “nothing less than perform a critique of imperial Rome on the eve of its collapse and, in doing so, glance[s] proleptically at Elizabethan England as an emergent nation” (42). If “the normative uses for Roman authority” to which James refers are solely affirmative ones, this is certainly the case. But, in early modernity, Roman history was as likely to be ransacked for negative exampla as positive models. To the degree that “Grecian” England had begun to imagine a future for itself in relation to the translatio imperii tradition, the island nation also recognized that the societal problems that had brought down a succession of prior empires were about to become its own.34 Like Rome in the past and Spain in the present, England too could be inversely affected by the very imperial successes it had begun to seek. Once again, A Fig for the Spaniard provides a provocative point of entry, for the state-issued polemic makes explicit the Elizabethan regime’s acceptance of this theory of translation, initially derived from St. Augustine’s reading of the book of Daniel, arguing that “the Medes and Persians,” “and after them the Greeks, and Romanes” (B2r), had given way to the new “Babylon” ruled by Philip II, turning anti-Christian an imperial lineage that the Spanish themselves had been proclaiming since the election of Philip’s father, Charles V, as Holy Roman Emperor. This is not to say that “Rome” in Titus Andronicus allegorically signifies “Spain”; however, the play’s Roman focus should underscore the fact that contemporary religio-political discourses often project the Rome-Spain association analogically. With Hapsburg Spain at once self-identifying and finding itself constructed by other nations (for good and for ill) as a type of “Rome,” the Spanish example must surely have been relevant both to Shakespeare’s representation and to his audience’s reception. And, if it is true, as James argues, that “when an Elizabethan speculates on the beginnings and end of imperial Roman politics … he inevitably trains one eye on the emergent British nationhood to which Rome’s empire cedes,” we must also recognize that this Elizabethan subject had also to be cognizant that if at some future date Rome’s empire was to be ceded to the British, that ceding would involve the mediating intercession that had been conferred on imperial Spain. And if, by “meticulously citing Rome’s own authorities, Shakespeare suggests that the founding acts of empire contain the seeds of its ruin” (44), his contemporaries were busily contemplating the sources of that ruin as well. High upon the list of problems that the Romans, their Spanish successors, and, proleptically, an empire translated to the English had to confront was the problem of what to do with immigrant populations drawn into the imperial orbit.35 In contemporary anti-Spanish polemic, in England as elsewhere in Europe, inappropriate cultural mixing was seen as constitutive of Spain, much to the empire’s detriment. As Barbara Fuchs has persuasively shown, Black Legend propaganda “often refers in unambiguous terms to Spain’s racial difference, its

34 On England and imperial translation, see Fuchs (2003). Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 35 According to Liebler, late-imperial Rome had become “a sutured patchwork of European and Afro-Asiatic peoples, politics, and religions” (1994: 278).

intrinsic Moorishness” (2009: 117). In A Brief Discourse of the Spanish State (1590), Englishman Edward Daunce put it this way: “The naturall Spaniard, being … mixed with the Gothes and Vandals, [is] given to theevery and drunkenness: mingled with Mores [is] cruell and full of treacherie: and consequently, tasting of everie one, [is] a spring of filthinesse” (1590: 35–6). Or, as Edmund Spenser framed the miscegenation concern while commenting on England’s colonial activities in his View of the State of Ireland, “So that of all nations under heaven (I suppose) the Spaniard is the most mingled, and most uncertaine” (1997: 50), and, in an alternate copy, the “most bastardly” (1949: 91).36 If Spain was being perceived as intrinsically “mixed with the Gothes” and “mingled with Mores,” the “most uncertain” and “most bastardly” of nations, how could a contemporary have looked upon the Roman past of Titus Andronicus without reflecting upon the present Spanish analog? And having done so, as indeed Elizabeth Tudor appears to have done, that English contemporary might also have reflected upon the means by which Spain had attempted to restore its own societal equilibrium. One of these was its recourse to pureza de sangre, purity of blood, and the complex formula of lineage and heredity that accompanied that religio-racial preoccupation. Another was the path of expulsion. Already having its own experience with the second remedy, both historically, in Edward I’s Jewish expulsion edict of 1290 (Shapiro 1996: 46–55), and more recently, with its general immigrant expulsions of the early 1570s (Bartels 2008: 101; Yungblutt 1996: 89, 91), England began to consider this “Spanish solution” to its own “Negar and blackamoore” problem. And so, in 1601, Elizabeth would order the deportation of these black subjects “into Spaine and Portugall”37—nations with which Africans had already mixed.

