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The Theatres of Cruelty: Eye relic

One of the more surprising aspects of Shakespeare's plays is that the most gruesome lines are often to be found not in the text itself, but in the stage directions:

'Enter King Henry VI with a supplication, and the Queen with Suffolk's head'

Time after time, especially in the history plays, the heads of major characters re-appear on stage without their bodies attached:

'Enter Iden, with Cade's head'

The price of political failure, or just of weakness, was likely to be an excruciating death.

'Enter Lovel and Ratcliff, with Hastings' head'

This is in a very real sense the theatre of public cruelty . . .

'Throwing down Somerset's head'

. . . and it is controlled by instructions that are sometimes spine-chilling, 'Enter Lavinia, ravished, her hands cut off and her tongue cut out', and occasionally just hilarious, 'Enter Messenger with two heads and a hand'.

'Enter the Bastard, with Austria's head'

'Re-enter MacDuff, with Macbeth's head'

'Re-enter Guiderius, with Cloten's head'

In today's terms, this sort of material is strictly post-watershed. But around 1600 in London's theatres, mutilation, dismemberment, execution were matinee fare. In Shakespeare's world, hideous human butchery was just a regular part of life. Strolling across London Bridge to see a play at the Globe or the Rose, you would pass rows of traitors' heads impaled on spikes. The execution of criminals was, if not exactly public entertainment, then certainly public spectacle. You might perfectly well go to Tyburn near Marble Arch in the morning, to witness a public hanging and then move on after lunch to watch Macbeth lose his head or the Earl of Gloucester both his eyes. Making the suffering of criminals and traitors public was a key part of the judicial system, and like the theatre, executions drew not only a large, but a socially very diverse, audience.

Here in the collections of Stonyhurst College, the Jesuit school in Lancashire, I'm holding in the palm of my hand what looks a bit like a small circular box of mints. But the inscription on it is not for sugar-free peppermints. It is four short lines of Latin. When I turn the box over, I can see a little window that shows what's inside. The window is in the shape of an eye, and on the silver mount round about it are engraved fine lines suggesting a pencil-thin eyebrow, some short curled lashes and a few wrinkles.

Through the glass I can see a small brownish lump, a bit like a shrivelled prune. I am looking at the past and to my amazement, it is looking back at me, for this is not a shrivelled prune, it's a human eye. And as the Latin inscription tells me, it's the right eye, the 'oculus dexter' of Edward Oldcorne the Jesuit. This is the reliquary of an English Catholic martyr, and one that, chillingly, does exactly what it says on the tin. Jan Graffius is curator of the Stonyhurst collection:

J Graffius: Edward Oldcorne was a missionary priest in the late 16th / early 17th century. Remarkably successful because he was 16/18 years hiding and working in amongst the Catholics of Worcestershire. He was a very gentle person and had the great misfortune to be caught up in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot.

N MacGregor: Was he one of the leaders of the Gunpowder Plot?

J Graffius: Nothing to do with it at all. Because of the safety of his house where he was living, other Jesuits who were being hotly pursued came to him for sanctuary and they were all caught at the same time. And although Father Oldcorne had absolutely no knowledge or complicity in it, as a Catholic Priest and a Jesuit, that was illegal in itself and he was tortured and then hanged, drawn and quartered.

The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 shook public opinion in much the same way as 9/11 did. When Guy Fawkes very nearly blew up James I inside the Houses of Parliament, it was immediately seen as a traitorous Catholic conspiracy in which the Jesuits, the Pope and the King of Spain were all implicated. Jesuits and clandestine N Macgregor: Catholic priests were hunted down, and sentenced to brutal exemplary punishment. Among them was Edward Oldcorne, executed near Worcester on 7th April 1606. Like all condemned traitors he was hanged, cut down while still alive and disembowelled, and then his body was quartered, literally hacked into separate pieces. The flavour of occasions like this is captured in a description of John Ballard's death, another priestly plotter of a generation earlier, who was executed in 1586:

'the first that was hanged, . . . being cut down . . . was dismembered, his belly ripped up, the bowels and traitorous heart taken out and thrown into the fire. His head also (severed from his shoulders) was set upon a short stake upon the top of the gallows, and the trunk of his body quartered and imbrued in his own blood, wherewith the executioner's hands were bathed, and some of the standers-by (but to their great loathing, as not to be able for their lives to avoid it, such was the throng) besprinkled.'

At the theatre, on the other hand, it's not so certain that the throng minded being besprinkled:

'I'm sure the groundlings at the front went there because they knew they'd get the spit and they'd get the blood.'

Tom Piper is a set designer with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and so he's in a good position to explain the practical difficulties of staging Shakespeare's theatre of cruelty - the beheadings, the eye squelchings and the other gory scenes:

'There's a gruesome bit at the end of Richard II when all the heads of all the people who've fought against Henry IV are brought in one after another and so about eight of them in sacks are dropped on the stage and they have to kind of not bounce - that's obviously a very comedy moment when one of your heads bounces across the stage - so quite often we weight them down with a lot of buckshot.'

But beating the bounce is only the beginning. Eyes are particularly tricky:

'We tend to use thing like we've got a couple of things here, which are basically lychees, the bit in the middle you can fill with blood. They're the right size, they're white and they're cheap, and they come in tins and you can kind of bring them with you wherever you're going around the world.'

