Shakespeare and the Welsh, Part V

11 Reasons for Shakespeare’s Hidden Welsh Sympathies.

(Read Part One of this series first?)

I don’t believe Shakespeare intended to represent the Welsh in a negative light, having reviewed in former posts this month the Welsh characters and connections in Shakespeare’s ‘history plays,’ and especially since discovering that Henry V can be read as an attack on English imperialism.

In fact, I would even go so far as to say that Shakespeare secretly sympathised with the Welsh nation and language – or that he was at least heavily influenced by people who did. Here are eleven reasons why:

1.) Shakespeare’s Welsh Blood.

For starters, Shakespeare’s maternal grandmother, Alys Griffin, was Welsh, which means ‘the bard’ was himself a quarter Welsh. Some early twentieth century scholars even believed that this link to an oral, poetic, Celtic tradition explained Shakespeare’s imaginative and linguistic abilities as a writer in English, although later critics have been more skeptical about this.

2.) Shakespeare’s Welsh Teacher.

Shakespeare had a Welsh school teacher, Thomas Jenkins. According to the eminent Shakespearean Jonathan Bate, Thomas Jenkins had a deep and lasting influence on Shakespeare, teaching him Latin at the King Edward VI grammar school in Stratford upon Avon, and helping to strengthen his growing abilities with langauge.

3.) Shakespeare’s Welsh Workmates.

Shakespeare worked with multiple Welsh actors in the London theatres. For a good part of his career as a writer, he worked with the company known as The Chamberlain’s Men, a group of actors who at any given time consisted of several Welshmen. These actors included Henry Evans, Jack Jones, John Rice (Rees/Rhys), Augustine Phillips and Robert Gough. Hard to imagine these relationships wouldn’t have influenced Shakespeare’s view of the Welsh.

4.) Shakespeare’s Welsh-Aristocrat Patrons.

Shakespeare’s first Folio is dedicated to the Earls of Pembroke, William and Philip Herbert. The dedication refers to the brothers as, “the most noble and incomparable paire of brethren.” Obviously these members of the aristocracy made a big impression – but as his financial patrons, their influence on Shakespeare would have been all the more powerful.

5.) Wales in Shakespeare’s Psyche.

Stratford upon Avon is close to the Welsh border, and there are more Welsh characters in Shakespeare’s plays than there are from any of the other nations which neighbour England. This is notable when you think of the size of Wales. These characters include Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Captain Fluellen in Henry V, and Owen Glendower in Henry IV Part One.

6.) Shakespeare’s Partly Welsh Monarch.

Shakespeare wrote during the reign of Elizabeth I, and the Tudors owed much to Wales and acknowledged strong roots there. This in itself likely coloured to some extent how Shakespeare depicted the Welsh. Elizabeth wasn’t as bad as her father, but the Tudors seemed particularly fond of decapitating those who offended or inconvenienced them.

7.) Shakespeare’s Welsh Dialogue.

Shakespeare championed Welsh language and identity on stage. Lady Mortimer, Glendower’s daughter, actually delivers all her lines in the Welsh language in Act Three of Henry IV Part One. This is very telling. English imperialists hoped that the Welsh language could eventually be extinguished altogether – so including it in a play whose audience was predominantly English-speaking is in fact remarkable. Though Elizabeth I may have had the bible translated into Welsh, this was primarily intended to increase English influence through the State apparatus of the Church.

8.) Shakespeare’s Welsh Settings.

Shakespeare sets a whole play in Wales. Cymberline is full of Wlaes and Welsh history and most of the action occurs in Wales. In this late romance, the heroine, Imogen, gets lost whilst trying to flee to the West Wales town of Milford Haven (Aberdaugleddau). Aberdaugleddau happens to be in the county of Pembroke, and it is referred to as, “blessed Milford” (3.2.59). Is this again due to the influence of Shakespeare’s patrons, the Earls of Pembroke?

9.) Shakespeare’s Welsh Love Interest?

Shakespeare is believed by many to have been bisexual. Several names have been mentioned in relation to the mysterious ‘Fair Lord’ or ‘Fair Youth’ to whom over a hundred of the sonnets attributed to Shakespeare are addressed. His patron, William Herbert, the Third Earl of Pembroke, is widely considered to be one of the most likely candidates.