A Modern Ecstasy

Shakespeare’s representation of the immigrant’s condition in The Comedy of Errors, the uproar surrounding the Dutch Church Libel incident and the attendant suppression of Sir Thomas More, the nightmarish portrayals of Jews, Moors, and Goths that propel The Jew of Malta and Titus Andronicus, as well as the contradictory government positions disclosed in A Fig for the Spaniard and Elizabeth’s orders of expulsion, reveal a number of pressures that, in the early 1590s, were swelling Elizabethan society nearly to the point of rupture. However, in spite of their attempts to divide England according to a native / stranger opposition, among the realities these texts betray is the impossibility of doing so. Though we have often thought of island England as relatively insulated from continental troubles, such sources suggest quite clearly that its borders were as porous as those of other nations—all the more so in the years during which the Dutch Revolt against the Spanish Hapsburgs and the French Wars of Religion sent refugees streaming toward English shores. And making this insider /

Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 36 Spenser (1997: 50); Spenser (1949: vol. 10, 91). 37 See note 29 above.

outsider dichotomy all the more problematic was the fact that the “stranger” crisis seems to have been generated to a significant degree by the rising tide of English “foreigners” making their way to the city and not solely by the presence of exiled European nationals in London. As Andrew Pettegree bids us consider, it was as much an influx of “returning soldiers, unemployed labourers, ‘masterless men and vagabonds’” who were flocking “to the capital in search of food, work or relief” that was overtaxing the city’s “institutions, hospitals, markets, and system of poor relief” (Pettegree 1986: 293), as it was an invasion of alien “newcomers.” To situate The Comedy of Errors, The Book of Sir Thomas More, the Dutch Church Libel, the plays of Christopher Marlowe, and Titus Andronicus in relation to A Fig for the Spaniard may also be to glimpse, contra official proclamations of welcome, some unintended “blowback” from the crown’s own propaganda campaign.38 For even as the regime declared openness toward strangers fleeing continental troubles, it also warned of “infinite swarmes of riche Jewes, sworne enemies to the Gospel,” and “Jesuites, and Shavelings [who] forget all Gospell, and mangleth and massacreth all true professors of the Gospell” (sig. B3r), who were seen to be roaming Europe—and entering England—in order to effect the King of Spain’s policies. Via its network of propagandists like John Wolfe, the Elizabethan government was in a strong sense “guiding” the nation (unevenly, of course, and toward not-quite-predictable ends) toward xenophobic attitudes by means of a propaganda campaign that advocated, somewhat paradoxically, both feelings of “merciful” openness toward refugees and virulent anti-Catholicism, Hispanophobia, anti-Semitism, and Maurophobia, all of which played into racialist miscegenation paranoia.39 In both the propaganda and the plays—with their ruthless Jews and Moors, Machiavellian merchants, licentious Goths, and Spaniards crueler than “the Turk”—England’s propagandists and dramatists alike evoked an undifferentiated otherness upon which they could rely to produce knee-jerk, nativist reactions to the presence of religious and ethnic outsiders. While demeaning Romish doctrine and Hispanizing the crown’s political opposition, their efforts also helped create a climate of fear that could be exploited to fill England’s playhouses. How deeply the majority of English citizens really felt the level of hostility represented in these sources remains a matter of some speculation. We have often made much of remarks by European contemporaries—such as that famously voiced by a Venetian traveler, who claimed that the English “are great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them; they think that there are no other men than themselves, and no other world but England” (quoted Knapp 1992: 30–31). This has led us repeatedly to reinscribe commonplaces about England’s “natural” dislike of outsiders. Less often have we had ears for opinions like this one, attributed to the Vidâme of Chartres, that there was not “any Nation in Christendome more liberall and courteous towardes strangers, then the English.”40

38 The metaphor is from Johnson (2004: ix–xii). 39 On the “guiding” hand of Elizabethan elites and their racialist miscegenation fears, Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. see Griffin (2009: 42–4, 164–7). 40 See R. A[shley]., trans. (1589).

