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Ulysses by James Joyce: Stephen’s theories

One of the thousands of factors which make both ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ and ‘Ulysses’ complicated reads is that in both of them the protagonist – the over-educated literature student Stephen Dedalus – expounds a detailed aesthetic theory. What complicates things further is that 1) the theories don’t really match the novels they’re embedded in, and 2) the two theories contradict each other. What are these theories and which, if either, reflects Joyce’s own position?

Theory 1: Aristotle and Aquinas

In Chapter 5 of ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ Stephen Dedalus, now a student at the university, expounds his aesthetic theory during the course of a long walk round central Dublin with his friend Lynch. Stephen’s theory distinguishes between impure kinetic art – art which arouses emotions of desire or repulsion, movement towards or away from the artwork – and pure art which, in his opinion, creates a mood of aesthetic stasis.

In my review of ‘Portrait’ I say that I’m not particularly convinced by this because The Novel is not at all a ‘static’ art form unlike, say, a painting or a statue. The opposite: a novel is a dynamic art form because 1) as you read through it your understanding of everything – plot, characters, themes etc – is continually changing. And 2) because this dynamic process continues even after you’ve finished reading, as you reflect on the novel or maybe read reviews or essays or the Wikipedia article about it or any other random comments you happen to come across online. Or maybe 3) go on to read another book by the same author which radically influences your opinion of the first book. And so on.

Reading a novel is, in other words, a never-ending and dynamic process. Even if Stephen only meant to draw a distinction between 1) works which create a strong sense of attraction or repulsion (such as, for example, pornography at one end of the spectrum and horror stories at the other) and 2) the kind of work he has in mind which leaves an impression of clarity and detachment, with no emotions of any kind triggered – even this kind of model doesn’t really apply to novels, which people tend to either like or dislike for hundreds of highly personal reasons which could never be fully tabulated.

Theory 2: Shakespeare

So much for Stephen’s first theory as expounded in ‘A Portrait’. As to theory two, in chapter 9 (the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ chapter) of ‘Ulysses’, the very same Stephen Dedalus, now a few years older and having left university, expounds a drastically different theory, using the works of Shakespeare as his test bed.

There are some key facts to get clear about this. For a start, the Shakespeare theory isn’t abstract like theory 1. Theory 1 relies on Stephen’s clever redefinition of concepts first propounded in the aesthetic theories of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas – in other words, its comes directly out of his scholastic learning. Theory 2, on the contrary, is practical, in the sense that it arises not from the abstract aesthetic theories of ancient philosophers, but derives from Stephen’s own personal reading of the plays of Shakespeare. So straightaway the two theories inhabit a spectrum between abstract and applied.

But the content of the theories is also diametrically opposed. Theory 1 famously leads up to the conclusion that, if the ideal work of art creates a sense of stasis, then the ideal work of literature should strive to be as objective as possible, should be a work in which the personality of the author disappears. This theory posits that the highest genre of literature is drama because in drama (I’ve put in bold the really famous part of this speech, which is quoted in all discussion of the subject):

The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood [in lyric poetry] and then a fluid and lambent narrative [in epic poetry], finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Theory 2, by contrast, is an elaborate statement of the exact opposite proposition, which is that all the key figures and all the key relationships in Shakespeare’s plays, derive from his own family, are fundamentally autobiographical. Far from being refined out of existence, Stephen now argues that Shakespeare’s personal biography is now everywhere present in his plays.

Stephen focuses on ‘Hamlet’ which he tries to persuade us is Shakespeare’s most autobiographical play. He says one driver for the play was Shakespeare’s trauma at learning about the infidelity of his (older) wife, Anne Hathaway. Many readers think of Hamlet the prince as somehow expressing Shakespeare’s own opinions about life (the powerful speeches about the meaning of life, suicide and so on) but Stephen says the real avatar of the middle-aged, successful playwright stricken with grief at the infidelity of his wife is not the young student prince, but the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father.

To put it in the rather convoluted language of the book, the idea is that Shakespeare was, like King Hamlet, cuckolded by his brother, Richard. Betrayed by his wife (Ann Hathaway/Gertrude) and betrayed by his brother (Richard Shakespeare/Claudius) Shakespeare is embodied in King Hamlet, the murdered father who returns as a ghost, and we know that Shakespeare played the role of the ghost in the first productions of the play, opposite a much younger actor playing the prince.

Far from refining himself out of existence, the author – in this theory – makes art out of the sordid mess and messy emotions of his own life.

Adding further evidence to the betrayal theme, in a passage about uncles, Stephen name-checks Shakespeare’s brothers Richard and Edmund, describes his assumed rivalry with them, and then goes on to point out how many wicked uncles (and wicked Richards and Edmunds) there are in his plays, notably Richard III and scheming Edmund in King Lear. Surely more evidence for his adulterous betrayal theory?

Having established his approach using ‘Hamlet’, Stephen goes on to talk about other Shakespeare plays, namely the so-called Romances written at the end of his career, which all feature the reconciliation of a father with his daughter (Prospero and Miranda (The Tempest), Leontes and Perdita (The Winter’s Tale), Pericles and Marina (Pericles). There must, Stephen insists, also be a biographical basis to this trope in Shakespeare, so long away in London, being reconciled with his alienated daughter (or grand-daughter?).

Disappointment

I remember being bitterly disappointed when I read this passage as a student. I was hoping one genius would have dazzling insights into another genius but it turns out Joyce had nothing of the sort. The idea that a writer uses his own experiences of his own family relationships in his works is so obvious as to be bathetic.

Far from giving new and unexpected insight into the creative process, the chapter suggests that all literature is autobiographical, is a projection of the artist’s (fractured) self and that the creator (Shakespeare / Joyce) is always present in his creations (Hamlet / Stephen-Bloom). This is not only not very interesting but, taken at face value, it diminishes both Shakespeare and Joyce.

In a dramatic context

To try and read Stephen’s presentation as a lecture or essay is to be disappointed so maybe a more profitable way to think about it is as part of the dramatic content of the novel. In other words, it is not interesting for what it tells us about Shakespeare (next to nothing, apart from a few details Stephen throws into his descriptions, for example of William’s daily walk to work along the Thames to the Globe theatre) so much as for 1) what it tells us about Stephen the fictional character, 2) the light it sheds on the themes of ‘Ulysses’, and 3) the broader artistic world of the day.

Fathers and sons

1. Regarding what the theory tells us about Stephen the fictional character, this is easy. It reveals that Stephen is obsessed with father-son relations, circling round and round the troubled relationship between Hamlet and his dead father, and the sad experience of Shakespeare and his dead son, Hamnet (who died aged 11 in 1596, as depicted in the current movie of the subject). Grandfathers, fathers and sons.

2. And this itself is, of course, entirely fitting in a novel which strongly features themes of fathers and sons: Stephen is anxious throughout the book that, instead of becoming the Great Writer he wants to be, he might instead be turning into a witty, garrulous drinker and failure like his father, Simon.

3. The novel also, of course, features Leopold Bloom who throughout Bloomsday repeatedly thinks about his own son, Rudy, who died when he was just 11 days old (Rudy 11 days, Hamnet 11 years – there are always patterns in Joyce). Bloom also resurrects his own father, Rudolf Virág, in one of the many ‘hallucinations’ in the delirious ‘Circe’ chapter.

4. And, of course, The Odyssey which ‘Ulysses’ is to some extent ‘based on’ (or aligned with or riffs off), is in part a poem about a young son (Telemachus) looking for his long-lost father (Odysseus).

5. Which is itself (sort of) echoed in the overall narrative arc whereby, in the final chapters of the book, young Stephen encounters Bloom in the role of father figure, and Bloom for a while takes a fatherly concern for Stephen (although, as is well known, the analogy doesn’t really hold because Stephen isn’t Bloom’s son and so, far from forging some kind of father and son relationship, Stephen in the end stumbles off into the night probably never to see Bloom again).

In other words, Stephen’s elaborate and contrived theory of Shakespeare not only need not be ‘true’ about Shakespeare, but doesn’t even need to be believable, because it’s not a public lecture or critical essay, it’s the speech of a character in a novel, and so only needs to 1) reflect the personality of the character (as it does) and 2) reflect or refer to some of the wider issues raised in the novel (as it does).

Performance, first aspect

Two more things undermine Stephen’s Shakespeare presentation as a theory. Most obviously, it is a performance. Stephen has arrived at Dublin’s National Library, in the head librarian’s office where are assembled some heavy hitters from the Dublin literary scene, the key figure being the poet A.E. (George Russell), an exponent of mysticism, Platonism, and emotive Irish nationalism. Also in the room are Mr Best (librarian, ‘tall, young, mild, light’) and John Eglinton (a pseudonym for real-life essayist William Kirkpatrick Magee, a literary figure and librarian).

These men know Stephen’s father, Simon Dedalus, and have heard tell of, but never yet met, his super-clever son (also promoted, among others, by his buddy Malachi Mulligan, as Eglinton attests: ‘—I was prepared for paradoxes from what Malachi Mulligan told us…’).

And so the whole situation is by way of Stephen’s opportunity to impress (some of) his elders and betters from the (small) Dublin literary scene. This situation explains why Stephen is so nervous, why he rambles on, and why he overstates and muddles his case (as my rather muddled summary of it indicates) and so is not really believable. It is a dramatic situation in which our hero has to continually gee himself up and keep at it:

Anxiously he glanced in the cone of lamplight where three faces, lighted, shone.

And, as his theory unfurls with increasing improbability, he comes to doubt it himself:

What the hell are you driving at? I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons.

A clash of worldviews

One of the reasons for his nervousness is because Stephen isn’t just confronting eminent figures but eminent figures with a completely opposed aesthetic worldview. It is easy to forget that the whole episode is set in a particular time and place, namely Dublin 1904. Now as I’ve emphasised previously, this means it is describing a society, culture and characters which are in almost every aspect still late Victorian. And one of these aspects is that many of the leading literary figures of the time were still in thrall to fin-de-siecle aestheticism, art for arts sake, and continental Symbolism, all flavoured with the high-minded nobility of the Celtic Revival.

Which means that buried beneath the maze of banter and learnèd references which all the characters in this scene throw around, there is a pretty straightforward clash going on, between the old world of mazy Celtic twilights and high aesthetic values, and Stephen’s aggressively rude insistence on the thumpingly material facts of life, on eating, drinking, peeing, pooing, sex and masturbation.

The elder statesman and poet A.E. represents the school which believes art to be intensely spiritual and to inhabit a realm of neo-platonic forms and perfections. For him and his ilk art must be uplifting and inspiring to take us out of the deadening quotidian world and raise us to the spiritual uplands. In this view, Shakespeare is a genius and genius has access to insights and worlds deprived us ordinary mortals. A.E. says:

—Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato’s world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.

(Gustave Moreau, here, being used as the epitome of Symbolist painting.)

From my summary, above, you can see how Stephen (and by implication his creator) is against all this. For Stephen great art begins not in a realm of ‘formless spiritual essences’ but in the muck and mess of human existence. This is why Joyce venerated the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and wrote a long critical essay about his plays, even writing the man himself a fan letter. It’s because Ibsen represented a complete departure from late-romanticism with its fairies and legends, and instead portrayed messy real modern life, complicated relationships driven by his characters’ fierce internal psychological battles.

But Stephen goes further than this. Ibsen never portrayed someone having a poo or masturbating or farting or having a pee in the garden (all of which happen in ‘Ulysses’). In his own way, Ibsen still respected Victorian manners and conventions. Not so Joyce. Along with all the other achievements of ‘Ulysses’, it brought the crudest physical bodily activities within the realm of artistic discourse. The book sets out to cover all of human life and so how could he leave out the basics?

Ezra Pound wasn’t wrong to see ‘Ulysses’ as a continuation of the meticulous realism of Flaubert, the taking of that kind of realism and accuracy to the limit and then beyond, exploding the bounds of the late-nineteenth century realist novel and going on to invent something completely new.

Back to the theory: hopefully you can now see that it is less valuable as an interpretation of Shakespeare (as which, it is pretty worthless) than as a dramatisation of Stephen (and Joyce’s) fierce punk opposition to the nose-holding high-mindedness of the older, Victorian generation.

Performance, second aspect

OK, so when Stephen presents his theory, he is doing it to not just a sceptical older generation but a generation with fundamentally different ideas about art than he holds and who he is, to some extent, baiting with his transgressive ideas.

But then something else happens to make it even more complicated. This is the arrival half way through Stephen’s nervous presentation of his frenemy and contemporary, the young wit Malachi ‘Buck’ Mulligan, who we saw teasing and antagonising Stephen in the very first scene in the opening chapter.

Half way through Stephen’s presentation shallow Buck arrives in the room and joins in the chorus of witty banter which accompanies every one of Stephen’s propositions, often with barely concealed mockery, for example when he gives his own not inaccurate parody of Stephen’s idea:

—It is quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.

In this respect the whole thing, although radically different in content, echoes in structure the presentation of theory 1 in ‘Portrait’. In that book, although Stephen’s theory is often quoted out of context as a standalone statement, it is actually delivered in a dynamic context, expounded during a long walk with a fellow student Lynch, who continually intervenes with deflating mockery of Stephen’s highfalutin theories.

Same here, only instead of just one set of interlocutors Stephen was already struggling to cope with – AE, Best, Eglinton, the occasional interventions of the chief librarian who pops in and out of the room – the arrival of Mulligan adds a whole new layer of mockery and chaffing to the mix.

So setting aside the radical dissimilarities of content, both theories have this in common, that they are delivered in the course of embattled dialogue with others.

Scylla and Charybdis

I’m aware I haven’t presented all these ideas in a perfect order. It’s quite difficult to do so when everything in the text is connected to everything else. But one last point. As I’ve reread it I’ve come to realise that the A.E. and John Eglinton’s traditional romantic neo-platonic theory is so clearly indicated or defended in its own right, that the chapter in effect contains not one but two aesthetic theories And when you come to think about it, this maybe sheds light on the Homeric parallel.

Scylla and Charybdis – who Joyce’s schemas tell us preside over this chapter – are famous sea monsters from Greek mythology, who lived on opposite sides of the narrow Strait of Messina. Scylla was a six-headed monster living on a cliff, who snatched sailors from passing ships, while Charybdis was a massive whirlpool that swallowed ships whole. Which is why they came to be used as a proverb symbolizing an inescapable dilemma, where avoiding one peril means falling victim to the other.

So: are these two aesthetic theories, the extreme of spiritual neoplatonism facing off against a theory of authorial autobiography, are these the Scylla and Charybdis of the title? In the Homer story, Odysseus’s ship has to sail a perfect middle course between the two perils. Does this suggest that Joyce does not stand behind Stephen’s theory, but somewhere between the two positions?

We know that Stephen has rejected his schoolboy theory of high aesthetic stasis and gone right over to the other end of the spectrum, deliberately shocking his fusty listeners with his insistence on the origins of Shakespeare’s works in the messy biographical details of sex and infidelity, jealousy and death.

But maybe this theory, theory 2, is also only dramatically appropriate to the character of Stephen Dedalus and didn’t represent Joyce’s own final view.

This interpretation is supported when, at the conclusion of his presentation, one of the auditors, John Eglinton, asks Stephen whether he believes his own theory and Stephen immediately (and with uncharacteristically blunt clarity) says No.

—You are a delusion, said roundly John Eglinton to Stephen. You have brought us all this way to show us a French triangle. Do you believe your own theory?
—No, Stephen said promptly.

(The French triangle is Eglinton’s way of saying Stephen’s theory reduces the genesis of one of the masterpieces of European literature, ‘Hamlet’, to the author’s involvement in a sordid little affair of adultery and his wife’s infidelity, a ‘French triangle’.)

