by Claire Kimball, Production Dramaturg
We might easily forget when we see so many Shakespeare productions featuring swordplay that the early modern dramatists also included firearms in their plays. The Bloody Banquet features two stage directions with guns: in the first, the Young Queen enters with pistols and in the second, a room full of people fire at a single target. Though they are clearly striking moments, early modern playwrights included firearms in their works more often than you might suppose: “More than sixty directions call specifically for a pistol or dag,” while still others ask for the discharging or shooting of weapons on stage (Dessen 164). A couple of the more well-known plays that include such firearms are The Spanish Tragedy and The Duchess of Malfi.
Guns were slow to claim their stake in warfare during the sixteenth century and not highly regarded. Initial models were slow to reload, frequently unreliable, smoky, and expensive. Eventually, however, their increasing portability shifted battle tactics in their favor. Mounted soldiers and pistoleers rose in popularity as they “rivaled the men-at-arms of old for battlefield domination and drove their rivals to acquire pistols alongside their more traditional weapons” (Eltis 100). Henry VIII’s personal bias toward archery had allowed the longbow to remain the preferred weapon, but the encroaching ‘military challenges’ of Elizabeth I’s reign encouraged an upgrade in offensive supplies and tactics (Esper 384). Handheld pistols improved in technology as matchlocks gave way to wheellocks and later flintlocks:
“The wheel-lock mechanism transformed the pistol into a compact, practical weapon suitable for mounted troops. The new pistol could be carried loaded, ready for instant use, and significantly extended the killing range.” (Kinard 13)
Despite its progress, the pistol was characterized by detractors as an emasculating or cowardly weapon of choice. In a society that had identified so closely with the honorable uses of the sword and longbow (each requiring skill with the weapon and a relative proximity to the target), guns increasingly allowed owners to blast at their victims haphazardly and do so at an advantageous distance. Firearms, Jim Casey notes, were “less manly because they required no particular masculine strength and because their range allowed a soldier to kill with little immediate physical danger” (Moncrief 90).
By the time of The Bloody Banquet’s composition, early wheellock “pocket dags” had become items of ill-repute.* Criminals now possessed weapons that they could conceal and keep loaded … and the aristocracy was a bit troubled by this prospect (Kinard 15). Queen Elizabeth I had banned pocket dags once they presented a concealed danger to the public. ** King James I returned to the issue in 1612 as a means to “disarm the papists” of a danger that was “growing in use” (Birch 158). We even find pistols a part of the ignominious stories in sensational murder ballads.
An example of a ballad in which the hero confronts a group of highwaymen and uses his pistols (“A New Ballad of the Three Merry Butchers” EBBA ID: 31733, University of Glasgow Library – Euing 235)
The Bloody Banquet will open in July as part of the Capital Fringe Festival. Check in with us next week for more about the play’s spectacle, vengeance, and murder.It’s interesting, then, when we consider the history surrounding firearms in early modern England, that The Bloody Banquet includes a scene in which a beautiful Queen enters with two pistols and murders her secret lover to ensure his silence. Later in the play, various members of the Lydian royal family (or, at least, their compatriots) discharge their firearms en masse at the tyrant Armatrites. What does it say about these characters when they use such items? Are the guns symbols of their wealth or markers of a new technological and murderous age? Does the image of a pistol contribute to a Queen’s moral degradation or, perhaps, a gentleman’s cowardice? Are we watching gunfire on stage as a mere spectacle element or a concurrent social condemnation?
* For an explanation on the current theory regarding The Bloody Banquet’s composition, consult “Gender, Hunger, Horror: The History and Significance of The Bloody Banquet” by Gary Taylor
** See The Proclamations of the Tudor Queens (Frederic A. Youngs Jr, Cambridge University Press)
Birch, Thomas. The Court and Times of James the First: Volume I. London: Printed by Henry Colburn, 1848.
Dessen, Alan C. and Leslie Thomson. A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642. New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Eltis, David. The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century Europe. New York, NY: I.B. Tauris and Company, 1998.
Esper, Thomas. “The Replacement of the Longbow by Firearms in the English Army” Technology and Culture. Vol 6, No 3, Summer 1965. Web. 17 May 2015.
Kinard, Jeff. Pistol: An Illustrated History of Their Impact. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, Inc, 2003.
Moncrief, Kathryn M., Kathryn R. McPherson, eds. Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011.