An accurate picture of how these “English” looked upon the immigrant aliens harboring among them must surely lie somewhere between the Italian’s reported blame and the Frenchman’s reputed praise. We would thus do well to heed Pettegree’s caution: “How endemic and how widespread this hostility was has been the subject of little detailed examination; it can too lightly be assumed that 41 xenophobia was a national characteristic in the sixteenth century” (1986: 276). We should also recall that in spite of the harassment England’s immigrants were forced to endure, the intensity of the crown’s investigations and reprisals, and the ferocity of the spite-filled discourse that was leveled by some at the stranger population, “the feared consequences of tolerating such a large foreign presence in England never materialized” (Yungblutt 1996: 94). London’s apprentices, artisans, merchants, craftsmen, and laborers, its native “foreigners” and its immigrant aliens, all had ample reason to feel aggrieved by the inconsistencies and contradictions of Elizabethan immigration policy—a “system” that, much like those of our modern nation-states, was “rich in perversities” (Downes 2006). But lest we imagine that the traffic in strangers flowed only toward England, it also bears remembering that significant numbers of English “fugitives” were at this moment fleeing for Catholic-controlled kingdoms on the continent (Haigh 1996: 254–64). Some took up residence at English colleges at Rouen, or Rome, or those founded in Spain by Philip II.42 Others chose the route of military service in the forces of various Catholic monarchs.43 By 1595, Lewis Lewkenor’s Discourse of the Usage of the English Fugitives, by the Spaniard, was imploring “all the young gentlemen of our Nation” to “beholde the spots & errours of theyr conceyved fancies” (B) and avoid “the service of the Spanish king” (A3).44 The prospect of gain from exactly this service, which Lewkenor himself had attempted, proved a great temptation to men like Sir William Stanley, Thomas Wintour, and most famously, Guy Fawkes (Fraser 1996: 69–82, Loomie 1971), English subjects who sided with Spain during the interminable Dutch War. In the decade to come, it was from these “native” ranks— not from London’s stranger community—that the Gunpowder Plot, “one of the greatest challenges that early modern state security ever faced” (Nicholls 1993: 218), would emerge. Despairing that James I had forever dashed Catholic hopes of re-enfranchisement, and facing the prospect of ongoing persecution and exclusion, the plotters would feel themselves compelled to answer government policy with previously unimaginable violence.45 It was persisting internal pressure, mounting from decades of homegrown social prejudices and religious resentments, that nearly

41 See Pettegree (1986: 276). See also Goose (2005: 110–35). 42 On the English colleges in Spain, see Loomie (1963). 43 Foreign military service was hardly a new trend in the 1590s. A slightly earlier example was the most infamous Captain Thomas Stukeley, who, after offering his talents to both Philip II and the pope, died serving Sebastian I of Portugal. See Griffin (2010). 44 Lewkenor (1595: B, A3r). Copyright © 2014. Routledge. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 45 For the Gunpowder Plot as an act of “terrorism” and a useful review of its historiography, see Appelbaum (2007).

cost the English their king and their parliament; the dreaded subversion of the state by national, ethnic, or racial minorities turns out to have been largely a projection of multiple public anxieties, stemming, no doubt, from dynastic and institutional instabilities, economic uncertainty, and media-fueled fear.46 Shakespeare would soon channel these divisive energies in his “modern ecstasy” (4.3.171), “the Scottish play,” an exploration of “The means that makes us [all] strangers,” the inhabitants of a “poor country, / Almost afraid to know itself” (4.3.165–6).

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