1 - The Derek Brewer Essay Prize: Playing Arthur: Making the Elizabethan Mariner

Summary

The age of Elizabeth I (reigned 1558–1603) is celebrated for its confrontations on, and explorations at, sea. Nautical figures such as Sir Francis Drake (c. 1540–1596) and Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618) have helped to personify the age of Gloriana for posterity as one of romance and adventure. This essay investigates the role played by the Arthurian legend in forging these chivalric fictions. Scholarship on Elizabethan Arthurianism tends to focus on the work of diligent propagandists, ardent antiquarians, and/or elaborate Spenserian allegory, but two Accession Day tilt shows performed by the ‘Privateering Earl’ of Cumberland, George Clifford (1558–1605), evidence a more playful appropriation of the legend and a more accessible form of tournament than has previously been appreciated. I contend that these Arthurian adaptations were popular entertainments and that they shaped conceptions of the early modern sailor.

The shadowy Celtic figure, King Arthur, was first given a biography that created a legendary imperial past for Britain in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae ( c. 1136). This fantastic account gathered as many sceptics as acolytes in subsequent centuries, and in the sixteenth century the question of Arthur's historicity became especially charged. That Arthur might not really have been an ideal warrior King leading Britain to victory against the Saxons and the Romans, that he might not have been at all, was initially a sensitive topic because of Henry Tudor's Welsh ancestry. Arthur subsequently became embroiled in the need for historical narratives of English exceptionalism created by Henry VIII's break from Rome. For the first half of the century, then, questions of Arthur's historicity politicise the legend. By the 1590s, however, such questions had lost their sting. Arthur was becoming a source of comedy rather than contention.

This was the decade in which King Arthur took to the commercial stage. The diary of the theatre impresario, Philip Henslowe (c. 1550–1616), records five play titles with clear Arthurian associations, among them: Vortiger (1596), Uther Pendragon (1597), and The Lyfe and Death of Arthur, King of England (1598). While only their titles survive, it has been suggested that these three plays formed a chronicle trilogy that may have been intended to rival Shakespeare's Henriad, which was playing down the road from The Rose at The Globe.