But the point of the exchange is obviously Stephen’s immediate ‘No’. Now on one level this reflects the witty tone of banter in which the whole thing takes place, in which everyone is hyper-aware of all the literary references they’re making, distorting and parodying for comic purposes, in which everyone is showing off. To spend an hour delivering a convoluted theory and then reply so bluntly that he doesn’t even believe it himself, is a stylish and witty manoeuvre – its Wildean brashness makes Stephen more worthy to be a member of this caste of witty litterateurs than the original theory.

But it also gestures towards the solution of the puzzle. When faced with a rock and a hard place the solution is neither. Or both. Or parts of both. Maybe the theory is included not just to further delineate Stephen’s character, or because Joyce identifies with it, but because it requires the worldview it’s opposing. Stephen can only express his debunking theory if he has something to debunk and so he needs A.E. and Eglinton and (appearing half-way through, Mulligan) to argue back or mock his theories because the real world is made out of precisely such conflicts and antitheses.

Maybe the point isn’t Stephen’s first theory or second theory or A.E.s platonic theory but a dynamic interplay between all three.

A ghostly answer

In his 1982 book about ‘Ulysses’, Canadian critic Hugh Kenner suggests a typically playful solution. Maybe Joyce’s aesthetic approach can be likened to the figure of Hamlet’s ghost who wanders through Stephen’s exposition of the play, as he, indeed, wafts in and out of the Shakespeare play itself. Like old King Hamlet’s ghost, maybe Joyce’s own autobiography moves in and out of the text, putting in appearances, disappearing but, like the ghost, dominating the entire action even in its absence. Which makes theory 2, instead of a rejection of theory 1 whereby the artist:

remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails

More like a subtle extension of it. Maybe the ghost author can drift in and out of the narrative at whim, trailing elements of autobiography like a ghostly cloak, at moments coming powerfully into focus, at others disappearing altogether and so allowing Joyce to believe in both his theories and neither. After all, as Richard Ellmann jokes in his 1972 book, ‘Ulysses on the Liffey’:

Whenever confronted by a choice between two possible things to include, Joyce chose both. (p.34)

So maybe that’s what he’s craftily doing here.

Credit

‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce was published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922.

Joyce reviews

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by Simon on February 20, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Literary criticism

Posted by Simon on February 20, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/02/20/ulysses-james-joyce-stephens-theory/

Shakespeare and War @ the National Army Museum

A tale of two Henries

In 1944 Laurence Olivier produced, directed and starred in a movie version of Shakespeare’s play ‘Henry V’. Shot in bright primary colours it dealt in bright primary patriotic emotions and 30 years later my Dad and his best friend could remember seeing it in the cinema as 12-year-old kids and being stirred by its patriotic fervour, its stirring invocation of England’s valour and fortitude, at a time when German V rockets were falling on London and the south-east. (A V2 rocket fell on the house next door to my Dad’s, killing the occupants. The one time he mentioned it was the only time I ever saw him cry. Britain needed all the patriotism and determination it could muster.)

Installation view of ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum showing posters, cartoons, photos and programmes from the Second World War including a poster for Olivier’s Henry V

Those ardent schoolboys will have noticed that the film was ‘dedicated to the ‘Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain the spirit of whose ancestors it has been humbly attempted to recapture’ because this appears as a caption at the start of the film, but won’t have known that the production was partly funded by the British government as a form of soft propaganda.

Forty five years later, in 1989, the actor widely seen as inheriting Olivier’s mantle, Kenneth Branagh, directed and starred in a new movie version of ‘Henry V’. Much was made of the fact that, instead of stylised sunny sets, the play went for a darker, grittier look, most notably in the battle of Agincourt scenes, filmed on a lovely sunny day in the Olivier version, but in a downpour of rain in the Branagh, which turns the battlefield into a quagmire, spattering all the characters with mud and also gore from the countless bodies which have been hacked and stabbed. Critics weren’t slow to point out that it was made in the aftermath of the Falklands War and so carried a strong message against war and warmongering.

Poster for the original 1984 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Henry V directed by Adrian Noble and starring Kenneth Branagh, as featured in ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum

The same play, the same author, the same plot, the same characters, the same stage directions and the same words – and yet supporting two very different productions, reflecting very different societies, mindsets and values.

These are just two examples of the way Shakespeare’s plays about war – the causes of war, the preparations for war, the experience of war, wartime emotions from terror to exhilaration – and the greatly varying opinions of his many different characters about war and warfare, have been quoted, adapted, distorted, illustrated and recycled, used both to support and attack Britain’s wars, in the 400 years since his death.

Shakespeare and War

The National Army Museum in Chelsea is currently holding a FREE exhibition titled ‘Shakespeare and War’ which sets out to review the huge history of the national playwright’s role in Britain’s many wars and conflicts and how his words, stories, characters and scenes have been used in widely different times and situations.

The exhibition sets out to document how the plays, characters and speeches have been excerpted and exploited propagandists, governments, commentators, satirists and anti-war activists, soldiers and civilians – during the turbulent 400 years since Shakespeare’s death, in 1616. As the curators put it:

The plays have been used to rally the nation at times of crisis and to reflect on the human cost of conflict. But they have also been used to critique war and to consider the more challenging aspects of the military experience. They have inspired soldiers and civilians alike, helping people face adversity on the battlefield and at home.

After Shakespeare

Thus the exhibition starts after Shakespeare’s death. There’s none of the usual fol-de-rol about his biography or the Globe Theatre or the parabola of his career, just the blunt facts that he was a very successful actor-dramatist-manager, who died in 1616, before the British Army even existed.

Instead we are thrown straight into the first major conflict which occurred after his lifetime, the civil war or wars of three kingdoms which broke out 23 years after his death, in 1639, and lasted until Cromwell’s pacification of Scotland in 1653.

The exhibition is divided into six broad historical sections, each of which is introduced by a wall label and then features all sorts of bric-a-brac from the period in question – broadsheets, posters, cartoons, pamphlets which cite or reference, quote or parody scenes, characters or speeches from the plays to suit the purpose of polemicists and propagandists of the moment, paintings or photos of Shakespearian actors or patrons, posters for productions through the ages, and then – in the modern era – recordings of radio and TV productions and so on. At the most basic level, it’s a curiosity shop of historical Shakespeariana.

1. Royal Shakespeare: The Civil War and Beyond

During the English Civil War Shakespeare was often associated with the monarchy. While in prison awaiting trial, King Charles I read Shakespeare’s (Second) Folio (the First and Second Folios were the first attempts to publish all Shakespeare’s works in one volume). The King made notes on its pages and the exhibition has his copy on show. This did not go unnoticed by the great poet and Puritan propagandist, John Milton, who is represented here by a first edition of his pamphlet, Eikonoklastes.

Installation view of the civil war part of ‘Shakespeare and War’, showing, on the left, engravings of Charles I (above) and Cromwell (below) along with Charles’s copy of the Second Folio beneath an English mortuary sword (photo by the author)

This little collocation of objects overflows with meanings. Eikonoklastes was written and published late in 1649 to justify the execution of King Charles which took place on 30 January 1649. It was a point-by-point rebuttal of a pamphlet titled Eikon Basilike, a Royalist propaganda work, which purported to be a spiritual autobiography of the saintly king. The Basilike set Charles up as the type of a perfect enlightened monarch who ruled by the Divine Right of Kings and through the ancient constitution. Milton refuted all these points and more, claiming that Charles’s rule had degenerated to a tyranny over a people who could only be free by executing him and abolishing the monarchy altogether.

Where does Shakespeare come in all this? Well, he was part of the culture wars between the two sides. Theatre was encouraged and sponsored by the King, the Court and aristocrats. Shakespeare’s younger contemporary, Ben Jonson, ended up writing masques – elaborate ritualistic performances, accompanied by music – for the King and Court, which reinforced the ideology of royalty and monarchical rule and in some of which the king himself took part.

In the eyes of radical Puritans all this was blasphemy. Representing people on stage came close to breaking the commandment about not worshipping images. Plays diverted people’s minds away from the only thing they should be contemplating, the glory of God. Playhouses were notorious sites of crime and prostitution. Shakespeare’s plays, even the sternest tragedies, are littered with outrageously rude puns and euphemisms, the kind of thing Parliamentary Puritans had in mind when they accused the theatre of staging ‘spectacles of pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious mirth and levity.’

For all these reasons and more the Puritans protested against the theatre in the years leading up to the war, and this explains why, when Parliament took control of the capital in September 1642, they promptly shut down all the playhouses. Which explains why there’s an engraving of Cromwell in this exhibition showing him wearing a suit of armour above a pile of discarded theatrical bric-a-brac, such as masks and disguises. For 18 long years the theatres were dark. Shakespeare’s Globe was torn down in 1644 and turned into ‘tenements’.

The Restoration

In 1660 the monarchy was restored and Charles II assumed the Crown. His 25-year reign was troubled by political and religious issues along the old civil war schism, at its most fundamental the clash between devotees of the Protestant cause and Charles’s Court which became tainted with accusations of Catholic sympathy, especially after he married the Catholic princess Catherine of Braganza in 1662.

Like his father Charles was a great patron of the arts, including theatre, and his rule saw the flourishing of the movement referred to as Restoration Comedy. The theatre once again became associated with all the vices of Londoners at play, and this, like the theatre of his father, became the target of religious criticism. The ongoing schism between Catholic-leaning court and Protestant nobles came to a head during the three-year reign of Charles’s brother, James II, who with typical Stuart arrogance, not only took a Catholic wife but made it clear that the new infant son she bore him would be raised a Catholic. The Protestant aristocracy rebelled and overthrew him in what their propagandists named The Glorious Revolution, inviting the Protestant Prince of Orange (in modern Holland) to come and be our king.

The curators skimp a bit on this period, displaying just one work, a copy of a book by the playwright John Crowne adapting Henry VI parts 2 and 3 and titled ‘Misery of Civil War’.

Shakespeare’s history plays

The thing is, Shakespeare’s history plays amount to a sustained investigation of the nature of authority and ‘good’ rule. All of them are named after the English king they focus on and ask questions like, What makes a good king? What makes a bad king? Are nobles, or ‘the people’, ever justified in overthrowing a king? If two noble houses fight for the crown, what are ordinary people to do? Follow their conscience, try to avoid the conflict, or fight for their local lord and master? Is there such a thing as a ‘just’ war in which case, how do you define one?

Questions like these echo throughout the obvious plays i.e. the ones about English history, but are also central to the Roman plays and three of the four great tragedies.

The history plays are usually divided into three groups:

the series depicting the Wars of the Roses, being: Henry VI parts 1, 2 and 3, and Richard III (4 plays)
the second tetralogy – including Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and Henry V
the standalone plays King John, Edward III and Henry VIII

The Roman plays which discuss the nature of authority and leadership focus on Julius Caesar and its sequel, Antony and Cleopatra. Both cover wars and include battle scenes.

The tragedies all feature war, in different ways. Macbeth is about a successful soldier and includes actual battle scenes. King Lear and Hamlet feature the invasion of their respective countries (England by the French and Denmark by the Swedes) but no actual fighting. And Othello is all about a highly successful mercenary general, which features no battles but is drenched in reminiscences of fighting and the rhetoric of battle.

What I’m trying to convey is that these 17 or so plays are rarely about war as such, but but are far more about the nature of power and authority and what happens when authority collapses.

The eight classic history plays are about the collapse of authority in one country and civil war among the English. The two Roman plays are the same: in both the Romans aren’t fighting any external enemy, but among themselves. Similarly, the three tragedies (excluding Othello) are about the collapse of royal authority in one country – the French only invade England in Lear and the Swedes invade Denmark in Hamlet once the native rulers have made a complete horlicks of trying to rule themselves.

And again, although the English come to the aid of the rightful heir to the throne at the end of Macbeth, they only have to do so because, yet again, the ruling class of the country in question (this time Scotland) have made a total mess of ruling themselves, as a result of all the murders Macbeth finds himself voodooed into committing.

Thus, the seventeen or so plays about history are almost entirely about the collapse of political authority in one country leading to civil war. The fifty years from the collapse of Charles I’s power in the 1630s through to the Glorious Revolution in 1688 are, therefore, the most relevant or applicable to Shakespeare’s concerns. It is, therefore, strange and intriguing that contemporaries, apparently, according to this exhibition, made so little application of the huge amount Shakespeare wrote on this subject to the one era in the past 400 years which most suited it.

This little survey of Shakespeare’s history plays also explains something else. Henry V is the only one in which is not about a civil war. Henry V is the only one in which we are not fighting among ourselves, but go abroad and fight somebody else. This explains why Henry V crops up in this exhibition as the spearhead for patriotic fervour more times than the ten other history plays put together – because once we’d sorted out our own political problems via the civil wars and rebellions of the seventeenth century, we turned our warlike energies against foreigners.

2. Revolutionary Shakespeare: Change and Political Debate

The late eighteenth century saw a major global war (against France) and two revolutions (in America and France) which changed the world. In each of these conflicts Shakespeare’s plays, characters and the Shakespeare brand were used to define, critique and support both a patriotic war and new political movements.

The Seven Years War

By the start of the eighteenth century Shakespeare had become established by numerous writers, critics and commentators as a national icon. The exhibition skips over the wars of the early 18th century, in Europe and India:

War of the Spanish Succession 1701 to 1714
Great Northern War 1717 to 1720
War of the Austrian Succession 1740
Carnatic Wars 1744 to 1763

Instead it jumps to the Seven Years’ War (1756 to 1763), the war against France which saw British victories on the Continent, in India, in the Caribbean and North America. The exhibition includes a number of interesting mementoes from the war.

David Garrick, the leading figure in London theatre by the mid-century, wrote a Dialogue to preface a 1756 production of The Tempest, in which two characters debate the rights and wrongs of the new war. It reminds us that for hundreds of years actors, managers and playwrights felt perfectly free to preface Shakespeare productions with prologues like this, tailoring the play to the issues of the day, or even cutting and rewriting bits of the plays to reflect current concerns.

In 1768 Edward Capell produced an edition of the plays in which he states what had, by then, become orthodoxy, that the 38 or so plays amount to ‘a part of the kingdom’s riches’. Not only this, but Britain’s standing ‘in the world’ depended on ‘the esteem within which these are held.’

The fact that Shakespeare’s one play which takes a foreign enemy is directed against the French did not escape numerous writers and commentators as Britain embarked on a global struggle against…the French. There’s a playbill for a production of Henry V staged in Covent Garden in 1761 which has two significant aspects. 1) For this occasion, the play was unsubtly subtitled ‘the Conquest of France’ and 2) each of the 23 productions were followed by a lavish recreation of the coronation of King George III which had just taken place (22 September 1761).

If Shakespeare’s association with kingship had been deeply problematic for Milton in the 1640s, long before a century had passed the name of Shakespeare, the Shakespeare brand, had become indissolubly linked to celebration of the solidly Protestant and anti-French monarchy.

The American War of Independence (1775 to 1783)

Following on from, and partly a result of, the Seven Years War, came the American War of Independence. Unsurprisingly, American patriots seeking to break from Britain drew on Shakespeare’s classical histories. Plays like ‘Julius Caesar’ and ‘Coriolanus’ helped support the idea of republican government and liberation from imperial rule.

The two sides (British and American) both staged plays and the curators display playbills from both sides, which use Shakespeare texts to propagandise for their cause. So there’s a playbill for an American production of Julius Caesar which applauds the ‘noble struggles for Liberty by that renowned patriot Marcus Brutus.’