Today these bloody bits of stage business can often seem contrived, artificial and remote. But in Shakespeare's time, they were disconcertingly close to the real suffering that the audience could witness for themselves in executions like Edward Oldcorne's.

The executions were meant, of course, to deter potential traitors, but inevitably they also inspired fellow Catholics. After Oldcorne's execution, a sympathiser must somehow have been able to secure his eye as a relic and then encased it in silver, as a treasured testimony of the gentle priest who died for his faith. To the authorities Oldcorne was a traitor, but to fellow Catholics a martyr, whose relics must lie gathered and honoured.

By the time of the Gunpowder Plot, the authorities were actively taking steps to prevent Catholics from picking up clothes or body parts that would commemorate the execution of priests. Their bodies were destroyed. It is a problem politicians still face today. It's easy to understand why the Americans buried Osama Bin Laden at sea so that his grave could not become a shrine and the focus of a cult.

Jan, what would you do with a relic like this around 1600?

J Graffius: It would be probably the most moving testament to the bravery of those priests who are working in England undercover. It would be a powerful inspiration. Jesuit priests who served in England and came back to Europe without having been caught often describe themselves as too unworthy to share the crown of martyrdom. So it wasn't something they sought, but it was something that was a huge honour.

In the case here we have relics relating to what we call the English martyrs of the 17th century. So for instance, this rather beautiful late 16th-century beaded box, the outer decoration gives you no clue as to what is inside, and if you lift the lid . . .

N MacGregor: It could be a work box, couldn't it? It could be a sewing box?

J Graffius: Absolutely, a sewing box or something of that kind. The lid is lined with pink silk studded with little black sequins, and there at the bottom . . .

N MacGregor: . . . is a bone.

J Graffius: . . . a human shoulder bone and then just above the elbow you can see where the knife has sliced right through it, a very sharp knife.

N MacGregor: This is the quartering.

J Graffius: The quartering. And the brownish material clinging to the bone is human flesh. It's the skin and muscle of one of four young men who trained for the priesthood in France and landed in Durham and were unlucky. They weren't disguised, they were very inexperienced and they were immediately arrested, executed within a matter of weeks, and somebody brave enough either to bribe the executioners for a part, or to follow and to notice where the bodies were buried (often in dung heaps) and then dig a piece up.

N MacGregor: And this also would inspire me if I were thinking of coming as an undercover priest to convert England.

J Graffius: It is a very graphic reminder of the price that other men have paid for trying to do the same thing.

Public executions were in a very real sense performances. The executioner's scaffold built for the likes of Edward Oldcorne and the Gunpowder Plotters was in fact a kind of stage, little different in construction and purpose from a theatre stage, and the crowds forming the audience expected the condemned to make a speech before dying. They usually did, mostly admitting their guilt, asserting their loyalty and asking for forgiveness.

The very word 'scaffold' had a double meaning. In Henry V the theatre stage is memorably described by the Chorus as an 'unworthy scaffold to bring forth / so great an object'. But in Richard III it is the place of public execution, where men march 'up to some scaffold, there to lose their heads'.

Bloody spectacle could be found on both. In George Peele's play of around 1590, The Battle of Alcazar, three men are disembowelled and the staging required for each man three separate vials of blood and a whole set of sheep's entrails. Spectators at the London playhouses knew what a bloody end looked like, and hovering near the front by the stage, they must have hoped for some in-your-face authenticity.

Contemplating the removal of Edward Oldcorne's eye, here at Stonyhurst, it is hard not to think of what is probably the most unsettling stage violence in the whole of Shakespeare, the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear, written around the time that Oldcorne suffered his fate.

Cornwall: . . . Fellows, hold the chair.

Upon these eyes of thine I'll set my foot.

Gloucester: He that will think to live till he be old

Give me some help! - O, cruel! O, you gods!

Regan: One side will mock another. Th'other too!

. . .

Cornwall: Lest it see more, prevent it. Out, vile jelly! Where is thy lustre now?

(King Lear 3.7.66-83)

The squelching of Gloucester's eyes is always a terrifying moment in the theatre. We wait for it, we turn away. We simply cannot look.

But were Shakespeare's audiences shockable in this way? I think that is probably unlikely, because the blood-soaked plays were very popular and real-life executions were the scenes of thronging crowds jockeying for the best views. Standing as a groundling at the foot of the stage must have been very like jostling around the bottom of the scaffold. A contemporary commentator tells us:

'there was no lane, street, alley or house in London . . . out of which there issued not some of each age and sex . . . and they thronged and overran one another for haste, contending to the place of death for the advantage of the ground where to stand, see, and hear what was said and done.'

Looking at this silver box, I find myself haunted by the thought of the last thing that Edward Oldcorne saw with this right eye. He had been hanged and cut down while still alive. So his last sight was almost certainly of a crowd of men and women, pushing and shoving, trying to get a better view and then finally, the hangman approaching with his knife to disembowel him.

All we can hope is that he was still confident that one man's courage can change the world, and that is what we will be discussing in our next, and final, programme.

Shakespeare quotations are taken from:

King Lear (London: Penguin, 2005). ISBN-13: 978-0-14-101229-2