Jacobean era

There's a minority who remain Roman Catholic, but by the 17th century they're a very small minority, they're not really a political problem, they don't cause trouble.

The real issue is where's the Church of England as a Protestant church going to go? How far down the lines of Protestantism is it to progress? And there's a tension in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods between those who want to push the Reformation further, who want to do away with some of the Catholic hangovers in terms of the trinkets, the ceremonials, in terms of the structure of the church, and push it further along a Protestant, what we might call low church line.

And there are those who say, no, we've gone far enough.

It's a perfectly good, part Catholic, but essentially Protestant compromise.

And as they walk, Joe Burley declaims passages from the plays of John Webster.

Webster, the great Jacobean dramatist.

Murder, revenge, treachery, poison, corruption.

all that glorious blood-soaked seventeenth-century theatre being declaimed as two figures make their way through the streets of hackney what a picture what an education And here's a surprise.

In Shakespeare's play, All's Well That Ends Well, Lafeu makes fun of Paroles by saying, "No, no, no, your son was misled with a snipped taffeta fellow there, whose villainous saffron would have made all the unbaked and doughy youth of a nation in his color." That comes from All's Well That Ends Well, act four, scene five.

This strange little insult about villainous saffron is purported to be a reference to an actual murder trial that took place when Shakespeare was 51 years old, a scandal that gripped Jacobean England from the royal court all the way down to the peasants in the streets.

It unfolded as a sensational public spectacle, a sprawling court drama filled with adultery, ambition, poison, accusations of black magic, and shocking betrayals among the inner circle of King James I.

The proceedings were so infamous that they became one of the first criminal cases to be consumed through pamphlets and broadsides, the Elizabethan equivalent of tabloid coverage, with the public eagerly following every revelation day by day.

Are any elements of the saffron considered poisonous?

No, no. Um, the association, the, the poisonous association, the, the reputation of the people involved, uh, the, um, the, the saffron as part of the murder.

And so because it was the lady who had the patent for the saffron starch that became so popular at the time of the Jacobean court.

Again, this was a fashion that was set by Queen Anne because she had beautiful blonde hair and beautiful fair skin, and so she loved having the golden tint to her ruffs to really complement her beautiful pale skin and, and blonde hair.

And that was something kind of unexpected that I f- I followed kind of one commodity chain and thought about beavers, and there was actually quite a lot of evidence about musquashes, or muskrats, their skins being sent to, to England to be used, yeah, to scent linen cupboards and things like that.

So this idea that Massachusetts rodents were kind of scenting the linens in the closets of Jacobeans is really fascinating.

But the colonial accounts are also really clear on the settlers' reliance on Indigenous expertise, that the English are not good at catching beavers.

As one colonist writes, "Beavers are full of cunning evasions." After the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620, William Bradford admitted that no one saw a beaver skin here till they were informed so by Squanto, or Tisquantum, who served as a broker between English and local groups.

And in 1615, it comes out that she may very well have had a hand in his death.

And that she may very well have been working with people accused of witchcraft, conjurers, astrologers, fortune tellers, poisoners, a whole kind of nest of really unsavoury, really rather brilliant characters from Jacobean London.

And so the whole thing becomes incredibly scandalous.

And she and her new husband, the Earl of Somerset, are put on trial for murder.

Witchland reconstructs the lives of people accused during Britain's Civil War era.

The witch hunts showing how religious extremism, war, poverty, misogyny and community conflict all combine to create this deadly moral panic.

And while the events of her book do take place in the decades following William Shakespeare's death in 1616, the conditions that made them possible were already developing during his lifetime, making this a fascinating study of the consequences, really, and frequent overlap of Reformation politics, Jacobean witchcraft beliefs, religious division, and social instability, and the supernatural world that reflected in Shakespeare's plays.