There are rather more relics from the British side and the curators display pictures focusing on New York. This is because early on in the war, the British Army under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Clinton occupied New York City and turned it into a garrison town. Members of the Army staged regular productions of Shakespeare at the newly-renamed Theatre Royal, confirming the by-now well-established link between drama and royalty. the performances were staged ‘with permission’ of Clinton, who was also a patron of the performances. Plays were staged to raise funds for wounded soldiers. The British tended to favour Shakespeare’s monarchical plays, whilst American Patriots used plays with a republican ethos (such as Julius Caesar and Coriolanus) in their satirical prints and posters.

Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Clinton, 1st Regiment of Foot Guards, 1758 (National Army Museum)

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1789 to 1802, 1805 to 1815)

As explained above, Shakespeare’s plays can be used to provide examples of resistance to oppression and corrupt politics and so justify insurrection against corrupt rulers. The French Revolution amounted to a massive ideological upheaval in the thinking of all Europe. In the three years after the initial overthrow of the monarchy in 1789, politicians and intellectuals all across Europe took the sides of either the revolutionary liberators or the rule of monarchy, hierarchy and order. But in 1792 revolutionary France declared war on Austria and Prussia and the conflict became military in nature. Many former sympathisers retracted their support, especially after the situation in Paris descended into The Terror of 1793 to 1794.

The French Revolutionary War lasted from 1792 to 1802, when it was terminated by the Treaty of Amiens. Fighting broke out a year later in what came to be called the Napoleonic Wars which were to last from 1803 to 1815.

During this long period of ideological and military conflict, Shakespeare plays, characters and lines were mobilised to justify both sides of the ideological and military divide. In Britain, politicians, public figures, actors, and the Army drew on the playwright’s characters and speeches to justify their reasons for going to war, and to criticize rebellions against royalty.

This 25-year period also happened to be a golden age of political satire, featuring two of the greatest British caricaturists and cartoonists, James Gillray (1756 to 1815) and Isaac Cruikshank (1764 to 1811). Amid the many visual jokes and references they and many cartoonists and commentators like them used to pillory the politics of the day, Shakespearian references loomed large.

So the exhibition has some excellent cartoons by both men, which invoke Shakespearian references for the purposes of mockery and exaggeration. This print by Cruikshank uses The Tempest to praise the patriotic Tory Prime Minister William Pitt and ridicule his chief political opponent, Charles James Fox, an opponent of the British monarchy who was an initial supporter of the French Revolution.

Prospero and Caliban in the Enchanted Island by Isaac Cruikshank (1798)

Smoothly dressed Pitt is depicted as the wonder-working magician Prospero, telling his creature:

Hence! – fetch us fewel and be quick
Thou wert best – shrugst thou malice?
If thou dost unwillingly what I command
I’ll rack thee with old cramps –

While Fox, portrayed as big ugly Caliban, and wearing a tricolour scarf (symbol of the revolution) shrugs with savage disgust, saying:

I must obey! his art is of such power
It would control a Setebos,
And make a vassal of him.

There’s a brilliantly vivid print by Gillray titled ‘A phantasmagoria – conjuring up an armed skeleton’ which depicts contemporary politicians as the three witches from Macbeth. The print criticises the Treaty of Amiens which was widely seen as a capitulation to France. In the picture the witches are replaced by three leading supporters of the treaty, Henry Addington, Lord Hawkesbury and William Wilberforce and their magic spells for peace have, it is implied, reduced Britannia to a skeleton. Note the sack of gold at bottom left implying that these ‘traitors’ were bribed to betray their country and the French cockerel at bottom right, mockingly standing astride a skinned British lion.

‘A Phantasmagoria; — Scene – Conjuring-Up an Armed-Skeleton’ by James Gillray (1803)

The exhibition includes probably Gillray’s most famous image, ‘The Plumb-pudding in danger; – or – State Epicures taking un Petit Souper’. The image depicts British Prime Minister William Pitt and French Emperor Napoleon carving up the world between them. I’ve seen it many times but didn’t realise that the epigraph directly under the title, at top right, is an adapted quote from The Tempest, namely ‘”The great globe itself and all that it inherits” is too small to satisfy such insatiable appetites’.

The Plumb-pudding in danger; – or – State Epicures taking un Petit Souper by James Gillray (1805)

In these cartoons you see something interesting happening. Many of the previous objects (from the Seven Years or American Revolutionary Wars) indicated that Shakespeare was best promulgated via productions of entire plays. Here, in these cartoons, you can see the way that Shakespearian tags and clichés now lend themselves to much more pithy and succinct visual media.

Satirical prints had been around all through the 18th century, in fact they go back to Shakespeare’s day and even earlier. But somehow the Gillray and Cruikshank feel new. They demonstrate how Shakespeare, as well as representing the ‘the kingdom’s riches, according to high-minded editors such as Edward Capell, could also be the source of popular jokes and gags.

From now on, alongside all the stirring patriotic stuff, the exhibition features a strand of often very funny works using Shakespeare for comic purposes.

3. Imperial Shakespeare: The Victorian Army

After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the British Army’s role began to change. Rather than fighting major campaigns on the Continent, it was regularly used to protect and expand Britain’s imperial possessions, to fight Queen Victoria’s ‘small wars‘. But further to what I just mentioned about comedy, my favourite bits from what amounts to the Victorian section of the exhibition, were comic.

It must be said that some of the exhibits in the show seem to bear a pretty slender relationship with its supposed subject, Shakespeare and War. For example, the eighteenth century section has a set of images around the death of General James Wolfe at the 1759 Battle of Quebec which have no direct relation to Shakespeare, don’t quote or cite Shakespeare, seem to have no relationship except that Wolfe’s death was made the subject of ‘patriotic plays’.

Less utterly irrelevant is this entertaining print. In 1823 British aristocrats still carried out duels and this print mocks the practice by having the duellers and their seconds portrayed as monkeys. Apparently the title derives from a quote from ‘The Merchant of Venice’ but it’s a pretty flimsy pretext for including it in an exhibition about Shakespeare and War.

Awful Moments or Monkeys of Honour, colour print by John Lewis Marks after an unknown artist (1823)

More directly relevant if irreverent are the excellent prints taken from a later book, the Military Misreadings of Shakespere by Major Thomas Seccombe. It contains 31 beautifully delineated cartoons of military cockups, clumsiness and pratfalls, each offset by an ironically serious Shakespeare quotation. In this one a beautifully dressed member of the Life Guards has just been thrown by his horse to the accompaniment of a grand quote from Titus Andronicus: ‘That what you cannot, as you would, achieve, you must perforce accomplish as you may’ which thus acquires a completely comic meaning.

‘That what you cannot, as you would, achieve, you must perforce accomplish as you may’ from Military Misreadings of Shakespere (1880)

The Crimean War (1853 to 1856)

It wasn’t all lolz. The great exception to the century of generally small colonial wars which the British Army fought was the Crimean War, the one major conflict we were involved in in the century between the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) and the start of the Great War (1914). This famously highlighted significant problems with the Army’s organization, notably in the famous and futile Charge of the Light Brigade. Newspapers reported on the poor conditions in which soldiers found themselves, leading to demands for improvements and reforms to the Army’s culture and structure.

Only one exhibit relates to this badly managed and bitter war, a watercolour done by the Swedish artist Egron Sellif Lungren which depicts a kind of cinematic reimagining of a production of Henry V (what else?) staged by Charles Kean at the Princess’s Theatre in 1859 i.e. a few years after the war ended. Queen Victoria attended the play and commissioned Lundgren to do a watercolour version of it for her Theatre Album. Of all the scenes in the play Lundgren chose to depict the siege of Honfleur which is not only the setting for Henry’s famous speech ‘Once more unto the breach dear friends’, but will have reminded many people of the long and gruelling British siege of Sebastapol.

Installation view of ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum showing Egron Sellif Lungren’s watercolour plastered across one wall, with Gillray and Cruikshank cartoons on the left

Imperial Shakespeare

Obviously the nineteenth century was the one in which Britain cemented its grasp over the largest land empire the world has ever known, as well as almost total control of the world’s oceans. This is a very big subject indeed and it is not really properly explored. Take just India. Were there no British theatres in India, Shakespeare productions in India? Did the growing Indian middle class every stage Shakespeare productions with Indian casts? Was Shakespeare’s name, plays or quotes never invoked to justify British rule in India? Were there comic or satirical pamphlets or prints using Shakespeare quotes to mock British rule in India? Not in this exhibition, nor anything about the British Army’s involvement in Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East or Far East.

Instead, as I’ve already pointed out, some of the exhibits have only a tenuous or oblique connection to the exhibition topic. For example, a picture caption tells us that amateur theatricals were often staged by regiments and soldiers as peacetime entertainments, which we might well have guessed. And that’s the fairly flimsy pretext for sharing a photo of members of the East Yorkshire regiment staging a production of Hamlet at their barracks in Cheltenham in 1895.

The Cast of Hamlet, Winter Gardens, Cheltenham, 1895 (National Army Museum)

Meanwhile, there’s nothing about the second war of the period which shook British confidence, the Boer War of 1899 to 1902. Were there no Shakespeare productions mounted here in England to raise funds or stir patriotic fervour? Did the besieged populations of Ladysmith, Mafeking or Kimberley put on productions to keep their spirits up? Didn’t domestic commentators or cartoonists use Shakespeare quotes or characters as material? If so, none of it is displayed here.

4. Patriotic Shakespeare: The First World War (1914 to 1918)

During the First World War great service and sacrifice were required of both the Army and the civilian population. As in the last great campaign in Europe a century before, Shakespeare was used in Britain to rally the troops and the country behind a sense of national duty.

As mentioned above, some exhibits are included on pretty flimsy grounds: for example, there’s no real reason to include some of Lord Kitchener’s recruitment posters (Your country needs You) except for the fact that, after Kitchener drowned when the ship he was sailing in hit a German mine (HMS Hampshire, 5 June 1916) the League of the Empire started publishing and presenting special editions of the ‘Complete Works of Shakespeare’ to wounded and disabled soldiers in his name, an edition which quickly became known as ‘the Kitchener Shakespeare’ – but there’s nothing at all about Shakespeare in the famous posters.

‘Lord Kitchener’s Appeal’, recruiting poster, 1914 (National Army Museum)

More tenuous examples include: a sketchbook by a John Henry Jenkins, a front line soldier, which depicted not only trench life but the watercolours of amateur theatricals which the soldiers put on, although Shakespeare is nowhere mentioned; or a 1915 recruitment poster which includes the image of St George and the dragon and so, the curators suggest, might have reminded some viewers of Henry V’s famous call, ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’ Pretty tenuous.

Much more relevant is a book of Shakespeare quotations arranged under themes or headings relevant to the war and distributed to soldiers, ‘Shakespeare in Time of War: Excerpts from the Plays arranged with Topical Allusions’, edited by the artist Francis Colmer and published in 1916.

Another apparently random object is this photo of Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps personnel packing boxes in a factory in 1918. Spot the Shakespeare connection? No, because there isn’t one…

Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps personnel packing boxes in factory, 1918

…until you look at the photo beneath it, which is a photo of Maggie Smale’s all-women production of Henry V, staged in a munitions factory in Leeds which had been operated by the ‘Barnbow Lasses’ during the Great War. Is this to do with feminism? Or pacifism? Or a celebrating of provincial grit? I wasn’t sure.

Still from Maggie Smale’s all-female production of Henry V as featured in ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum. Photo by Mike Oakes

Amateur productions of Shakespeare were mounted across the country, sometimes to raise morale, to entertain wounded soldiers, for the benefit of the public. Three hundred years after his death Shakespeare was not only a well-known brand but possibly the only literary writer a lot of working class people had heard of. As in his own time, he catered for an audience of elite intellectuals, the educated middle classes, and illiterate workers. You can see why Shakespeare productions abounded because he was 1) possibly the only playwright everyone had heard of and 2) safe –unlike more recent troubling playwrights of the previous generation (Shaw, Ibsen etc).

There’s a clip from an official film showing wounded soldiers watching open air production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Scenes like this 1) the British heritage which the soldiers were fighting for 2) to a wider audience demonstrated the care the government was taking of its fighting men. This clip appeared alongside footage of scenes of artillery and war preparation, thus dovetailing Britain’s cultural heritage into the war effort.

in my own life I’ve met plenty of people who don’t give a toss about official culture, art or theatre. You’ve got to wonder how many of the sock and maimed soldiers forced to watch this kind of thing actually enjoyed it or even understood it. Because that’s a thing about Shakespeare – unless you’re pretty familiar with the play beforehand, it’s impossible to get the most out of a theatrical production, in fact it’s often impossible to understand what’s going on and especially difficult to get any of the comedy in his plays.

It’s fascinating to learn about the Shakespeare Hut. In February 1916, to commemorate 300 years since his death, this mock-Tudor retreat was opened on a plot of land in Bloomsbury. The hut was built on a site cleared for a planned Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, which was abandoned because of the war.

The aim was to provide shelter for wounded Australian or New Zealand troops. Over the next two years it would welcome in more than 100,000 soldiers far from their New Zealand homes. Queen Mary visited in 1917, took up her post behind the tea counter, and poured cups for all the men.

The troops were subjected to regular Shakespeare productions, including an all-female Henry V starring Ellen Terry, one of the most famous actors of her day. Hah! So the Maggie Smale production was following in venerable footsteps.

The exhibition features photographs and playlists from the Hut and you can read more and see photos in an interesting Guardian article about it. Interesting to learn that it the site is now occupied by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

One of the most interesting learnings from the exhibition is about the role of theatricals among British prisoners of war held in Germany. The exhibition focuses on the Ruhleben Camp in Germany which housed some 5,000 POWs. Prisoners were allowed to construct a theatre and, for the same tercentenary which prompted the Shakespeare Hut, staged a series of productions, including Twelfth Night and Othello. The exhibition features photos and a programme from a 1915 production of As You Like It.

In a similar spirit, the British Red Cross mounted a Shakespeare Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in 1917. Quite clearly, if you go looking for Shakespeariana during the First World War, you’ll find it.

Installation view of ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum, showing a poster for the Red Cross Shakespeare Exhibition of 1917 (photo by the author)

5. Democratizing Shakespeare: The Second World War

Same goes for the Second war. Once again Shakespeare was trotted out as the exemplar of the culture and values that were under attack from Nazi Germany, that we were fighting to preserve. The motives and means were very similar to the first war – am dram productions across the country to entertain wounded troops or raise money, leading actors of the day giving patriotic productions in London to stir patriotic fervour, footage of productions shot to be show in cinemas and raise morale.

With the new angle of radio. For the first time productions could be broadcast, to a large radio audience which steadily grew throughout the six war years. As part of the government’s attempt to mobilize society to support the war effort, British theatre was sponsored by the state for the first time in its history.

The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) was created to promote and maintain the fine arts and British cultural life. It later became the Arts Council of Great Britain. The Entertainment National Services Association (ENSA) provided for the forces, organising shows and performances by well-known actors, singers, and comedians.

Photo of an ENSA production staged in a London underground station in 1942 (National Army Museum)

Despite the challenges of wartime, both theatre and Shakespeare thrived. Once again, his words helped to frame the experience of conflict both in Britain and across the world. The exhibition features a recording of a radio programme originally broadcast by the BBC Overseas Services on Shakespeare’s birthday on 23 April 1942. It included extracts from ‘As You Like it’, Henry IV part 1 and, of course, Henry V. It was introduced and performed by leading Shakespearean actors Peggy Ashcroft, Robert Donat, Edith Evans and Ralph Richardson. You can listen to it on headphones and marvel at their phenomenally posh plummy English voices.