10.) Shakespeare’s Welsh Fairies.

The fairies in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream are believed to have been influenced by Welsh folklore. Shakespeare was probably inspired by reading Geraldus Cambrensis’ twelfth-century account of his journey through Wales, written in Latin and published in Shakespeare’s time. The account includes a description of the human-like Welsh ‘fair folk’ – Y Tylwth Teg – whose alternative society, inhabiting a parallel world, resembles the fairy kingdom of Oberon and Titania. English fairies, on the other hand, were insect-like creatures with wings.

11.) Shakespeare’s Quasi-Welsh Theatre?

There is some indication that the Welsh language may have been used interchangeably by The Chamberlain’s Men. The printed text for As You Like It contains a curious word which no one could explain for a long time. Jacques says, “Ducadame,” which makes no sense in English or Greek. However, if the English printer was attempting a phonetic spelling of the Welsh “Dewch gyda fi/mi” (“Come with me”), then the line makes sense within the context and action of the play.

Shakespeare and the Welsh Part IV

Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Celtic ‘Other.’
(Read Part One of this Series First?)

It’s not just the Welsh who are represented in Shakespeare’s Henry V. There are the enemy French of course, but the famous ‘Four Captains’ scene has also made this play a favourite with post-colonial critics looking at English identity and Englishness as defined by England’s near neighbours. The ‘Four Captains’ are:

·        Gower the Englishman,

·        MacMorris the Irishman,

·        Jamy the Scot, and

·        Fluellen the Welshman.

Writer and historian Christopher Highley says the play as a whole shows, “Shakespeare’s disillusioned ambivalence about the reasons behind and the consequences of England’s empire-building.” It also produces “a skeptical counter-discourse about English expansionism within the British Isles.” What does that mean?

Henry V: A Game of Two Halves.

Basically, the play is set up in the first half as a nationalistic epic. It’s all about England and Englishness and how glorious, right, courageous, noble and manly England is. The nation, under Harry’s leadership, gets stirred up against the French in a similar way to how Britain got stirred up about the Falklands under Thatcher. The army – whose stout yeomen’s arms are ‘made in England’ are almost like a hoard of English soccer fans boarding an airplane to attend the World Cup. The costume designer for The Hollow Crown even had that image in mind.

The scene with the ‘Four Captains’ marks a turning point. Things start to go wrong – it’s harder than the English think and the audience sees that the army is hardly as ‘pure’ in terms of Englihness as everyone assumed at the outset. Shakespeare deliberately throws a spanner in the works of his mostly English audience’s nationalism by showing them how dependent Harry’s army is on Celtic ‘others’ whose nations define England’s borders.

Agincourt: An ‘English’ Victory?

Ireland, Scotland and Wales are not only represented as fighting for England’s cause; they also simultaneously threaten it. At that time in history, Scotland was the most immediate threat – Harry’s gains in France are won by risking a Scottish invasion whilst his army is absent from Britain fighting the Battle of Agincourt.

The conclusion? Shakespeare’s Henry V suggests that England and Englishness is not as mighty and confident as it is at first represented to be. In fact, throughout Shakespeare’s history plays as a whole, the kingdom has been shown to be unstable.

Henry the Fift: ‘Frenemies’ and Neighbours From Hell.

Within the British Isles as a whole, England’s kings have a tenuous hold on power. Keep in mind too that the Royal line changes several times again between the time of Henry V and the days of Shakespeare. The play was also performed during the times of The Nine Years War in Ireland (1594-1603).

English identity was more fragile than that of its Celtic neighbours. According to Christopher Ivic in his essay ‘Norman Bastards, Bastard Normans: Anamalous Identities in The Life of Henry the Fift,’“for many English writers, Welshness was viewed as more ancient, true and unmixed than Englishness.”

The bloodline of the Tudors owed much to Wales, as did the victory of Henry VII over Richard III, the House of York and the Plantagenet dynasty. Henry VIII may have brought about the Act of Union between the two nations of England and Wales, but even this was not enough to erase national, linguistic, cultural and psychological differences between the two peoples.

