Maypoles and Puritans
By LESLIE HOTSON
WHEN Chaucer's restless spring comes round, I always long to go on pilgrimage in search of Shakespeare's-England ; and experience invariably turns my steps towards the Public Records in Chancery Lane. Here, among the recorded wrangles, often set down while tempers were still hot, we are bound to witness authentic doings of the liveliest kind. In tune with the spirit of the season we select a pair of parchments from the Court of Star Chamber, each revealing an enthusiastic struggle between the stubborn defenders of Merry England and the offensive Puritans —over the maypole.
The first of these takes us to Bermondsey, the village of Shake- speare's adversary, Justice Gardiner, not far from the Globe on the Bankside. In the year 1615, while the poet was still living, we find a Bermondsey linen-bleacher, who had renewed the village maypole at great expense, complaining that the Puritans had destroyed it. Specifically, his parson, by preaching against it as " unlawful!, superstitious and idolatrous," hacliso inflamed his faction that one midnight they " did violently, furiously, riotously, routously and in warlike manner march " up to the green, " and did then and there in most furious and outragious manner . . . assault the sayd Maypole, and with fIatchetts, Sawes, or otherwise, cutt down or sawe the same into several peices." And not content with this, the Puritan preacher appropriated the wood to his own use.
Turning to the other parchment. (first dealt with by Professor C. J. Sisson in his. Lost Plays of Shakespeare's Age, 1936), we find ourselves transported to Stratford-on-Avon, and here the tide
of battle seems to set against the Puritans. For whereas in Ber- mondsey Merry England was worsted and had to complain in the courts, in Stratford it is the parson (freely called a Puritan by his enemies) who is the party aggrieved. And though Shakespeare unfortunately missed the excitement by dying three years too soon, some of his intimate friends led the attack on the Puritans in 1619, and, as we shall see, they joined battle just about as close to the poet's mortal remains as they could get.
Here is the background. Three years after Shakespeare's death a lawyer acting for the Puritans of Stratford had found out that the vicar, John Rogers—a favourite with Shakespeare's friends— could be ousted from the vicarage because he held more than one benefice. In order to put in Thomas Wilson, a preacher more to their liking, the Puritan faction pressed this charge home against the vicar, but not without violent opposition. In Star Chamber Thomas Wilson accuses a formidable group of gentlemen, yeomen and tradesmen, led by Mr. John Nashe and Mr. William Reynoldes, both friends of Shakespeare, who by his will had recently left them legacies. Nashe's nephew, by the way, later married Shakespeare's granddaughter, Elizabeth. In May, 1619, the new preacher com- plains, his opponents scattered copies of libels against him and his backers in the taverns of Stratford and the neighbourhood. He quotes one libel in prose and another in rhyme doggerel. The former begins like this: " Sirra ho, . . . I here reported that all the old bitinge and young suckinge Puritants of Stratford are ioyned with their twoo Just-asis a peace, maliciously to displace and vtterly vndoe their minister, and to bringe in his place as arrand a k /nave/ as them selues, of purpose to assist them in their hypocrisye. . . . They haue sett all the towne together by the eares, which is the true office of a Puritant."
And it ends, " this merry moneth of May, thy honest friend if thou doe not turne Puritant, F. S." I am strongly if unjustifiably tempted to expand these initials into F/riend of/ S/hakespeare/. The libel in rhyme, entitled " A Satyre to the Cheife Rulers in the Synagogue of Stratford," is a performance less witty ; but it contains a provo- cative suggestion for ridding the town of the new preacher, as follows: " If that their minister be knockt ith head."
The feud came to its climax at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, on Sunday, May 30th, 1619, the day on which Wilson was inducted. At evening prayer on that day the old vicar, Rogers, was never- theless still officiating. Wilson claims that he himself went to the service only to attend, and did not offer either to preach or to read. Shakespeare's friends Nashe and Reynoldes and their faction, how- ever, says Wilson, " seekinge and wishinge his utter destruction," chose this moment to march to the church " in a ryotous tumultuous and seditious manner," proclaiming that they would flea -him and dispatch him of his life," and adding loud and rude comments on his private morals. The Puritan party already inside the building, led by Alderman Henry Smith, took alarm at these threats from the approaching crowd. Wilson says that they " were in very dredfull manner astonished, affrighted and amazed to heare and see such a multitude of disordered persons . . . behaving in such tumultuous sorte " ; so much so that his friends had to lock him up for safety in the chancel (where Shakespeare had recently been buried) " for feare least hee should have bene then and there forthwith murthered " by the rioters, " whose furye and rage towardes him was then so great as that hee and his freindes did verely thincke that he should never have come forth alive."
While Wilson was locked in with the entombed dramatist behind the chancel bars, a sharp struggle developed at the church-doors. Though the besieged Puritans pleaded with the Nashe-Reynoldes attackers " to desist from their bloudthirsty attempts," a few managed to break in through the doors. When these were over- powered and ejected, they " flunge great stones through the glasse windowes " and broke and battered them and the church walls down, so that if Wilson's friends had not spirited him away (possibly through the charnel or bone-house on the north side of the chancel), he is convinced his enemies would have killed him outright. To his enthralling description of the conflict over his own body, Wilson adds an account of the subsequent contention over the Stratford maypole. Here Shakespeare's friends seem to haye triumphed. After they had set up the pole on May Day, 1619, it stood all summer, until the time of Stratford Fair in September. Just before the Fair, however, the Puritan alderman, Henry Smith, and the bailiff, John Wilmore, took down the maypole. Wilson is at pains to insist that they " did not take downe the said Pole . . . for any dislike they have unto the pole," but because it was an obstruction to traffic in fair-time ; and that on taking it down on Monday, the 13th, they declared that, when the fair was over on Wednesday, the pole might be set up again within six hours.
Evidently Shakespeare's friends didn't believe a word of it. They saw the move as a Puritan attack on the ancient and laudable customs of Merry England, and a sly way of getting rid of the maypole in fair-time, when it flourished as the focus of dancing and cudgel-play. Without losing a minute, on the very day it was taken down, Nashe, Reynoldes and their followers assembled in arms, and, according to the Puritan preacher, " with great shoutes, triumphs and outcryes," put the pole up again " in the very selfe same place where it formerly stood."
We may leave it standing there, restored by Shakespeare's friends, and return to the poet's tomb in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church for a look at Shakespeare's monument. Countless pilgrims have been puzzled by the expression they find on Shakespeare's sculptured and painted features. His jaw has dropped, leaving his mouth half- open, and his eyes are wide in an incredulous, wooden and offended stare. Whence came such a look to the face of the friendly, affable : and genial Shakespeare ? When wo. stop to reflect that the setting up of his bust coincided pretty closely in time with the ousting of the old favourite vicar, John Rogers, and the arrival of the Puritan preacher, it all becomes perfectly clear. It was the enforced listen- , ing to the sermons of Wilson which fixed that expression of disgust on the poet's face, and it has remained there ever since.
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