There’s a section devoted to the Laurence Olivier production of Henry V described at the start of this review.

And once again there’s a section devoted to British prisoners of war staging Shakespeare productions in camps in Germany. The exhibition includes a list of plays staged at Stalag 383 in Hohenfels, which included ‘The Merchant of Venice’.

6. Just Shakespeare: Adapting After 1945

After the Second World War the patriotic tone of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V lingered throughout the 1950s. But the second half of the 1960s saw radical changes in all aspects of art and culture, with a variety of new approaches to all the arts including theatre. This included the anti-war movements triggered by Vietnam, as well as new attitudes to sex and nudity, which now began to appear in Shakespeare productions.

For 200 years the name and plays of Shakespeare had acted as a kind of recruiting sergeant for the British Army and rallying point for the nation in times of real threat (particularly during the Napoleonic, First and Second World Wars). From the late 60s onwards, Shakespeare’s relationship with the state, the Establishment and the Army came under increasing critical scrutiny. Not in every production, but in an increasing number.

Hence Kenneth Branagh’s 1984 RSC production. Unlike earlier productions it shows the execution of French prisoners onstage and then left the bodies and corpses from the Battle of Agincourt at the back of the stage, behind a gauze curtain, for the later, supposedly reconciling scenes between the English king and his French bride-to-be.

The last section of the exhibition, in the central booth of the (fairly small) exhibition space, takes the Branagh production as setting the tone for productions which followed the Falklands War (1982), the Gulf War (1990 to 1991), and the Iraq War (2003 to 2011).

It includes video clips of stage productions including:

a 2013 production of ‘Othello’ which depicts the characters in the modern-day Army uniform used during the Iraq War
a 2015 production of ‘Othello’ which features graphic scenes of waterboarding Iraqi suspects
‘Days of Significance’, a play by Roy Williams based on ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ which looks at the impact of British troops who fought in the Iraq War

The strong anti-war flavour of these productions and the pretty intense criticism of the British Army and its techniques, could hardly be more unlike the innocent patriotism of the Shakespeare Hut or the brightly colours optimism of Olivier’s Henry V. If we go to war with Russia I wonder if Shakespeare will be trotted out to inspire patriotic spirit as it was 100 and 70 years ago. I doubt it. Shakespeare hasn’t changed, that’s to say the texts remain pretty much what they were 400 years ago. But our understanding of war, gained in the brutal conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, has made any thoughts about the glamour or heroism of war impossible to modern Brits.

Availability bias

This is a fascinating premise for an exhibition and I thoroughly enjoyed working my way through the wealth of objects and their captions. It proves that Shakespeare is like the Bible, so compendious and diverse that you can find words to justify more or less any opinion on any subject (as demonstrated by the opposing sides in the American War of Independence using Shakespeare to bolster their arguments).

However, it throws up an obvious issue which is to do with the availability of objects to display. The exhibition was curated by – and is based on the scholarly books by – two Shakespeare scholars, Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai, namely Wartime Shakespeare: Performing Narratives of Conflict. Just from the synopsis on Amazon you can see how a book-length work like this is free to range over all and any productions it likes because words are easy. On the other hand, an exhibition in a museum is severely limited by the objects it can get its hands on.

In fact, like every exhibition at every gallery or museum, this one is an exercise in the art of the possible. Objects which denote important productions or topics may not be available (or may not even exist) while other topics throw up a glut of barely relevant artefacts.

In addition, it’s difficult and expensive to get objects on loan from other collections whereas it’s cheap and easy to get them from your own storeroom, so all exhibitions in all galleries are biased towards the host institution and its collection.

Plus there’s the common problem with any historical overview which is that objects from three or four hundred years ago are rare whereas, as you get closer to the present day, the number of objects rapidly increases, until you are drowning in a surfeit of stuff.

These imbalances in the real world threaten to unbalance or distort the picture painted by any exhibition, an imbalance which is easily managed in books and articles where issues and ideas can be easily conveyed by text alone.

So, at various points, I couldn’t help feeling that the curators had included some objects more because they were just related to one of the conflicts during the period in question than for their Shakespearian relevance. As mentioned above I couldn’t see any Shakespeare connection to the three or four pictures of General Wolfe and the capture of Quebec except that the event was turned into patriotic plays and prints. To put it another way, some of the links between specific conflicts and Shakespeare were pretty tenuous. I still don’t understand why there was an English mortuary sword in the Civil War section except that maybe the curators felt they just needed a physical object, any object, to go alongside the half dozen books and pamphlets.

All the objects (photos, pamphlets, diaries and whatnot) are interesting, it’s just that I was left scratching my head why some of them were included.

Shakespeare and conflict

There’s another, more scholarly, issue. This, as I touched on earlier, is that taken together, Shakespeare’s dozen or so history plays, plus the relevant Roman plays and the tragedies, build up into a subtle, sophisticated, multifaceted meditation on the themes of power, authority, legitimacy, insurrection, rebellion, revolt and overthrow.

Arguably, to really address the topic which this exhibition sets out to explore, you would need a really sound grasp of how all these issues are dramatised and explored in the 20 or so relevant plays, before you even started your review of how they’ve been applied to Britain’s wars and Britain’s Army.

But this, of course, is a massive task – after a lifetime reading Shakespeare I still haven’t read all the history plays and have nothing like a complete grasp of the issues of legitimacy and political power which they raise.

And an exhibition like this has to be practical, finite and manageable. This one achieves what it sets out to do, in a relatively small space, as well as it probably could do. But, in my opinion, the ghost of the larger political, social and cultural issues raised by the plays hover over it, unmentioned and undiscussed.

To take just one aspect of what I’m driving at, many of the characters in the history plays (the ones I’m familiar with) describe and discuss the horror of war, the fear experienced by soldiers, the terror of innocent civilians, the horrific injuries, killing and massacres involved, the fields strewn with bodies, the devastated landscapes and ruined economies. Descriptions of these kinds of things are commonplace in the plays and yet, somehow, hardly occur anywhere in this exhibition.

At some point I realised that this is not an exhibition about Shakespeare and War as about Shakespeare and the British Army. This explains why it’s divided into chronological periods based entirely around conflicts the British Army engaged in right up to the present day, rather than the themes of war encountered in the plays which I have just listed. And this is why, although it’s a very enjoyable trot through British military history, with an emphasis on how Shakespeare’s name, characters and words have been exploited in times of war – it feels, ultimately, despite being packed with shiny objects, intellectually thin.

You can see how an exhibition about Shakespeare and war would actually be something quite different: instead of taking a chronological approach it would take the topics I’ve mentioned several times now – the collapse of authority, civil war, rebellion, interstate war – and then the aspects of war – recruitment, training, fighting, sieges, inspirational rhetoric, the exhilaration of fighting, the horror of wounding, the devastation of the countryside, the mourning of widows – and explore how all of these are described and critiqued in Shakespeare’s multifaceted dramas. It would be something completely different from this exhibition. But then again, maybe what I’ve got in mind would be so wordy and text-heavy that it couldn’t be staged as an exhibition at all.

What this exhibition does, it does very well. It is small but beautifully staged and is FREE.

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by Simon on July 20, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, Great War, History, Literature, Second World War, War, World War One

Tagged 1616, Adrian Noble, American patriots, American War of Independence, Amy Lidster, Antony and Cleopatra, Arts Council of Great Britain, Austria, Awful Moments or Monkeys of Honour, Battle of Quebec, BBC Overseas Service, Ben Jonson, Boer War, Britannia, British Army, Caliban, Carnatic Wars, Catherine of Braganza, Catholicism, CEMA, Charge of the Light Brigade, Charles II, Charles James Fox, Charles Kean, Cheltenham, civil war, Coriolanus, Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, Covent Garden, Crimean War, Cromwell, David Garrick, Days of Significance, Democratizing Shakespeare: The Second World War, Divine Right of Kings, Edith Evans, Edward Capell, Edward III, Egron Sellif Lungren, eighteenth century, Eikon Basilike, Eikonoklastes, Ellen Terry, Emperor Napoleon, England, English civil war, ENSA, Entertainment National Services Association, Falklands War, First World War, France, Francis Colmer, French Revolutionary Wars, General James Wolfe, God for Harry England and Saint George, Great Northern War, Great War, Gulf War, Hamlet, Henry Addington, Henry IV part 1, Henry IV part 2, Henry V, Henry VI part 1, Henry VI part 2, Henry VI part 3, Henry VIII, history plays, Hohenfels, Honfleur, Imperial Shakespeare, Imperial Shakespeare: The Victorian Army, India, Iraq War, Isaac Cruikshank, James Gillray, James II, John Crowne, John Henry Jenkins, John Lewis Marks, John Milton, Julius Caesar, Just Shakespeare: Adapting After 1945, Kenneth Branagh, Kimberley, King Charles I, King George III, King John, King Lear, Ladysmith, Laurence Olivier, League of the Empire, Liberty, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Clinton, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London theatre, Lord Hawkesbury, Lord Kitchener, Macbeth, Mafeking, Maggie Smale, Major Thomas Seccombe, Marcus Brutus, Military Misreadings of Shakespeare, Milton, Misery of Civil War, mortuary sword, Much Ado About Nothing, Napoleonic Wars, National Army Museum, Nazi Germany, New York City, North America, Othello, Paris, Parliament, Patriotic Shakespeare: The First World War, patriotism, Peggy Ashcroft, Prince of Orange, prisoners of war, Prospero, Prussia, Puritans, Queen Victoria, Queen Victoria’s Theatre Album, radical Puritans, Radio, Ralph Richardson, Red Cross Shakespeare Exhibition, Restoration comedy, Revolutionary Shakespeare: Change and Political Debate, Richard II, Richard III, Robert Donat, Roy Williams, Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal Shakespeare: The Civil War and Beyond, Ruhleben Camp, Second World War, Setebos, Seven Years War, Shakespeare, Shakespeare and War, Shakespeare at War: A Material History, Shakespeare in Time of War, Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe, Shakespeare's history plays, Shakespeare's plays, Shakespeare’s Folio, siege of Sebastapol, Sonia Massai, St George and the Dragon, Stalag 383, the Barnbow Lasses, the Caribbean, the Conquest of France, the Crimean War, the Glorious Revolution, the Kitchener Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, the Restoration, The Seven years War, the Shakespeare Hut, the tempest, the Terror, Theatre Royal, Titus Andronicus, Treaty of Amiens, V2, war, War of the Austrian Succession, War of the Spanish Succession, Wars of the Roses, Wars of Three Kingdoms, Wartime Shakespeare: Performing Narratives of Conflict, Waterloo, William Pitt, William Wilberforce, Women's Army Auxiliary Corps

Posted by Simon on July 20, 2024

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The Plantagenets (1) by Dan Jones (2012)

The House of Plantagenet held the English throne from 1154 (with the accession of King Henry II) until 1485 (when Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth).

The origin of ‘plantagenet’

The name derives from Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou in north-west France (tucked in behind Normandy and Brittany) from 1113 to 1151, and here’s why:

When Henry I of England’s only son and heir, William Aetheling, drowned in the White Ship disaster of 1120, Henry took a second wife, Adeliza, in the hope of having another son, but their marriage was childless. So Henry named his daughter, Matilda, born in 1102, as his heir and called the nobles of England together to vow to accept her as monarch after his death. All he had to do now was marry her off to another royal family so she could continue the line. Henry received various offers for Matilda’s hand and eventually chose the 15-year-old Geoffrey of Anjou, son of Fulk V, Count of Anjou – for the good reason that the county of Anjou lay to the south of Henry’s kingdom of Normandy, so this alliance would secure his southern border.

Now according to legend, young Geoffrey of Anjou was not only a keen rider and fierce warrior but liked to sport a sprig of yellow broom in his hair. The Latin for broom is Planta Genista – hence the nickname Plantagenet which came, in retrospect, to be applied to the entire ‘house’.

(In actual fact, the family didn’t start using this as a family name until several centuries after Geoffrey’s death, but history now refers to the entire line as ‘the Plantagenets’ and ‘the Plantagenets’ they will forever remain.)

Anyway, when Henry I of England died in 1135, his daughter Matilda theoretically became Queen (a title everyone was uncomfortable with, so she took the title ‘Lady of England’).

But such quibbles were rather academic because Henry’s sister’s son, Matilda’s cousin, Stephen of Blois, hastened to England to lay claim to the throne himself. Although his claim was more remote than Matilda’s, he had one big advantage – he was a man.

On this basis, Stephen secured the loyalty of many of the more conservative nobles. As Dan Jones points out, the law of primogeniture i.e. the automatic succession of the first-born child of a monarch, was, during this period, only taken as a rough guideline. In practice, each new king needed the support of a majority of the nobles in order to secure the throne. And this support Stephen managed to achieve, helped by influential relatives, notably his younger son, Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester.

However, not all of the nobles of England supported Stephen, some cleaved to Henry’s original wish that Matilda succeed to the throne – and so England fell into a nineteen-year period of anarchy and civil war, fought between the brutal mercenaries of Queen Matilda and the equally brutal mercenaries of King Stephen.

It was only towards the end of the period that Matilda’s son, Henry, began to emerge as a capable leader and successful warrior in his own right. Henry won successive campaigns in England, lobbied the pope to be recognised as the valid successor to Stephen and won over regional English barons. Eventually in 1153 King Stephen recognised Henry’s right to the throne and adopted him as his ‘son’. Next year Stephen died and Henry ascended the throne as Henry II, thus ending the civil war and unifying the realm of England but also the family’s extensive lands in France.

And thus begins the real chronicle of the Plantagenet kings.

Dates

Dan Jones has written a rip-roaring, boys-own-adventure version of the history of the Plantagenet kings (and queens) between the ascension of Henry II in 1154 and 1399, when Richard II was overthrown by Henry Bolingbroke, who thus became King Henry IV of England.

The Plantagenet dynasty continued for another 85 years after Richard’s overthrow, up till the day when King Richard III was cut down at the Battle of Bosworth Field and was succeeded by a new family, the Tudors; but Jones brings his account to an end at 1400, partly for thematic reasons – to continue means getting into the Wars of the Roses which is a whole new story – but mostly because of size – this paperbook book is already a hefty 601 pages long: another 85 years-worth would have made it too big and heavy to hold or read easily!

And not to worry, Jones has gone on to publish the sequel – Plantagenets II you might call it – or, as it’s actually titled, The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors. For although Henry V, Henry VI, Edward IV and Richard II are all theoretically Plantagenets, the 15th century has a feel of its own, dominated by the prolonged civil war between two branches of the Plantagenet line which came to be known as the Yorkists and the Lancastrians.

Narrative history

Conventional academic history normally includes surveys of society, analyses of changing social structures, a look at the developing economy, technology and commerce, developments in law and governance, with sections thrown in about the arts, poetry, painting and architecture.

Well, none of that features in this big book. All that social, economic and cultural history has been chucked out to make The Plantagenets read almost like a novel, with Jones concentrating exclusively on the triumphs and reversals experienced by the strong central characters, the successive kings and their immediate families – scheming, strategising, involved in endless in-fighting, marrying off members of the family, making alliances, breaking alliances, raising armies of mercenaries and marching off to war. The result is ridiculously fun and readable.

Adding to the popular feel, the book is divided into seven sections with romantic titles like ‘Age of Shipwreck’, ‘Age of Empire’, ‘Age of Opposition’ and so on, giving a bright Hollywood feel to each era. And these sections are themselves broken up into surprisingly numerous chapters, 85 of them to be precise.

Given that the seven section headings each require a title page and a blank page (i.e. 14 pages with no text), this means that the chapters are an average of 601 – 14 blank pages = 587 text pages / 85 chapters = 6.9 pages long.