And besides all that, after Elizabeth I, England was ruled by a Scotsman, James I!

Is Shakespeare’s Henry V a British or an English Play?

Many critics claim that Shakespeare’s Henry V is a celebration of British identity and patriotism as opposed to Englishness. But, as Ivic points out, an interesting but little-known fact about the play is that in one manuscript (F1), the lines of dialogue for the Welsh captain, Fluellen, are often introduced in the margin as ‘Welch’ instead of ‘Fluellen’ or ‘Flu.’ Likewise for MacMorris, ‘Irish;’ and for Jamy, ‘Scot.’ Gower the Englishman, on the other hand, is consistently represented as ‘Gower.’

The play therefore seems to have been written from an English rather than a ‘British’ perspective – but it is more than a simple celebration of English identity, more than an ‘epic of English nationalism.’ It is a sophisticated interrogation of the whole idea of England and Englishness, and of English imperial right and superiority. The Welshness of Fluellen is used to destabalise any easy national identity which the predominantly English audience might like to assume.

Fluellen as a Representation of Welshness.

Christopher Highley: “Fluellen figures the colonial subject who has internalized English values and subordinated his own provincial loyalties to service to the English nation-state.”

Christopher Ivic: “many Elizabethans and Jacobeans considered Wales to be a mild, compliant neighbor.” Shakespeare’s Henry V can be seen as “disseminating an idealized (indeed fictionalized) Anglo-Welsh alliance. But Wales and Welshness also serve as disturbing examples of various forms of proximity […] and the play’s inscriptions of these forms of proximity unsettle notions of England, English and Englishness.”

 

For King Harry, God, England and St. George! Or Not.

Finally, if Fluellen represents the Welsh and Welshness, surely the play has no greater cypher of Englishness than King Henry himself. Not so! The character who inspires so much English nationalistic pride in the beginning of the play is towards the end of it inverted in a surprising and almost shocking way.

Harry’s Englishness first begins to Waver when he disguises himself as a common soldier and goes walking around the camp at night to hear the opinions of his men. Initially he’s mistaken for a Cornishman, which immediately makes his Englishness ambiguous.

But Shakespeare doesn’t stop there. Next, Harry tells Pistol he’s a ‘Welchman’ – a kinsman of Fluellen, no less. And later again, after the battle, ‘Harry English’ confesses to Fluellen, ‘I am Welch you know good countriman,’ to which Fluellen responds, ‘All the water in the Wye, cannot wash your Maiesties Welsh plod out of your body.’

What’s going on? Why would Shakespeare have his most English character do this, when the actual Henry V had no Welsh blood at all? Well, Henry V was born in Monmouth, but that doesn’t seem enough of a reason to have him state something like this. My own personal theory? You’ll have to wait for the next post, and in the meantime please leave a comment.

Tara for now

 

Shakespeare and the Welsh Part III.

Shakespeare’s Henry IV.

(Read Part One of this Series First?)

Bolingbroke’s usurpation of the English throne has proved successful – he is now King Henry IV and his cousin Richard II is no more. However, Henry’s reign is troubled. 

There are problems in England with the Earl of Northumberland, his son Henry Percy [Harry Hotspur] and the Archbishop of York attempting to rebel against Henry. They’ve joined with the Mortimer family and the Welshman Owain Glyndwr.

The rebels plan to overthrow Henry IV and divide the kingdom in three – the north for the Northumberland family, the south for the Mortimers, Wales and the western midlands of England for Owain Glyndwr.

The whole of Wales is in revolt at this time under the leadership of Glyndwr. Castles are being seized across Wales and even Welsh students at Oxford are abandoning their studies in order to return home and join under the disgruntled nobleman Owain.

This Owain Glyndwr (Owen Glendower) is one of the most important figures of Welsh history and much has been written about him already. But how does Shakespeare choose to represent him?

Shakespeare’s Owain Glyndwr.

Like the Welsh depicted in Richard II, Shakespeare’s Owain Glyndwr (written in the play as Owen Glendower) is also highly superstitious. However, it’s not just the Welsh this time – the English also believe Owain to be a magician (a belief commonly held at the time).

