Shakespearean Intersections by Parker Patricia;

Author:Parker, Patricia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2018-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

“The Martyrdome and burning of William Tyndale in Brabant.”

—Illustration in The whole workes of W. Tyndall, Iohn Frith, and Doct. [Robert] Barnes, three worthy martyrs (1573)

Cardinall Poole came out of Brabant into England, and . . . was by Parliament restored to hys olde dignitie, that he was put from by King Henrie.

—John Stow, The chronicles of England (1580)

My departure oute of Brabante, (myne owne naturall Countrey) into youre Maiesties Realme of Englande . . . to escape the handes of the bloud-thirsty.

—Jan van der Noot, Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings (1569)

There were, however, even further connections of different kinds between England and Brabant throughout the century leading up to Othello, including with regard to the reign of Mary and Philip that took England back to Catholicism after Henry VIII’s break with Rome, the pouring of Brabantian refugees into England, the broader geopolitics of the threat from the Ottoman Turk, and fears in England of a Spanish invasion. Thomas Nashe begins The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) by setting it “About that time that the terror of the world, and feauer quartan of the French Henrie the eight . . . aduanced his standard against the two hundred and fifite towers of Turney and Turwin, and had the Emperour and all the nobility of Flanders, Holland, and Brabant as mercenarie attendants.” Anne Boleyn was sent as a teenager in 1513 to the prestigious Habsburg court of Margaret of Austria in Mechelen between Antwerp and Brussels, the court in Brabant in which Margaret ruled as governor of the Netherlands and the future Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles V was brought up.54 In the wake of the Reformation, Brabant figured centrally in the history of religious and doctrinal conflicts. It was the site, for example, of the martyrdom of William Tyndale, who was captured in Antwerp and put to death for heresy in 1536 at Vilvoorde, near Brussels, memorialized in the Protestant polemics of John Bale and others and in an illustration of “The Martyrdome and burning of William Tyndale in Brabant” that accompanied the account from Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, in a collection of martyrdoms and sufferings among “infidells” in Brabant in 1573. On the opposite side of the religious divide, John Donne’s maternal grandfather, the Catholic playwright and epigrammatist John Heywood, went into exile to Brabant in 1564, when a commission was set up to enforce the Act of Uniformity against Catholics during Elizabeth’s reign.55

John Stow’s The Chronicles of England (1580)—which refers repeatedly to the long history of “English Marchants goodes in Brabant” (252) and the residence in Brabant of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor—includes Brabant among the united dominions of Charles’s son Philip and England’s “Queene Mary” (1092), at their marriage in 1554 on “Saint James day” (July 25, the feast day of “Sant’Iago,” Spain’s patron saint). Stow notes as well that as part of the restoration of Catholicism to England, “Cardinall Poole came out of Brabant into England, and . . . was by Parliament restored to hys olde dignitie, that he was put from by King Henrie” (1093).

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