In other words, the chapters are short, focused and punchy, and Jones likes to end them on a cliff-hanger:

It would be here, however, that all his decades of triumph would dissolve, finally, into heartbreak. (p.99) [setting up the next chapter which describes the war which eclipsed the end of Henry II’s reign]

Yet for every month he spent on his crusade, problems loomed larger and larger for the Plantagenet empire back at home. (p.123) [describing the mounting problems facing Richard I]

All he could do was sit behind his ever-receding lines and hope for a miracle. None would be forthcoming. (p.165) [King John loses Normandy to the French]

The book often has a soap-opera-ish tone but then many of the actual events are barely believable, and the whole story presents a vast panorama of lying, treachery and blood-curdling violence on an epic scale.

All in all, this is a hugely enjoyable, racy, pacy page-turner of a popular history.

A war of all against all

It is fairly common knowledge that the Middle Ages were warlike, but it’s still breath-taking to read quite how much it consisted of back-to-back fighting. With the spring of each year came the return of the ‘campaigning season’ and off they’d go, pretty much every leader of every country, duchy, princedom, earldom and so on – keen to gain ‘honour’ and loot by attacking their nearest neighbour and reneging on every deal they’d made the previous year.

And it wasn’t just wars between ‘nations’ – after all, nations in our sense barely existed – the fighting is between everybody. Henry II was reckoned a great king in his day because he held together an ’empire’ which stretched from the border with warlike Scotland, across all of troublesome England, down through the duchy of Normandy (which he owned as a descendant of William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy), along with Anjou which he’d inherited, into Brittany which he’d conquered, and across the vast area of south-west France known as Aquitaine, which came into his possession after he married its queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, in 1152.

It comes as no surprise that holding on to all this land involved the king in non-stop conflict against the Scots in the north, against the King of France in the East, and in putting down a ceaseless stream of rebellions everywhere else, especially in the territories scattered on the periphery of his ’empire’ (namely in Poitou, Maine and Brittany).

So much is to be expected. What was a revelation to me was the extent to which Henry II ended up fighting his own family. He had four sons – William, Geoffrey, Richard and John. He parcelled out bits of the empire to each of them but they were never satisfied, his eldest son William in particular, champing at the bit for more land and more power, and in 1173 this led to ‘the Great Revolt’ when Henry’s eldest three sons united to rise against him, supported by their mother Eleanor (!) and numerous rebel counts.

It took Henry 18 months of unremitting fighting and canny diplomacy to put the rebellion down. He then showed astonishing clemency in forgiving his sons and re-allotting them their various dukedoms (Richard retained Aquitaine, Geoffrey Normandy, and so on). After all, he needed them – they were his heirs.

(The example of Henry’s wise forbearance is revisited later in the book, when bad King John and weak King Henry III are seen vindictively punishing those who opposed them – and thus creating enemies for life, not only in the enemies themselves, but animosity among their wider families and children. In this, as in so much else, Henry II showed a tough wisdom.)

But if Henry forgave his sons, he didn’t show the same clemency to his wife and rebel queen, Eleanor, who he locked away in Shrewsbury castle for her pains (and to guarantee her sons’ good behaviour). In any case, despite his forgiveness, the three unfilial boys carried on making alliances with the king of France, with rebellious counts, with anyone they could get to listen to them, and carried on non-stop plotting against their father and against each other.

At this high level of courtly politics the unscrupulous politicking, back-stabbing, levying of mercenaries and fighting small battles to put down rebels, uprisings, invasions and attacks is constant.

If there’s one conclusion from this long, violent, treacherous and cynical record it is what a terrible system of government ‘kingship’ was, when the throne so often ended up in the hands of women who no-one would follow, of psychopaths who suspected everyone of betraying them, of children who were easily manipulated by cabals and cliques, or of men who were simply not up to its almost impossibly demanding requirements.

Plantagenet or Angevin

Historians are divided in their use of the terms ‘Plantagenet’ and ‘Angevin’ in regards to Henry II and his sons. Some make Henry II the first Plantagenet King of England, while others refer to Henry, Richard and John as the ‘Angevin dynasty’, Angevin being the adjective derived from the region of Anjou, because all three were Dukes of Anjou and (Henry in particular) expanded their realm to contain all of England, Normandy, Brittany, Anjou and Maine, and Aquitaine i.e. the western half of France.

In 1204 John lost much of the Angevins’ continental territories, including Anjou itself, to the King of France. This is why the Angevin’ dynasty is considered to end with John, and John’s sin – Henry III of England – being considered the first Plantagenet, a name derived, as we’ve mentioned, from the nickname of his great-grandfather, Geoffrey of Anjou.

King Henry I (1100 to 1135)

Youngest son of William the Conqueror, King of England and Duke of Normandy, Henry I groomed his own son William Aetheling for the succession, having him named co-ruler when he turned 16, as was the custom.

The drowning of this son in the White Ship tragedy (the Aetheling and a group of courtiers were aboard ship in Barfleur harbour drinking late into the night, at which point the captain ill-advisedly set off to sail back to England in pitch darkness and crashed into some rocks) left the succession to the throne vacant.

Henry’s first wife was by now dead, so he quickly remarried the nubile young Adeliza of Louvain, in the hope of having another son, but their marriage was childless. So as a last resort, Henry declared his daughter, Empress Matilda, his heir. She had been married to the Holy Roman Emperor when just eight, but he had died and she had returned to England. Now Henry quickly remarried her to Geoffrey of Anjou who was just fifteen, in 1128. Their marriage was difficult but eventually Matilda did her duty and gave birth to two sons, Henry (who would become Henry II) and Geoffrey, in 1133 and 1134. Then, after a day hunting, Henry fell ill after – according to legend – consuming ‘a surfeit of lampreys’ at dinner, and died on 1 December 1135.

The Anarchy (1135 to 54)

After Henry I died without a male heir, his daughter Matilda claimed the throne but was beaten to it by her cousin, Stephen, who ruled the centre of England as King Stephen, while Matilda managed to establish a base in the West Country, with regular incursions by her allies in the East and North. Both sides hired mercenaries, mainly Flemish. Over the next 19 years hardly a part of England wasn’t ravished and burnt by these hated foreigners. England became a wasteland.

King Henry II (1154 to 1189)

Cut to a generation later and young Henry – Henry FitzEmpress as he was called ‘Fitz’ meaning ‘son of’ and Queen Matilda often being referred to as an empress – is turning twenty.

Henry has shrewdly married Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152 and plots to overthrow the ageing king Stephen. The major obstacle to Henry’s plan to take back the throne of England was Stephen’s own son, Eustace. But Eustace did everyone a favour by dying in 1153, just as Henry mounted an invasion of south England backed by Norman forces. Now lacking an heir, and faced with Henry and Matilda’s sizeable forces, King Stephen made a deal, declaring Henry his heir and adopting him as his ‘son’ – and then very conveniently dying the next year (1154).

Thus Henry smoothly succeeded to the throne and became King of England, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine, Count of Anjou, Count of Maine, Count of Nantes and sometime Lord of Ireland.

21 when he came to the throne, Henry was clever, resourceful and aggressive, and faced almost continual warfare from the King of France and neighbouring counts and dukes for the next 37 years. He not only held his empire together but expanded it south towards Toulouse, while seizing Eastern Wales and East Ireland, repeatedly defeating his enemies, while also finding time to supervise reform of the tax and legal systems, especially in England.

Maybe the most striking thing about these kings is the way the way England continued to be only one of their realms. English historians see them as English kings concerned with English law etc, but Henry and his sons Richard and John were as much or more concerned with courtly politics, appointments, the laws and customs and even the smallest castles and lords in Normandy, Brittany, Poitou, Maine, Anjou or Aquitaine as well.

The simplest proof of this is that when Henry II, caught up in his last campaign (against his eldest son Richard who had rebelled against him, in alliance with the king of France), realised that he was dying, he headed not north to England, but south into his home domain of Anjou, dying at Chinon Castle and asking to be buried at nearby Fontevraud Abbey. This abbey is also the last resting place of his queen Eleanor, and their son Richard I. It’s only by bending the truth that we call these early Plantagenet rulers ‘English’. They were something else, really, for which no modern word quite exists. Rulers of the Plantagenet Empire.

Henry had five legitimate sons with Eleanor of Aquitaine:

William (b.1153) who died aged 3.
Henry the Young King (b.1155) who died aged 28 in the midst of fighting against his father and brother Richard.
Richard (b.1157) who became king in the middle of waging a military campaign against his own father (one chronicler said that his father’s corpse, laid out in the chapel at Chinon, began to bleed from the nose when Richard approached it – and who would blame it!).
Geoffrey (b.1158) the sneaky devious one who was involved in countless plots against his father and brothers but died in a tournament in 1186, aged 27.
John (b.1166) who schemed relentlessly during his brother Richard’s absence in the Holy Land. While Richard was away, John handed over much of the Angevin empire to King Philip Augustus of France in return for being allowed to rule it, and then plotted with Philip to try and prolong Richard’s captivity in Germany. What a creep.

King Richard I (1189 to 1199)

It is interesting to learn that Richard was always closest to his mother, Eleanor. Once is father Henry II had given him her territory, the Duchy of Aquitaine, Richard refused to be budged from it despite Henry II’s complicated plans to move his sons around the empire and frequent generous offers to Richard. No. Aquitaine was his!

When the Saracen leader Saladin seized Jerusalem in 1187 all Europe was shocked and Henry II negotiated a peace with his enemy King Philip of France in order to ‘take the Cross’ and go crusading to the Holy Land. But Henry died in the midst of the rebellion against him led by Richard and so the onus to take up the cross fell on the latter, a doughty warrior who, of course, was to go on and earn the sobriquet Cœur de Lion or Lionheart.

As for Henry, so England was only one of Richard’s many realms and one he wasn’t particularly attached to, always preferring his ancestral homeland of Aquitaine. Richard mainly regarded England as a cash cow and mulcted it mercilessly in order to fund and provision a huge fleet for the crusade. (Richard is widely quoted as having said that if he could have sold London to raise funds, he would have.)

Richard rampaged across the Mediterranean, seizing Cyprus for his empire and alienating other European notables engaged on crusade. Once actually in the Holy Land he won some famous campaigns, including recapturing the port of Acre, but he never got near recapturing Jerusalem and he alienated many important European leaders with his braggadochio.

In his absence the condition of his empire decayed. King Philip of France (who had returned early from the crusade, in anger at Richard’s bossiness) now attacked Normandy, and England was brought to the brink of civil war between the forces of the chamberlain Richard had appointed, William Longchamps, and rebel nobles allied with his slimy brother, John.

While all this was happening at home, the crusade dragged on but a) Richard was physically ill for most of it b) military might turned out to be even between the Crusaders and Saladin, leading to a costly stalemate.

Eventually, Richard signed a peace pact with Saladin allowing for Christian pilgrims to visit Jerusalem in peace, and set sail, vowing to return.

It was only on the return journey that Richard discovered just how many enemies he had made in the Holy Land, and just how blackened his reputation had become. Travelling overland from the Adriatic, Richard was caught and imprisoned by Leopold of Austria who he had insulted at the siege of Acre (by refusing to let Leopold enter the captured city on equal terms with himself and Philip of France, and then by ordering Leopold’s standard inside the captured city to be torn down).

Leopold now sold Richard on to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who promptly insisted that England pay a vast ransom for Richard’s release. Despite lobbying from the King of France and his brother John to keep him imprisoned, loyal nobles in England eventually raised the ransom and paid the Emperor, who released Richard. He had been in prison from Christmas 1192 to February 1194.

Back in England, Richard set about raising more money in order to put this realm back on a sound footing, before setting off to Normandy to reclaim the territory the King of France had seized in his absence.

It was in the south, in Aquitaine, that Richard met his death, unexpectedly shot from the battlements of the castle of Châlus-Chabrola, as Richard suppressed a relatively minor revolt by Viscount Aimar V of Limoges. Richard was hit in the shoulder by a stray crossbow bolt. Trying to pull it out, he snapped off the shaft leaving the metal arrowhead deep in his shoulder. The surgeon who removed the metal arrowhead hacked deep into the flesh and muscle to get at it. The wound became infected and then gangrenous. Richard died in his mother’s arms, in agony. He was 41.

Richard was buried in the same church – Fontevraud Abbey near Chinon – as the father he had spent so much energy rebelling against (Henry II).

King John (1199 to 1216)

‘England’s most callous and remorseless king’ (p.216)

Richard had married Berengaria of Navarre in 1191 during his sojourn in Cyprus. Despite eight years of marriage they failed to produce any children. Richard’s death without an heir was the trigger for the dissolution of the empire his father had so laboriously built up and defended.

Towards the end of his life Richard had nominated his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, the son of his late brother Geoffrey, to be his heir, and when Richard died, Brittany declared for Arthur. But England declared for John, while Aquitaine was left to fight for.

John’s lack of political nous, his ability to rub everyone up the wrong way, his reputation for treachery, and his uselessness as a general all contrast sharply with the ascendant French king, Philip II, who had come to the throne in 1180 as a 15-year-old. (John, born in 1166, was 33 when he came to the throne; Philip, born in 1165, was one year older and infinitely more experienced and canny.)

As English people we tend to focus on the failures of bad King John, but this is to miss the point that Philip was the star king of the age, not only going on Crusade, but fighting off a north European alliance at the crucial Battle of Bouvines, which was a defining moment in the unification of France. Philip won Normandy and Brittany and most of Aquitaine from John, as well as extending French possessions further to the south-east.

Philip built a great wall around Paris, re-organized the French government, reined in his nobles and brought financial stability to his country. All in all he transformed France from a small feudal state into the most prosperous and powerful country in Europe and no wonder contemporaries came to call him Philip ‘Augustus’ during his lifetime (in reference to the Roman emperor Gaius Octavius Thurinus whose success in extending and bringing peace to the Roman Empire earned him the title ‘Augustus’).

Jones chronicles John’s loss of almost all the continental parts of the Angevin empire. For the first time, a Plantagenet king really was forced back into these British islands and could now truly be described as an English king. The surprise of this section of the book is how firm and effective John’s rule actually was in Britain, where he extended Plantagenet rule over all of Wales and most of Ireland.

John was fascinated by law and instituted circuits of judges, himself taking a close interest in even trivial law cases. In the height of his reign from 1207 to 1212 he devised countless new ways to extract money from his nobles, as well as turning on the small but wealthy Jewish community in England with terrifying rapacity, torturing wealthy Jews till they handed over more or less all their belongings to him.

With these devices John became the richest of the Plantagenet kings, and yet the loss of Normandy and his unscrupulous money-raising turned the aristocracy against him. A series of revolts in the 1210s led to lengthy negotiations over a peace treaty. This expanded – as medieval texts had a way of doing – into a complete set of rules which king and nobles should abide by, and was given the name of the Big Charter, or Magna Carta. The nobles forced King John to sign it at Runnymede in East Berkshire in June 1215.

It was news to me that the Magna Carta was:

less a bill of rights than a peace treaty between the king and his rebellious barons
that it failed – within months it was renounced by the king and his main supporter, the pope, and open rebellion broke out again

As civil war erupted both sides raced to seize London and the rebel barons succeeded. In January 1216 Philip of France’s son Louis landed with a French army and was warmly welcomed into rebel-held London. Deprived of money, support and arms John’s forces took to picking off rebel strongpoints and he was campaigning in East Anglia when, in late 1216, he contracted dysentery and died, leaving his nine-year-old son to inherit a country divided between rebel and loyalist forces.

