Shakespeare Magazine 05

History: The Tower of London
s a City of London Tour Guide
I can talk for hours about
Shakespeare and his links to
obscure ruins hidden in secret
corners of the Square Mile. The
smaller and quirkier, the better.
“See this wall? Let me tell you
about it!”
Shakespeare had a full, rich life in
the City. We find him in fairly ordinary
places – Carter Lane, Bread Street and
the alleyways of Blackfriars. So when the
Editor asked me to write about the Tower
of London I demurred. Surely the Tower
yields tales of kings, queens and traitors. If
Will from Stratford ever went there it’s not
recorded. What on earth would I say?
Shakespare himself is almost silent
on the subject. But there are some
interesting scenes in Richard III which
could reveal something of his feelings
toward the fortress. In Act III, Scene I,
Prince Edward speaks plainly: “I do not
like the Tower...” He is a doomed little boy
who, along with his brother, will shortly be
swallowed up within its stone walls and
disappear from history. He’s inquisitive
and he asks Buckingham about the old
building, wondering if it was built by Julius
Caesar.
Buckingham replies that is was indeed
built by Caesar, and the reader wonders
if this is another amusing example of
Shakespeare’s dodgy grasp of history. Just
think of all those anachronistic clocks in
plays like Macbeth and Julius Caesar, not
forgetting the game of billiards in Antony
and Cleopatra. For Elizabethans, however,
the origins of the Tower were hazy.
Squatting just outside London, at the
south eastern boundary, it seemed to have
sprung up at the time the Romans built
their great wall around the City. Londoners
did indeed know the White Tower as ‘Julius
Caesar’s Tower’.
Of course, we know different. Begun
in 1078, the great stone fortress was built
to consolidate William the Conqueror’s
victory over the English and keep the
population in awe of his might. By Will’s
day it was a contradictory place. On one
hand it functioned as a tourist attraction,
with visitors flocking to see fearsome
beasts such as leopards and bears at the
royal menagerie. On the other hand, it was
still very much a royal palace. It was also a
prison. The Tower was a place where the
unlucky, the brave and the foolish went to
suffer and die.
Most infamously, the Tower was
where a Queen of England, Anne Boleyn,
was imprisoned and executed in 1536
– an incident which is most definitely
not mentioned in Shakespeare’s late
collaborative play Henry VIII.
In 1601, Robert Devereux, the renowned
26 SHAKESPEARE magazine
“Most infamously, the Tower was where
a Queen of England, Anne Boleyn, was
imprisoned and executed in 1536”