You can find a copy of her book anywhere major books are sold, and I'll have a direct link provided for you in the show notes today.

stay for me there i will not fail to meet thee in that hollow vale and think not much of my delay i am already on the way and follow thee with all the speed desire can make or sorrow's breed each minute is a short degree and every hour a step towards thee at night when i betake to rest next morn i rise near my west of life almost by eight hours sail than when sleep breathed his drowsy gale but hark my pulse like a soft drum beats my approach tells thee i come and slow however my marches be i shall at last sit down by thee in the last few lines there is that effect of terror which is several times attained by one of bishop king's admirers edgar poe Again we may justly take these quatrains from Lord Herbert's ode, stanzas which would, we think, be immediately pronounced to be of the metaphysical school.

so when from hence we shall be gone and be no more nor you nor i as one another's mystery each shall be both yet both be one this said in her uplifted face her eyes which did that beauty crown were like two stars that having fallen down look up again to find their place while such a moveless silent peace did cease on their becalmed sense one would have thought some influence their ravished spirits did possess there is nothing in these lines with the possible exception of the stars simile not at once grasped but lovely and justified which fits johnson's general observations and the metaphysical poet's in his essay on coolie a good deal resides in the richness of association which is at the same time borrowed from and given to the word becalmed but the meaning is clear the language is simple and elegant it is to be observed that the language of these poets is as a rule simple and pure in the verse of george herbert this simplicity is carried as far as it can go a simplicity emulated without success by numerous modern poets the structure of the sentences on the other hand is sometimes far from simple but this is not a vice it is a fidelity to thought and feeling the effect at its best is far less artificial than that of an ode by gray and as this fidelity induces variety of thought and feeling so it induces variety of music without whether in the eighteenth century could be found two poems in nominally the same metre so dissimilar as marvell's coy mistress and crachaw's st teresa the one producing an effect of great speed by the use of short syllables and the other an ecclesiastical solemnity by the use of long ones love thou art absolute sole lord of life and death If so shrewd and sensitive, though so limited, a critic as Johnson failed to define metaphysical poetry by its faults, it is worthwhile to inquire whether we may not have more success by adopting the opposite method, by assuming that the poets of the seventeenth century, up to the Revolution, were the direct and normal development of the precedent age, and without prejudicing their case by the adjective metaphysical consider whether their virtue was not something permanently valuable which subsequently disappeared but ought not to have disappeared johnson has hit perhaps by accident on one of their peculiarities when he observes that their attempts were always analytic he would not agree that after the dissociation they put the material together again in a new unity It is certain that the dramatic verse of the later Elizabethan and early Jacobean poets expresses a degree of development of sensibility which is not found in any of the prose good as it often is.

If we accept Marlowe, a man of prodigious intelligence, these dramatists were directly or indirectly—it is at least a tenable theory—affected by Montaigne.

even if we except also johnson and chapman these two were notably erudite and were notably men who incorporated their erudition into their sensibility their mode of feeling was directly and freshly altered by their reading and thought in chapman especially there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought or a re-creation of thought into feeling which is exactly what we find in donne in this one thing all the discipline of manners and of manhood is contained a man to join himself with the universe in his main sway and make in all things fit one with that all and go on round as it not plucking from the whole his wretched part and into straits or into naught wishing the complete universe might be subject to such a rag of it as he but to consider great necessity we compare this with some modern passage know when the fight begins within himself a man's worth something god stoops o'er his head satan looks up between his feet both tug he's left himself in the middle the soul wakes and grows prolong that battle through his life It is perhaps somewhat less fair, though very tempting, as both poets are concerned with the perpetuation of love by offspring, to compare with the stanzas already quoted from Lord Herbert's ode, the following from Tennyson.

British playwrights, so [laughs] what an incredible gift that is.

And I've always, I've been likening it to Jacobean drama.

Mm.

It has that element of Jacobean drama, like The White Devil, revenge as tragedy.

Um, um, m- Duchess of Malfi that I-

Duchess of Malfi, yes