P.S. Arthur of Brittany

John hadn’t ascended the throne uncontested. On Richard’s death in 1199 he was certainly the eldest surviving son of Henry II, but an elder brother of his, Geoffrey, although he had died in 1186 (aged just 27) had had a son, Arthur, who succeeded his father to become Arthur I, Duke of Brittany.

John’s claim was supported by the bulk of the English and Norman nobility and he was quickly crowned at Westminster Abbey, backed by his mother, Eleanor. But young Arthur was supported by the majority of the Breton, Maine and Anjou nobles and received the support of Philip II, King Of France.

For the next four years the two were involved in a complex powerplay involving complex interactions of allies and enemies. In 1202 John’s forces captured young Arthur and John sent him to the castle at Falaise (or Rouen, according to some accounts). It isn’t known for certain what happened next but one chronicler says that, one night, drunk after dinner, John went to Arthur’s cell, murdered him, weighted his body with a stone and threw it into the River Seine. Whatever happened, Arthur never re-emerged, and the rumour of his death alienated the entire population of Brittany from John, and eventually became well known throughout France and England. When Philip II of France invaded England in 1216 he cited John’s alleged murder of Arthur as one of the pretexts.

Interdict and excommunication

Among the other perils of being a 12th century king (or emperor or count or prince or duke) was having to manage your relationship with the pope. When the archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, died in 1205, John proposed a successor but he was rejected by the cathedral chapter for Canterbury. Both sides put their proposals to the pope who turned them both down and imposed his own candidate, Stephen Langton. Infuriated, John banned Langton from entering England and seized the church’s property. The pope retaliated by placing the entire country of England under an Interdict, in March 1208, prohibiting clergy from conducting religious services, with the exception of baptisms for the young, and confessions and absolutions for the dying. John seized land and estates belonging to the church, prompting the pope to personally excommunicate John in November 1209. Jones’s account of all this is very funny, John’s lead characteristic being complete indifference to the Interdict and excommunication.

Eventually both sides saw a solution was required and in 1213 the papal legate brokered a deal whereby John offered to surrender the Kingdom of England to the papacy for a feudal service of 1,000 marks, and agreed to pay back the huge sums he had gouged out of his clergy and church during the Interdiction. It sounds like a bad deal but in fact it won the pope over to John’s side and he gave unstinting support to the king throughout the Magna Carta crisis. Pope Innocent in fact excommunicated the barons who forced John to sign the Big Charter, and then excommunicated King Philip of France when he invaded England in January 1216. Hard not to conclude that excommunications were thrown around like smarties.

King Henry III (1216 to 1272)

‘Born without a father, abandoned by his mother, never allowed to grow up watching another king rule, all his life dominated by others: Henry was from the start a poor candidate for the Crown…’ (p.266)

Henry III had such a long reign because he came to the throne aged just 9. He was the oldest son of King John and his wife Isabella of Angoulême. As we’ve seen, his father died in the middle of what became known as the First Barons’ War (1215–1217). The rebel barons had allied with the crown of France and the French had invaded England, led by the king’s son, Prince Louis, the future Louis VIII. There followed a year and a half of complex manoeuvres, sieges and battles, notably the second Battle of Lincoln (p.222) where an army led by the 70-year-old William Marshall managed to defeat the pro-French English barons. These land defeats were accompanied by several sea victories against the French – before Louis finally gave up and signed the Treaty of Lambeth relinquishing French claims to the English crown.

Henry was humourless and devout and, as he matured, became increasingly obsessed with the last Anglo-Saxon king, Edward the Confessor. He was impressionable and remained under the influence of older guardians till well into his 30s, allowing them to fleece the country in the usual way, despite the limits supposedly set by Magna Carta. First Hubert de Burgh and then Peter des Roches gained influence over Henry, and used their positions to award law cases in their own favour, seize land, divert royal revenue to their own families etc, prompting a number of uprisings and virtually small-scale civil wars.

During Henry’s reign the Magna Carta, along with the Law of the Forest, were reissued and widely distributed. Generally ignored under John, it was only during Henry III’s reign that these documents began to take hold as a list of rights and duties which a king was expected to obey. They formed the basis of the notion that, in order to have his way – and especially raise money for foreign war – the king could be held to account to the numerous clauses of the two documents. In other words, that the king had to bargain and barter for financial support.

Such was Henry’s misrule that a consistent body of barons now began to meet three or four times a year to consult on Henry’s actions. One of them is referred to as a ‘parliament’ in a document of Henry’s, in 1236 (p.251). And this is how the English Parliament began, sitting in judgement on an incompetent king. As early as 1233 there was talk of deposing the king.

Simon de Montfort came from France and was the latest in a line of strong father figures that Henry seemed to need. Simon married Henry’s widowed sister, Eleanor of England, in 1238, shocking commentators; usually royal women were kept as bargaining chips to marry off to foreign kings not mere aristocrats. The king’s brother Richard of Cornwall, briefly rose in revolt against the marriage, until paid off.

As the 1240s rumbled along de Montfort and Henry fell out. After a mad project to conquer Sicily barely got off the ground, though incurring huge debts in the mid-1250s, the barons, once again, rebelled against an incompetent Plantagenet king. Summoned to Oxford to give money and support to Henry’s scheme, the barons refused to a man, and instead imposed the Provisions of Oxford, an extension of the Big Charter rights, with the insistence that England be ruled by a council of 25 barons elected by their peers, and a new innovation – that justice in the shires should be administered by four knights who would go on circuit to review law cases (p.261).

These were followed by the Provisions of Westminster in 1259 which lay down far-reaching reforms in administration. Henry had become ‘a dithering irrelevance’ in his own land (p.263).

Having read these accounts of the reigns of King John and Henry III, what they really amount to is the glaring fact that rule by one man was a terrible, terrible system, which seemed to have embedded in its essence institutional corruption, favouritism, unfair and arbitrary taxation, brutal torture and execution on trumped up charges, personal vendettas, and the pursuit of mad, exorbitantly expensive foreign wars.

Alas it would take another 400 years of personal rule by various incompetent kings before Oliver Cromwell’s regime took opposition to its logical conclusion and cut off the head of yet another incompetent, spendthrift ruler, thus chastening and limiting all his successors.

The only successful campaign of Henry’s rule was carried out by the Earl of Salisbury, who secured the land around Gascony in south-west France, thus establishing a 200-year-long commercial connection with this important wine-growing region.

But for the rest, Henry was ultimately forced, under the Treaty of Paris, to go to France and kneel before the French King Louis IX, and do him formal obeisance, and renounce his claims to Normandy, Maine, Anjou and Poitou.

If there’s a dramatic plotline to his long reign it’s in the relationship with Simon de Montfort. Born in France, Montfort inherited the earldom of Leicester and arrived in the English court in the 1230s. His fierce Catholic faith and manly confidence (he had already been on several crusades) dazzled the impressionable Henry who, as mentioned, married him to his sister Eleanor. But relations slowly became strained, as de Montfort presumed on their friendship to borrow money against the king’s name in 1239. de Montfort was also squeezed out by the arrival of the de Lusignan clan from France in the 1240s, who also began to manipulate the impressionable king.

A long line of disagreements – over Henry’s mismanagement of a campaign in Poitou, and then over de Montfort’s heavy-handed administration of Gascony – led to de Montfort becoming the leader of the rebel barons in the later 1240s and into the confrontations of the 1250s, where he led the deputation which forced Henry to accept the Provisions of Oxford.

A complicated sequence of failed negotiations led up to the Battle of Lewes on 14 May 1264, the first set-piece battle on English soil in a century. The rebels won, capturing the King, Lord Edward, and Richard of Cornwall, Henry’s brother and the titular King of Germany. This led to the Great Parliament of 1265 (also known as de Montfort’s Parliament). For the first time representatives were invited from all the counties and selected boroughs of England. Voting rights were discussed. All this is the seeds of modern democracy.

But Henry’s son, Prince Edward, escaped from captivity and rallied royalist nobles as well as Welsh rebels and this led to a pitched battle with de Montfort’s forces at Evesham (4 August 1265), which was a decisive royalist victory.

Jones describes how a 12-man hit squad was commissioned to roam the battlefield, ignoring all distractions, with the sole task of finding and killing de Montfort. They succeeded. Montfort’s body was mutilated, his testicles, hands and feet cut off. To later generations he became a sort of patron saint of representative government. Today, De Montfort University in Leicester is named after him.

Henry III was once again titular king but he was a broken, dithering old man. The real power in the land during his last few years was his forceful and energetic son, Edward (named after Henry’s icon, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, Edward the Confessor) who turned out to be a very different character from his saintly Saxon namesake.

[To be continued…]

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by Simon on April 29, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Anglo Saxon, Books, History, Middle Ages

Tagged 2012, Adeliza, Adeliza of Louvain, Angevin, Angevin Empire, Aquitaine, Arthur of Brittany, Battle of Bosworth, Battle of Bouvines, Battle of Evesham, Battle of Lincoln, Berengaria of Navarre, Brittany, Chinon Castle, Count of Anjou, Cyprus, Cœur de Lion, Dan Jones, de Lusignan clan, de Montfort's Parliament, Edward IV, Edward the Confessor, Eleanor of Aquitaine, England, English throne, Eustace, excommunication, First Crusade, Fontevraud Abbey, France, Fulk V, Gascony, Geoffrey of Anjou, Geoffrey V, Henry Bolingbroke, Henry I, Henry II, Henry III, Henry IV, Henry of Blois, Henry V, Henry VI, House of Plantagenet, Isabella of Angoulême, Jerusalem, King John, Law of the Forest, Leopold of Austria, Lionheart, Louis VIII, Magna Carta, Matilda, Normandy, Oliver Cromwell, Papal Interdict, Philip Augustus, Planta Genista, Richard II, Richard III, Runnymede, Saladin, Scotland, Simon de Montfort, Stephen of Blois, The Anarchy, the Great Parliament, the Great Revolt, the Holy Land, the Holy Roman Emperor, the Middle Ages, The Plantagenets, the Provisions of Oxford, the Provisions of Westminster, the Tudors, Treaty of Lambeth, Treaty of Paris, Viscount Aimar V of Limoges, War of the Roses, White Ship disaster, William Aetheling, William Longchamps, William Marshall, William the Conqueror

Posted by Simon on April 29, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/04/29/the-plantagenets-dan-jones/

The Wars of the Roses by John Gillingham (1981)

This book is 42 years old but is still, apparently, influential for the approach it takes to the subject. It amounts to an attack on prevailing historical opinion about the wars, and his critique of that attitude remains influential to this day.

Gillingham’s arguments are summed up in the brief but powerful opening chapter.

The prevailing view

The Middle Ages are conventionally dated as coming to an end around 1500. Therefore, the fact that England was subject to civil wars between various claimants to the crown from 1455 to 1485 was taken as indicating the general bloodiness of the whole 15th century, and an indication that the entire Plantagenet line of kings was worn out.

On this the traditional view, the wars of the roses represent the ‘decline’ of the Middle Ages into chaos and bloodshed, reaching a nadir with the short brutal rule of King Richard III (1483-1485), whose injustice and harshness prompted yet another rebellion, this time led by a Welsh nobleman, Henry Tudor, which culminated in the decisive Battle of Bosworth, where Richard was killed and his army defeated.

The victorious Henry – crowned Henry VII – established the Tudor line of monarchs which proceeded through Henry VIII, Mary Tudor, Edward VI, to the glorious reign of good Queen Elizabeth I, marking the transition from an exhausted medieval dynasty to the ‘early modern’ period. Hooray.

Gillingham’s counter-arguments

The myth of periods

Historians know they shouldn’t divide history into periods, but they do. They shouldn’t because time is a seamless continuum and dividing it up into chunks is highly misleading. Defining ‘periods’ in this way has two drawbacks.

Having defined a block of time as the ‘so-and-so period’, the temptation is to give this random era a beginning, middle and end.
And ‘ends’, in the organic world, tend to be the result of age and decline.

Thus the recurring vice of historians is inventing periods and then spending careers accounting for their ‘rise’ and their ‘fall’.

The myth of the Middle Ages

But these are totally misleading metaphors. In reality there were no ‘middle ages’. The phrase was invented in the ‘Renaissance’ to characterise the period between the peak of the ancient Roman world and the revival of learning which Renaissance authors were very conscious of in their own time.

But in our time, for a generation or more, historians have been subverting the ‘myth of the middle ages’ in all kinds of ways.

One way is by explaining that Rome didn’t ‘decline and fall’ as fast or as thoroughly as the myth demands. This is the thrust of Chris Wickham’s magisterial study, The Inheritance of Rome which shows how the legislative, linguistic, religious and administrative legacy of Rome continued for centuries after the removal of the last Roman emperor (476), strongly enduring into the era of Charlemagne (crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800).

The myth of violence

Gillingham asserts that England wasn’t a specially violent or bloodthirsty place in the later 15th century. The reverse. All the evidence is that England was unusually peaceful among comparably sized European states. Gillingham gives a lot of evidence for this.

He gives a long explanation of military technology, showing how the widespread development of powerful cannon was accompanied by the equal development of fortifications which could resist them, specifically the creation of bulwarks sticking out from the curtain walls of town or castle walls, to be used as platforms to bombard attacking forces. Almost all European towns and cities built them because the continent existed in a state of almost continuous warfare; there are hardly any in England because they weren’t needed.
Foreign observers commented on the peacefulness of England and pointed out one simple reason: the Channel. All nations in continental Europe were liable to be attacked at any moment by any other nation. Nobody could attack England. Seaborne raids there were, for example on the Cinque Ports on the south coast – but these merely prove Gillingham’s point because these were the only places which built ‘modern’ defensive walls. The entire rest of England didn’t need them.

On the contrary, Gillingham adduces evidence that the wages of labourers were at their highest point during the period. And – something he doesn’t himself mention but which I know independently – the period from 1450 saw the flourishing of the late medieval style of parish church design known as ‘Perpendicular’ – new, larger-than-ever churches built across the country and representing the wealth that comes from economic and social stability. It was the heyday of medieval church building.

So far from being the bloodbath which later tradition made it out to be, Gillingham pithily sums up the period of disorder which later generations called the wars of the roses as merely ‘a few disturbances of the aristocratic establishment’ (p.11).

The Tudor myth

So why is there this myth in the first place?

Because when Henry Tudor defeated Richard III he commissioned writers to prove that he was a hero, restoring order and peace to a nation brought to its knees by incompetent rulers, weltering in blood and chaos, all leading to the acme of evil – the wicked king who Henry overthrew, black Richard III, the evil hunchback.

His son (Henry VIII) perpetuated this version of history and so did his sons and daughters (Edward VI and Elizabeth I). Chroniclers, teachers, historians – everything they wrote and published using the power of the new printing presses (which began to spread precisely during Henry VII’s reign) was first vetted and approved by government censors. And the Tudor government used the power of the press to promulgate the Official Tudor Version of history describing a state brought to the brink of chaos by the incompetent Lancastrians, and only saved from chaos by the heroic Tudor dynasty.

100 years later, Shakespeare – whose history plays are sometimes credited with being the biggest single influence on the English people’s view of their own history – sealed and cemented the myth in the series of eight ‘history’ plays he wrote about Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, and the sad decline of Henry VI (the incompetent, possibly mentally defective king under whom the wars broke out) and the short wicked reign of Richard III.

Later historians accepted the official Tudor myth at face value and the story of chaos climaxing in the wickedest king in our island history was repeated over and again.

Only in the 1980s and since, has a revisionist version of the period taken hold: one that doesn’t represent it as a period of decline and fall into inevitable violence, but of surprising peace and stability upset only by dynastic quarrels right at the top of society which had surprisingly little impact except on the poor individuals press-ganged into fighting or in whose vicinity battles – generally quite small-scale battles – took place.