Shakespeare’s Owen even believes it himself: he comes across as being a bit over-inflated in his opinion of himself:

“At my nativity/ The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,/ Of burning cressets; and at my birth/ The frame and huge foundation of the earth/ Shaked like a coward./All the courses of my life do show/ I am not in the role of common men.”

Shakespeare’s Owen also boasts of his learning (he was an educated lawyer in reality before becoming a revolutionary), but his speech is peppered with noticeable Welsh ticks and he comes across as common or comical:

“I can speak English, lord as well as you;/ For I was train'd up in the English court,/ Where, being but young, I framed to the harp/ Many an English ditty lovely well.”

Glendower's ally Harry Hotspur constantly teases him for greater comic effect. Hotspur is a rash and quarrelsome character who doesn’t believe any of Owen’s hype or is simply trying to provoke him into an argument.

Hotspur works as a foil to make Glendower look like a bit of an idiot. Converesley, Glendower’s patience with the rude and arrogant Hotspur could be seen as admirable.

Shakspeare’s Owen Glendower: A Positive Image?

Critics have been divided as to what Shakespeare’s intentions were in this scene. Is he putting Owen and the Welsh down, or making a defense of them by showing Hotspur and his opinions to be rash?

David Bevington: “Whether Glendower is to be perceived as a powerful magician (…) is a complex question.” But, “In general his claims to magical powers are undercut by Hotspur’s sardonic witticisms.”

It seems though that Shakespeare himself intended to present Glendower’s claims as authentic, because in the play Glendower conjures music (the musicians were perhaps hidden away behind curtains in different parts of the theatre, so that the audience was tricked into thinking that the music did indeed “hang in the air”).

Joan Fitzpatrick: “Whether or not Shakespeare wished us to think that Glyndwr summoned the music supernaturally (…) is less important than the fact that magic appears to occur. Although Hotspur’s response to the apparent magic is typically mocking, he does not deny that Glyndwr has done what he said he would on this occasion.”

Glendower and Other Characters in Henry IV.

The way the other characters respond to Hotspur is important to how Glendower is perceived. Hotspur is admonished by Mortimer and Worcester and even by his own wife.

Mortimer presents a positive account of Glendower, and according to Fitzpatrick this undermines Hotspur’s characterization of him, as well as writer and historian Christopher Highley’s opinion that Shakespeare wanted his audience to share Hotspur’s negative ideas about Owain Glyndwr and the superstitious Welsh.

Glyndwr’s son in law, Edmund Mortimer, ultimately defends his father in law’s merits:

“In faith, he is a worthy gentleman,/ Exceedingly well read, and profited/ In strange concealments; valiant as a lion,/ And wondrous affable; and as bountiful/ As mines of India.”

“Strange concealments” refers to the way Owain and his men were able to attack and then vanish. Glyndwr was so skillful at using the Welsh mountains, woods and weather to his advantage that in his own lifetime the English thought he was a master of the black arts.

Shakespeare’s Glyndwr and His View of the Welsh?

So, if Shakespeare really is presenting Owain Gyndwr in a positive light, does that mean his representations of the Welsh throughout his ‘history plays’ are well intended? Not necessarily.

As I pointed out in Part Two of this serial post, the Welsh in Richard II have perhaps not been depicted in a fair or accurate manner (depending on whether you see Welsh loyalty to Richard II as an admirable thing or as a negative mark of the power of English imperialism).

And next week I’ll hopefully discuss Fluellen in Shakespeare’s Henry V – probably the most well-known of all Shakespeare’s Welsh characters – and show how Shakespeare’s portrayals of the Welsh can often contain insidious political influence that favours English superiority over a subjugated Welsh ‘otherness.’

Shakespeare and the Welsh Part II.

(Read Part One First?)

So, to recap the theme of all this . . .

• The way persons or people are represented can have a powerful effect (see the first post in this series), and

• Whoever exercises the power of representation has power indeed.