Full of meat and ideas

Lots of history books are full of dates, events and pernickety interpretations of them, but Gillingham’s book is riveting for the way it defines the big issues and tackles them head on. It is packed with logical arguments and insights.

It is, for example, fascinating to read that the biggest problem for any armed force in the field was provisions. Even living off the land was only a viable option for a limited period. In a war of foreign conquest part of the process of cowing the opposition was ravaging and destroying the land. But in a civil war, especially when you were claiming the throne and looking for people’s loyalty, the opposite was true – you wanted to present yourself as the enforcer of peace, law and stability. You wanted to rein in your followers and limit damage as much as possible.

These reasons explain why the Hundred Years War – fought mainly in France and which ended on the eve of the Wars of the Roses, in 1453 – and the other continental wars of this period, often settled down into long and destructive sieges, with land around the besieged cities being systematically ravaged and laid waste.

By contrast the Wars of the Roses were characterised by the opposite, an unusual number of pitched battles, battles which didn’t last long and were usually decisive. Neither side wanted to destroy the very kingdom they were fighting to inherit.

This isn’t the place to summarise the actual wars (there were three distinct periods of violent conflict with periods of peace and manouvering between them). You can read summaries of the events on Wikipedia or any number of other websites. Suffice to say that in his opening chapters Gillingham’s book gives a host of fascinating, logical and persuasive arguments for rethinking our understanding of the entire period.

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by Simon on September 20, 2016 • Permalink

Posted in History, Middle Ages, War

Tagged 1455-1485, 1981, English history, Henry VI, history, John Gillingham, Lancaster, Margaret of Anjou, Middle Ages, Richard III, The Wars of the Roses, war, York

Posted by Simon on September 20, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/09/20/the-wars-of-the-roses-john-gillingham/

The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson (1888)

This is unashamedly a children’s book. It was published as a monthly serial in Young Folks: A Boys’ and Girls’ Paper of Instructive and Entertaining Literature from June to October 1883 under the pseudonym ‘Captain George North’ (the same pen name Stevenson used for Treasure Island). Still, I am reading and experiencing it as an adult.

Cover of The Black Arrow illustrated by N.C. Wyeth

The Wars of the Roses

The story is set against the backdrop of the Wars of the Roses, a confusing conflict when the weakness and mental illness of King Henry VI allowed a major civil war to develop between followers of two large noble families – York and Lancaster, each fighting for the crown – which dragged on for a generation, from 1455 to 1485. (Hence the novel’s sub-title, A Tale of the Two Roses.)

There is no high-level explanation of any of this in the novel, and no date given to help the reader orientate themself. We see the conflict not from the vantage of courts and kings, but reflected in the microcosm of what seems to be a small area of the Fenland i.e East Anglia, around the fictional village of Tunstall, with its Moat House and nearby Holyrood Abbey.

The novel opens with a confused throng of villagers, the publican, the local parson Sir Oliver Oates, the lord of the manor Sir Daniel Brackley, and his ward the young teenager Dick Shelton, as they get confused reports of a battle, or at least of another nobleman in some kind of warlike trouble, nearby.

Things are further confused when Brackley’s man, Bennet Hatch, takes Dick to go and talk to old Nick Appleyard, the oldest man in the village who saw service under Henry the Fifth. Hatch wants to ask him to form a small troop to defend the village while the other men ride off to the battle. But they’ve barely started talking before out of nowhere a big arrow whizzes past them, embeds itself between Appleyard’s shoulders and, after a few, shudders, he dies. There are enemies in the woods across the valley. But who? Why?

Brackley is rallying his men outside the village pub when some of them spot a figure fleeing from the churchyard across fields and into the nearby woods. Dick runs over to the church and finds a parchment nailed to the door which promises revenge against oppressors and is signed ‘Jon Amend-All of the Green Wood, And his jolly fellaweship’. It is in the form of doggerel verse:

I had four blak arrows under my belt,
Four for the greefs that I have felt,
Four for the nomber of ill menne
That have opressid me now and then.

it goes on to name four specific individuals who it threatens with death for their ‘crimes’.

One is gone; one is wele sped;
Old Apulyaird is ded.

One is for Maister Bennet Hatch,
That burned Grimstone, walls and thatch.

One for Sir Oliver Oates,
That cut Sir Harry Shelton’s throat.

Sir Daniel, ye shull have the fourt;
We shall think it fair sport.

It seems to be blaming all four for taking part in the murder of Harry Shelton (Dick’s father) and the burning down of his house. When, in the next scene, we see the slippery and corrupt Sir Daniel Brackley extracting money with menaces i.e. doubling his tenants’ rents to him or else promising to hang them, we quickly come to suspect the poetic accusation is correct. Brackley has brought Dick up, harsh but fair, but the poem seems to implicate him in the murder of Dick’s father when Dick was a small child, and the burning down of his family’s house, Grimstone. You don’t have to be a genius to suspect that young Dick will find himself falling out with his guardian and in with Jon and the romantic woodland ‘fellaweship’.

Adventure and excitement

Stevenson possesses in abundance the boys adventure skill of creating tense moments which set the pulses racing and inflame the teenage mind in all of us. When Brackley (not suspecting the boy’s growing suspicions) sends Dick on an errand to nearby Tunstall Moat House, he finds himself falling in with another young lad who was at the inn and is (for some reason) also going the same way. Once they’ve identified themselves to each other, they carry on through the snowy woods (the novel is set in the depths of winter).

In this scene, the boys have arrived at the ruins of the burnt-out mansion, only to realise there are other people around in the neighbourhood, then realising it is the ‘woodland fellaweship’. They climb warily through the debris and look out through a ruined windowframe:

Peering through this, they were struck stiff with terror at their predicament. To retreat was impossible; they scarce dared to breathe. Upon the very margin of the ditch, not thirty feet from where they crouched, an iron caldron bubbled and steamed above a glowing fire; and close by, in an attitude of listening, as though he had caught some sound of their clambering among the ruins, a tall, red-faced, battered-looking man stood poised, an iron spoon in his right hand, a horn and a formidable dagger at his belt.
(Chapter 4. A Greenwood Company)

The story is chock full of such moments of suspense, confrontation, escape, fights, battles, storms at sea – Stevenson threw everything he could think of and the kitchen sink into the plot.

Fast-moving plot

This other lad Dick has teamed up with is called John Matcham. They watch the outlaws interrupt their meal in the clearing to go off and attack a line of Brackley’s men who are wending through a different part of the woods. Continuing on their way, they encounter a strange leper slowly ringing a mournful hand bell, who reveals himself to be Brackley in a disguise he’s adopted to navigate the dangerous woods. All three finally make it to the safety of Tunstall Moat, Brackley’s base.

Book 2. The Moat House

Here, Dick confronts Brackley with his suspicions and makes him swear he had nothing to do with murdering his (Dick’s) father – which he does with easy fluency. But the parson also named in the doggerel accusation, Sir Oliver Oates, can’t bring himself to take an oath, stuttering and hesitating and turning red, pretty much incriminating himself.

Moreover, one of Brackley’s men brought wounded to the Moat House after the attack on them by the outlaws which Dick and John witnessed, and who is now dying – one John Carter – more or less confesses to the murder and implicates Brackley.

Right. So we have established that Sir Daniel Brackley is the man who helped or was responsible for murdering Dick Shelton’s father and burning down his ancestral home, years ago, but who then adopted and raised Dick. The scales fallen from his eyes, Dick and John decide to escape from the Moat House. But this proves easier said than done since it is a medieval fortress and full of Brackley’s men on high alert for an attack. There is a lot of creeping along spooky, dark castle corridors holding only a rushlight.

Illustration for The Black Arrow by the wonderful N.C. Wyeth

Illustration for The Black Arrow by N.C. Wyeth (1916)

Eventually they are discovered and flee into a vacant room, barricading themselves in against attackers. After repelling an attack through an unsuspected trap door – John Matcham finally reveals that ‘he’ is a maid in disguise. ‘He’ is Joanna Sedley, heir to a fine estate etc etc. whose family are all dead and so has spent her life being held hostage by a number of great lords, all planning marriage deals for her.

Now Brackley has possession of her and wants to marry her off to another lord who will pay a fine price. There is just time for Dick and Joanna to realise they are in love with each other! before the door is forced open by Brackley’s men who seize Joanna and almost grab Dick, who wriggles free, plunges out the window into the moat below, swims across it and scrambles to safety under cover of darkness. Phew!

Book 3. My Lord Foxham

Several months have gone by and the House of Lancaster is in the ascendant with the Yorkists defeated – the small port of Shoreby-on-the-Till is full of Lancastrian nobles including Brackley, sucking up to the new masters of the land. Now we learn that Dick has been hiding out all this time with the outlaws in the forest and that their leader is called Ellis Duckworth. He has loaned Dick some of his cut-throats, criminals and deserters to tail Brackley to Shoreby and now the chapter opens with them hiding out, drinking and grumbling, in a low pub.

One of their spies comes in to report that Brackley is going to a midnight assignation at a house by the sea – Dick and his men follow, Dick climbs over the wall and peers through the window and sees the house contains Joanna Sedley, now magically transformed from the ‘boy’ he shared adventures with in book one into a tall, stately, womanly figure – he is even more in love with her, though a little daunted by her fine womanhood.

Other figures are seen moving suspiciously around the walls and so Dick’s men attack them, leading to a scrappy fight. Dick kills one then tackles a good-sized man in a fight which spills into the sea – Dick manages to trip him, get him under the waves and forces him to yield. It turns out to be Lord Foxham, himself no friend of Brackley, himself come to spy on Joanna. Realising they’re on sort of the same side, Dick and Foxham arrange to meet next day at St Bride’s Cross, just outside Shoreby, ‘on the skirts of Tunstall Forest’. Here Lord Foxham confirms his identity and that he is the rightful protector of the fair Joanna Sedley. Dick’s passionate protestations about her safety persuade Foxham that Dick truly loves her, and he declares that Dick shall marry her. Only the slight problem that she is held captive by Brackly and betrothed to Lord Shoreby stands in the way.

So Dick resolves to rescue fair Joanna from the house by the sea. Since his fight with Foxham’s men the night before was pretty conspicuous, Brackley has doubled his guard, placing armed men round the house and knights on the approach roads, so Dick has the bright idea of approaching by sea. In a series of rather contorted events which are typical of the novel’s contrived storyline, Dick commissions his pack of criminals to steal a ship, which they do by hailing the master of a boat newly arrived in the port of Shoreby, as he comes ashore, then plying him with so much drink that he is easy to lure outside, mug and tie up. Then the gang row back out to the ship – the ironically named Good Hope – take command of it and sail it to a rough pier not far from the isolated house where Joanna is being held.

But when our men leave the ship and walk along the rough pier they find themselves instantly attacked, coming under bow and arrow fire, killing and injuring many, the whole crew panicking and rushing back to the ship, some falling into the water and drowning, others expiring on the deck. Quite a bloody scene.

Even Lord Foxham, who we only met ten pages earlier, is wounded, and carried to a cabin below decks. Here, once the ship has weighed anchor, he tells Dick that he was scheduled to meet the young Duke of Gloucester (the future King Richard III) of the house of York, with notes about the deployment of the Lancastrian forces around Shoreby. Dick must now undertake this mission. And Foxham names Dick the rightful husband of Lady Joanna in the letters he asks Dick to bear – but it is up to him to actually secure her.

In further melodrama the ship is now driven by heavy seas to shipwreck on the sand not far from Shoreby. Once the tide has gone out all the survivors of the vain attack on Brackley’s house struggle ashore and traipse inland, but not without – in yet more action – briefly coming under attack from a platoon of men apparently place there to defend the coast. But they escape without any more casualties.

All of this, by the way, takes place in the depth of winter, with darkening stormy skies, high seas, and snow storms. It is all very atmospheric and well described but the underlying scenario is too far-fetched for the reader to buy into.

Book 4. The Disguise

Dick pays off the motley crew, all too happy to leave their unlucky (and very young) leader, and elects to stick with Lawless. This outlaw has emerged with higher stature then the other cut-throats: it was he who Dick saw in the clearing cooking the outlaws’ meal; it was he who took control of the Good Hope‘s helm, steered it through the storm and ensured it survived the wreck. Now Lawless takes Dick through the snow-struck forest to his secret lair in the woods, a warren created when a tall beech tree was blown over, with the sides shored up with earth and turf and the entrance covered with brushwood.

Lawless leading young Dick to his den in the woods, illustration by N.C. Wyeth

It is, in other words, a fantasy version of a boy’s den in the woods. Inside it is surprisingly warm and snug, especially after Lawless lights a fire, they cook and eat some food and share some sweet wine, and Dick tells his story. ‘You want Lady Joan?’ Lawless asks Dick. ‘Let’s go and get her.’ So Lawless opens one of the several trunks stashed round his den and gets out several friar’s cassocks, complete with rope belts. And a tray of make-up pencils (a sort of indication of the theatrical origins or references of much of the language and plot of the novel). He gets Dick to put on the friar’s costume and then applies make-up to make him seem older, a wise old wandering friar. They head off through the snowy woods, back towards Sir Daniel Brackley’s residence in Shoreby.

Here, in the chaos of an over-packed lord’s house, Dick sees two fine ladies heading upstairs and follows them, till he encounters Lady Joan again, in the company of her serving lady. But oh alas and alack! Joanna reveals that she is to be married next day to Lord Shoreby. She and the lady must go back downstairs to the marriage feast while Dick stays hidden. Off they go but only a few minutes later a malevolent dwarf-jester comes snooping around and, as he discovers evidence of Dick hiding, Dick leaps out, they tussle, and Dick stabs him to death with his poniard. (For the hero of a children’s story Dick kills quite a few people – he killed one of Foxham’s men in the fight by the sea, he kills the dwarf – and all this pales next to the slaughter in book 5. It’s a surprisingly violent book.)

When the dwarf’s body is discovered by servants there is much alarm and shouting but Dick stays hidden in Lady J’s room, when she returns for a further clasping of hands and bosoms and protestations of love – all watched by the ironic lady-in-waiting, before Dick tries to make his escape.

Since he is still in his disguise as a friar, he tells the house guards that he is going to the nearby church to pray for the dwarf’s soul (his body having been laid in state there), but the guards take him at his word and frog-march him to the church. Here he is no sooner introduced to the parson, Sir Oliver Oates, who begins to recognise him through is disguise than Dick throws himself on his mercy. In an unguarded moment the parson, for his part, admits that he was used as a decoy to lure Dick’s father to his death all those years ago, but swears he didn’t know that was what was going to happen. The soldiers are sitting in the pews watching him suspiciously so there’s no way Dick can escape the church, and so he spends the night next to Sir Oliver, pretending to mutter prayers for the dead dwarf.

Next morning they are woken early by the grand procession for the wedding of Lord Shoreham to Lady Joanna. But barely has the fine lord entered the church, richly caparisoned and accompanied by his fragrant retinue than a brace of arrows ring out, shooting him dead on the spot, injuring Brackley, creating hysteria and panic among the attendants and ladies.

This is stilled by the imperious voice of Lord Risingham, the noblest man present. To Dick’s dismay the parson immediately betrays him and Lawless (his fellow fake friar) and they are dragged before Risingham and all kinds of accusations thrown at them of being in league with the fellowship of the Black Arrow and therefore involved in this sacrilegious outrage.

Brackley is incensed and wants to drag Dick off and torture him to death, but Lady Joanna intercedes to say she never wanted to marry Lord Shoreby and loves Dick, and her (cheeky) lady in waiting backs up the story and so Risingham, who has seniority, has Dick taken by soldiers to his own chambers to judge.

Here Dick saves the day by admitting that he guilty to some extent of falling in with the fellowship of forest crooks, but he only did so after learning that Brackley murdered his father. He clinches his case by handing over to Risingham a letter he had conveniently found on the murdered dwarf in which the villain Brackley plots to overthrow the Yorkist interest – which includes Risingham – and then hand over Risingham’s lands to Lord Shoreby. Risingham is incensed and instantly releases Dick, making him swear to mend his ways.

So Dick finally gets to escape the house and trouble and is walking free across Shoreby when, of all the bad luck, as he is passing one of the inns on the dockside, out of it stumble some very drunk sailors which include Arblaster, the unfortunate captain who Dick’s men got drunk, mugged and then whose ship they stole and wrecked. He doesn’t recognise him but his wretched dog does, coming barking up to him and lawless, still in their silly friar disguises. The drunks grow in suspicion and when he tries to bolt, grab him, tie him up and drag him back into the pub. Here Dick spins a long cock and bull story, admitting he is one of the outlaws but has grudges against them, and that the outlaws have a vast pile of treasure in the woods, and persuading Arblaster and his mates that he’ll lead them to it. In its way this is a curious and flavoursome scene. They are by this stage very drunk and Dick makes them show him the only possession of his which they found and therefore took off him – Lord Foxham’s signet ring with which he was to identify himself to Richard of Gloucester – when Dick snatches it, up ends the tables in their faces, and scarpers out the door and along the quayside into the night. Phew.

Book 5. Crookback

Though as convoluted in detail as the others, this is in some ways the simplest book. If you remember, Dick had promised Lord Foxham he would rendezvous with Richard Duke of Gloucester and give him Foxham’s writings on the disposition of enemy (Lancastrian) forces in Shoreby. Now, Dick hid those papers when he was at Lawless’s den in the woods, which is why Arblaster and his drunk shipmates didn’t find them when they searched Dick the night before.

Now, the next morning, Dick is on his way through the woods back to Lawless’s den to get them, when he comes across a man defending himself against several attackers. Dick throws himself into the fray, coming to his defence, and together they beat the men off. At which point the other blows his horn and a brace of horsemen arrive and quickly identify the man he’s saved as Richard Duke of Gloucester, known as Crookback and as every schoolboy in 1888 knew, the man who would become King Richard III, according to legend the most wicked monarch in England’s history.

At this point, if it hadn’t been obvious before, the reader realises that this is a novel not only about two roses but about two Richards. For immediately the duke of Gloucester reveals the manic glint in his eye and the intensity of his ambition.

Gloucester explains to Dick that he is about to attack Shoreby and Dick gives him an eye-witness description of the Lancastrian forces every bit as good as Foxham’s. Gloucester knights Dick on the spot, from this point onwards Sir Richard Shelton. But says now he must command a troop during the forthcoming battle of Shoreby.

The (fictional) Battle of Shoreby is described across two chapters in impressive detail. The reader feels this is what it must be like to attack a medieval town through narrows streets and, as Dick does, command his men to raise a barricade with furniture looted from the rickety houses and then withstand attacks from massed archers and from armoured knights on horseback. It is rip-roaring exciting stuff.

Eventually the battle is won and Richard asks permission to ride and rescue his lady love, and Gloucester gives him a troop of men. Off they go trailing Brackly and his forces through the forest. After various delays and losing of the tracks, Dick and his men creep up on Brackley’s party gathered round a fire which includes Lady Joanna. They gather and attack, but Brackley’s men were waiting for them and mount a a surprise counter-attack. Joanna runs to Dick in the confusion and they escape the confusion of battle into the dense forest.

(It’s worth noting that although the novel is made of clichés, there keep coming unexpected complications and rebuffs, which give it a sort of realistic but also quite a frustrating feel. When Dick and his gang stole the ship and sailed it round to attack Brackley’s house by the sea I thought it would be a storming triumph, so was very surprised when they are beaten back and many killed or injured by bowfire before they’ve barely got off the jetty.)

Briefly, Dick and Joanna make it back to the safety of Lord Foxham’s house. There is a further encounter with Gloucester where Dick displeases the great man with a notable request. Gloucester says he will give Dick anything he desires, and at that moment – as it happens – amid the chaos of post-battle Shoreby, some troops come past hustling some captives who Gloucester, barely bothering to look, orders to be hanged. And Dick recognises among them Arblaster, the wretched sea captain who Richard has twice wronged, stealing his ship and ruining his livelihood, then throwing a table at him in the quayside pub. Now Dick sees a way to atone for his past sins and asks Gloucester to spare this man’s life. Irritated at the triviality of the request, Gloucester agrees to do so – since he has given his word – but fiercely tells Dick that he can’t expect to rise in his army, in his cause, if he throws away favours on trifle. And so Gloucester gallops off.

Next morning Dick is up betimes, accoutred and arrayed in the finest regalia Foxham can provide, ready for his wedding to Lady Joanna. He strolls around the town, surveying the triumphant Yorkist troops, before straying further afield and ends up walking through the (by now very familiar) snowy woods.

And it is here that the psychological climax of the book comes, when Dick disturbs a figure lurking in the woods in disguise and it turns out to be none other than Sir Daniel Brackley. They argue. They nearly fight but Dick refuses to shed blood on his wedding day. In fact he admits – to Brackley, to the reader, to himself – that he has done too many bloody deeds recently, spilled too much blood. Although he has all the justification for it, he will not harm Brackley. He tells him to go before he calls the guards. And so Brackley shuffles off, suspiciously.

At which point there is the twang of a bow and from a nearby thicket an arrow is despatched which embeds itself in Brackley, who falls to the ground. Dick rushes to him and just has time to tell him that, yes, it is a Black Arrow, when Brackley expires. And Ellis Duckworth comes from the thicket holding his bow. He heard Dick forgive Brackley, but he can’t forgive. He asks Dick to pray for his soul. And Dick notes that vengeance hasn’t made Duckworth feel good, in fact he feels sick and guilty. Give it up, says Dick. Hatch died in the Battle of Shoreham. So three of the four mentioned in the original verse threat are now despatched. Dick asks forgiveness for the parson and Duckworth, reluctantly agrees.

‘Be at rest; the Black Arrow flieth nevermore—the fellowship is broken.’

‘But be at rest; the Black Arrow flieth nevermore’. Illustration by N. C. Wyeth

In the short conclusion to the book, Dick marries his Joan. Richard Crookback makes a last appearance riding by with the long train of his armed men, going towards the next battle, and parries banter with Foxham, Joan and Dick, offering Joan the husband of her choice. Of course she cleaves to honest Dick, and Gloucester pshaws, turns his horse and gallops off towards his destiny.

And in the last few sentences we learn that Dick and Joan lived out their lives in peace and happiness far from the wars and that two old men – Arblaster the shipman and Lawless the rogue – also live out their lives in peace. Dick has, in some measure, atoned for his youthful bloodthirstiness, by at key moments, interceding and saving both their lives. And with that thought, or moral, the book ends.

Reasons for The Black Arrow’s relative failure

The relative failure and comparative neglect of this novel makes you appreciate the elements which made the classics Treasure Island and Kidnapped such successes. I identify four reasons:

1. One hero

In those novels there is one boy hero (Jim Hawkins, David Balfour) – clearly identified in the first sentence – and you are thrown immediately into his plight – which is also described clearly and obviously. In The Black Arrow the picture is much more confused: it takes fifty pages or more to become really clear that the story is about a young lad, Master Richard (‘Dick’) Shelton, the ward of the wicked Sir Daniel Brackley, and this is because quite a few characters are introduced in the confused and busy opening scenes.

2. Third person narrator

The successful tales are first-person narratives, throwing you directly and immediately into the adventure at first hand. The Black Arrow has a third-person narrator who is not, for some reason, very believable, partly because of the confusion of plot which dogs a lot of the story.

3. Good guys and bad guys

In his classic works you know who the good guys and bad guys are – the pirates in Treasure Island, the ship’s crew and then the loyalist British army in Kidnapped. In this book it is much harder to tell for several reasons:

a) it’s a civil war so there’s no immediate way of knowing who’s on whose side, except by asking
b) characters change sides, including the hero who is not wholeheartedly for either side

4. A charismatic anti-hero

When Richard Crookback appears in the fifth act, the reader realises that this is the fourth reason why this novel isn’t as successful as Kidnapped or Treasure Island – the presence of a charismatic baddy.

Both those stories introduce fairly early on a hugely charismatic, charming, threatening, adult hero who enthrals the boy narrator and comes to dominate the story – namely Long John Silver and Alan Breck Stewart. Their presence, their charming rogueish amorality, lifts both books onto a completely different level.

In this book, the dangerous charismatic adult is Richard Crookback – he immediately captures our attention by his spirited self-defence against four or five attackers, and then with his arrogant nonchalance as soon as he starts talking to Dick. From now to the end of the novel the story lifts and sails whenever he is present – he is a pantomime villain like Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham in the movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. But his arrival makes you realise that he is what the preceding four-fifths of the book have been missing.

Medieval vocabulary

Apparently Stevenson used the Paston Letters, a collection of authentic correspondence from the period, as his model, and – as someone who studied medieval literature at university – I did feel the text had some of the tang and hempen antiquity of the older language, albeit interlarded with what I thought were Shakespearian usages from 200 years later, and some speeches which had a Scots ring to me. You have to be prepared to enjoy exchanges like this:

She was groping for the bolt, when Dick at last comprehended.
‘By the mass!’ he cried, ‘y’ are no Jack; y’ are Joanna Sedley; y’ are the maid that would not marry me!’
The girl paused, and stood silent and motionless. Dick, too, was silent for a little; then he spoke again.
‘Joanna,’ he said, ‘y’ ’ave saved my life, and I have saved yours; and we have seen blood flow, and been friends and enemies—ay, and I took my belt to thrash you; and all that time I thought ye were a boy. But now death has me, and my time’s out, and before I die I must say this: Y’ are the best maid and the bravest under heaven, and, if only I could live, I would marry you blithely; and, live or die, I love you.’
She answered nothing.
‘Come,’ he said, ‘speak up, Jack. Come, be a good maid, and say ye love me!’
‘Why, Dick,’ she cried, ‘would I be here?’
‘Well, see ye here,’ continued Dick, ‘an we but escape whole we’ll marry; and an we’re to die, we die, and there’s an end on’t.’
(Chapter 3. The Room Over The Chapel)

On the other hand, one of the pleasures of reading old literature, especially something as conventional in its way as this ripping yarn, is the logical habits of mind of writers brought up in previous ages. There is a lovely logic to the deployment of the material in the opening of the chapter ‘In Mine Enemies’ House’ – the way the place is identified, then described, then the attitude behind its busy state, then a specific setting in time given, and then the weather: the whole impression being rounded up and summarised in the witty sentence about the eye of the modern.

Sir Daniel’s residence in Shoreby was a tall, commodious, plastered mansion, framed in carven oak, and covered by a low-pitched roof of thatch. To the back there stretched a garden, full of fruit-trees, alleys, and thick arbours, and overlooked from the far end by the tower of the abbey church.
The house might contain, upon a pinch, the retinue of a greater person than Sir Daniel; but even now it was filled with hubbub. The court rang with arms and horseshoe-iron; the kitchens roared with cookery like a bees’-hive; minstrels, and the players of instruments, and the cries of tumblers, sounded from the hall. Sir Daniel, in his profusion, in the gaiety and gallantry of his establishment, rivalled with Lord Shoreby, and eclipsed Lord Risingham.

All guests were made welcome. Minstrels, tumblers, players of chess, the sellers of relics, medicines, perfumes, and enchantments, and along with these every sort of priest, friar, or pilgrim, were made welcome to the lower table, and slept together in the ample lofts, or on the bare boards of the long dining-hall.

On the afternoon following the wreck of the Good Hope, the buttery, the kitchens, the stables, the covered cartshed that surrounded two sides of the court, were all crowded by idle people, partly belonging to Sir Daniel’s establishment, and attired in his livery of murrey and blue, partly nondescript strangers attracted to the town by greed, and received by the knight through policy, and because it was the fashion of the time.

The snow, which still fell without interruption, the extreme chill of the air, and the approach of night, combined to keep them under shelter. Wine, ale, and money were all plentiful; many sprawled gambling in the straw of the barn, many were still drunken from the noontide meal. To the eye of a modern it would have looked like the sack of a city; to the eye of a contemporary it was like any other rich and noble household at a festive season.

There is a pleasure and a seduction in the logical disposition of the material, a pleasing old-fashioned storytellingness. I made a note of sundry medieval words which, although I’ve often read before, I don’t actually fully understand.

arbalest – a crossbow with a special mechanism for drawing back and releasing the string
baldric – a belt worn over one shoulder to carry a weapon (usually a sword) or other implement such as a bugle or drum
brigandine – a cloth garment, generally canvas or leather, lined with small oblong steel plates riveted to the fabric
buckler – a small shield, up to 18 inches in diameter, held in the fist with a central handle behind the boss
cresset – a metal cup or basket, mounted to a pole, containing flammable substance like oil, pitch or a rope steeped in rosin, burned as a light or beacon
gyves – a shackle, especially for the leg
losels – a worthless person or scoundrel
lout – verb: to bow or stoop
murrain – a plague, epidemic, or crop blight
poniard – a small, slim dagger
pottage – a thick soup or stew made by boiling vegetables, grains, and, if available, meat or fish
sallet – a light medieval helmet, usually with a vision slit or a movable visor
shaw – a coppice or thicket of trees
tippet – a scarf-like narrow piece of clothing, worn over the shoulders
tucket – a flourish on a trumpet
windac – a piece of equipment to pull back the tight string of a crossbow

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by Simon on September 18, 2016 • Permalink

Posted in Adventure, History, Novel

Tagged 1888, A Chronology of The Crusades, adventure, Alan Breck Stewart, Alan Rickman, arbalest, baldric, Battle of Shoreby, Bennet Hatch, book, boys adventure story, brigandine, buckler, Captain Arblaster, Captain George North, children's book, chivalry, civil war, cresset, Crookback, crossbow, David Balfour, Dick Shelton, dwarf, East Anglia, Ellis Duckworth, Fenland, Grimstone, gyves, Henry the Fifth, Henry VI, historical novel, Holyrood Abbey, House of Lancaster, House of York, In Mine Enemies' House, Jim Hawkins, Joanna, Joanna Sedley, John Carter, John Matcham, Jon Amend-All, King Richard III, Lawless, leper, Long John Silver, Lord Risingham, losels, lout, medieval story, melodrama, Middle Ages, murrain, My Lord Foxham, N.C. Wyeth, Nick Appleyard, novel, outlaws, Paston Letters, piracy, pirates, poniard, pottage, Richard Crookback, Richard III, Richard of Gloucester, Risingham, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, sallet, shaw, Sheriff of Nottingham, Shoreby, Shoreby-on-the-Till, Sir Daniel Brackley, Sir Oliver Oates, St Bride's Cross, Stevenson, suspense, sword, the Black Arrow, The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses, The Moat House, The Wars of the Roses, tippet, Treasure Island, tucket, Tunstall, Tunstall Forest, Tunstall Moat House, Wars of the Roses, windac, Yorkists, Young Folks: A Boys' and Girls' Paper of Instructive and Entertaining Literature

Posted by Simon on September 18, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/the-black-arrow-robert-louis-stevenson/

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Reasons for The Black Arrow’s relative failure

1. One hero

2. Third person narrator

3. Good guys and bad guys