Angelo Montecelli’s rendering of The Shield of Achilles as described in Homer’s Iliad. The shield depicts the cosmos, beginning with divinity and the zodiac at the center, and ending with the world of humanity – divided between war and peace – on the peripheral. The shield was said to be so arresting that warriors approaching to fight with Achilles would momentarily stop and stare at it and so be slain in their hesitation. Some critics have suggested that the shield’s power was psychological: as a scaled down model of EVERYTHING, the beholder sees himself represented microscopically within its circle and cannot hope to achieve much beyond awe in the face of its incontestable immensity.

In the last weeks of April I also began watching The Hollow Crown at my neighbour’s. This BBC series includes dramatisations of Shakespeare’s Richard II, Henry IV Part One, Henry IV Part Two, and Henry V. Trying to figure out who was who within the messy world of the history of English Royalty, some Google and Wiki-based research soon revealed that these four plays were the main source of Shakespeare’s representations of the Welsh and Welsh characters.

The Welsh in Richard II: How Shakespeare Represents the Welsh in Act 2, Scene 4.

Play with your fancies, and in them behold the Earl of Salisbury and an army of ‘trusty Welshmen’ waiting assembled on the misty coast of North Wales. They await the return of King Richard by sea from Ireland, and plainly seek to aid him in combat against the usurper Bolingbroke who has returned from exile to reclaim his inheritance during Richard’s absence. (In The Hollow Crown version, the Welsh are dressed like Ewoks – and though Medieval Wales might have been as curious and distant a place as the moon of Endor, yet, is this in itself an accurate representation? Read a Q&A with The Hollow Crown's costume designer.)

The most striking thing about the Welsh in this situation, besides all their beardyness and bone-bling, is their loyalty to the King of England. Today this may seem strange and misplaced, especially since Richard was a harsh king who had been unpopular in the region. Nonetheless, it is historically accurate. He had a loyal following in Wales and found much affection from the people there upon his return.

This loyalty is perhaps understandable. It’s a bit of a stereotype, but the Welsh have always been a spiritually-minded people – even superstitious, if you like. The official source of spiritual instruction in those days was the Church, and it was the Church who invested monarchs with spiritual power. ‘The Divine Right of Kings’ was largely unquestioned. Bolingbroke’s audacity in challenging the authority of the crown must have seemed like a Satanic sort of madness to the average medieval mind. God would defend the king and surely all manner of things would be well; and if they were not, those who gave their lives in defense of Richard would probably feel assured of a place in heaven.

The Welsh in Richard II: How Shakespeare Misrepresents the Welsh in Act 2, Scene 4.

The Welsh in Shakespeare’s play are in effect portrayed as deserters despite their true-to-life loyalty to King Richard II (it is well attested that a party of Welshmen tried to rescue Richard by pursuing Bolingbroke and his men on the road to London after he had captured the King through trickery).

The Welsh Captain in the scene tells Salisbury of a series of omens and portents that have resulted in his soldiers becoming convinced that Richard must be dead. In Shakespeare’s play, the keys to Bolingbroke’s success are:

• Impatience, physical disintegration, and/or ill-discipline on the part of the Welsh (“we have stayed ten days and hardly kept our countrymen together”).

• Moonlighting in the hospitality industry or fickle allegiance on the part of the Welsh (“Thy friends are fled to wait upon thy foes”).

• Superstition on the part of the Welsh, and a failure to notice the syphoning off of Welsh water to major English towns of the day such as Chester (“The bay trees in our country are all withered, and meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven . . . These signs forerun the death or fall of kings”).

A sane person would therefore be unlikely to trust these sorts of ‘trusty Welshmen’ to provision a war camp with whittled marshmallow-roasting sticks. Ironic then that they seem to have been entrusted with the fate and security of the entire English realm.

The Welsh as Portrayed in Shakespeare’s Richard II: Mystical or Misguided?

Ewoks: "Bring it on."

If this representation is accurate, then instead of launching costly military campaigns, the English might have conquered Wales more easily by installing bottomless holy wells. Combining this strategy with propaganda in the form of misleading fortune cookie messages and newspaper horoscopes, the English would have succeeded in no time:

Merlin say: “cast they sword in the well today; thou shalt have good fortune.”

)-(  “Pisces: if thou seest any sword-smith, be sure to slay him or risk bad luck.”

V  “Aries: surrender without resistance this week – the Force may not be with you.”