The 17th Century: I Remember It Well! Quiz

Answer: James I

When King James VI of Scotland ascended to the throne of England as James I, he took over sponsorship of Shakespeare's company, which under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I had been called the Lord Chamberlain's Men (for Elizabeth's cousin Henry Carey, Lord Hundson, who served in that office). Companies of players from England, including Lawrence Fletcher, who is listed in the same company as Shakespeare, are known to have been in Scotland in 1589 and again in 1599, and there is speculation that the playwright was among them as an actor. If "Hamlet" was written in 1600 or 1601, as most scholars believe, the descriptions of the company of players in "Hamlet" could have reflected this experience.

The 1603 publication of Shakespeare's plays is called the "Bad Quarto" because it was pieced together from performances of the plays or obtained from early drafts rather than being written down with a view toward literary art; however, because a version of "Hamlet" appears there the play can be dated before 1603. Whether he had met Shakespeare in Scotland or not, King James, who was a writer himself, enjoyed drama and comedy, defended theater attendance over the protests of Scottish clergy, and even referred to himself as a "player king" when writing advice for his son Henry, then the crown prince.

Answer: East India Company

The performance aboard the East India Company ship "Red Dragon" was recorded in Captain William Keeling's log for September 5, 1607, as the merchant ship was becalmed off the coast of West Africa, waiting for the seas and winds to be right to proceed to the Cape of Good Hope and into the Indian Ocean toward the rich East Indies and the spices.

Queen Elizabeth I had granted a Royal Charter on the last day of December 1600 to the Earl of Cumberland and a group of 215 "adventurers" who would become the East India Company, later called the British East India Company. While the Earl was a naval commander, the "adventurers" for the most part were "knights, aldermen, and burgesses" venturing capital and reaping profits rather than going to Africa, Asia, and other faraway places themselves. Spices and pepper were important commodities, but as the 17th Century rolled on, traders went on to import silk, cotton, and indigo dye for clothing; saltpeter for gunpowder; drinks like tea, coffee, and chocolate for increasingly popular coffee houses and social events; and many other products Europeans came to take for granted (and we take for granted today). The company eventually exerted political and cultural influence all over the globe. The Dutch East India Company, established in 1602, was a competitor.

Answer: Thirty Years War

When Shakespeare was writing "Hamlet" the Thirty Years War was in the future, but Denmark and Norway would be very much involved with that war, as would members of England's royal family. There are records of performances of "Hamlet" at court for James I in 1619 and Charles I in 1637, both while war was raging in Europe. One can imagine that the signs of impending war in the play resonated for that audience. At the time, the Holy Roman Empire, including the states that would become Germany, was a patchwork of small nations, some Lutheran, some Calvinist, and some Roman Catholic. The religion of the ruler was the religion of the nation, with the concept of freedom of religion within a state rare.

Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of James I and Anne, was married in 1613 to Frederick V, Count Palatine of the Rhine, one of the German states. When the ruler of Bohemia died, leaving the Protestant nation vulnerable to take over by the powerful Catholic Archduke Ferdinand, Bohemian Protestants responded by throwing Ferdinand's emissaries out of a castle window, an event known to history as the Second Defenestration of Prague. In 1619, Frederick and Elizabeth were asked to become King and Queen of Bohemia. Within a year, however, Ferdinand had become the Holy Roman Emperor and used his superior power to defeat the new king at the Battle of White Mountain. Because their reign was so short, Frederick and Elizabeth became known as the "Winter King and Queen" and the Thirty Years War quickly began to spread.

James's queen and Elizabeth's mother, Anne of Denmark, was sister to Christian IV, King of Denmark-Norway and Duke of Holstein and Schleswig, which were in Germany. Christian wanted to gain control of the Elbe River in Germany to strengthen his trade routes, protect his lands there, and outdo the king of Sweden as the Protestant hero. Both Scotland and England supplied Christian IV with troops, but he too was crushed by the onslaught of the Holy Roman Emperor's forces, losing the decisive Battle of Lutter in 1626. The Thirty Years War affected much of Europe but was most devastating in Germany, where it is estimated that at least 20% of the population were killed.

Answer: Liver

William Harvey was educated at Cambridge then went to Padua in Italy, where the famous anatomy professor Hieronymus Fabricius taught. (Galileo was also a tutor at Padua when Harvey was there.) Harvey's approach well demonstrated what would come to be called the scientific method. He applied physics, experimentation, and repeated observations to build on Fabricius's discovery that there were valves in the veins and arteries of animals and humans.

Few doctors in the 17th Century questioned the authority of Galen, who built on the knowledge of his time, around 200 A.D. Understanding of anatomy and medical care was based on theories of humors, and the liver was thought to take in nutrition and replenish the blood, with veins and arteries being different systems, and blood getting used up every day. Physiology was linked to philosophy, and anatomy to emotions.

Harvey linked physiology to anatomy, looking closely with magnifying glasses (no microscopes yet) to see how blood was flowing, guided by the valves, and to see what happened when a vessel was compressed to stop the flow. As court physician to King James I and King Charles I of England, he went on hunting trips with the royal parties and minutely observed the animals' bodies. He also observed the bodies of men killed or wounded in battle, paid close attention while treating patients, and dissected living snakes to see how their hearts pumped. He gave lectures and demonstrated what he had learned. Gory and revolutionary, Harvey's work took a while to be accepted. In a later book, he expounded on the shocking idea that reproduction happens when a sperm fertilizes an egg, with an embryo developing from that union.

Answer: It was so cold the River Thames froze over for two months.

Just to get one thing out of the way, the beer vat incident actually happened, and the wave of beer is said to have been 15 feet high, but it occurred in 1814, was not weather-related (that I know of), and most of the people who died were in cellars. And while there were droughts in England during the 17th Century, the Great Fire of London (in 1666) was not caused by the weather. As for sunspots, 1683-84 falls into a period of time called the "Maunder Minimum" - around 1645 to 1715 - when a "prolonged sunspot minimum" was noted, but it is unclear how this could have affected the weather, which was unusually cold.

The 17th Century in Europe and North America was so cold at times, it has been called the "Little Ice Age" and was characterized by heavy snowfall, frozen waterways, and increased glaciation that destroyed farms and villages in mountainous areas. Summers were cool, and agriculture was affected, leading to famines and starvation; some historians estimate that France, Norway, and Sweden lost 10% of their population to weather-related causes and that Finland and Estonia may have lost even more.

But people found ways to make the best of it. Curling and ice skating became popular sports, and 1608 gives us the first written, illustrated reference to a Frost Fair on the frozen River Thames in London. The winter of 1683-84 was particularly cold, and the Thames froze solid from December 20 until February 6, making it into a street filled with shops, coaches and horses, and people playing games and watching bull-baiting, puppet shows, and other entertainments. Even King Charles II and Queen Catherine participated, taking part in an outdoor feast cooked on the ice. At the last Frost Fair in 1814, an elephant was led across the ice; what with the tidal wave of beer, I'd say 1814 was an interesting year, but - alas - outside our time period for this quiz.

Answer: Inquisition

In the quotation Hamlet was probably talking about space on earth for a kingdom rather than deep space, but his words conjure up thoughts of the universe, especially when looking at the history of science in the 17th Century. Galileo observed that in addition to the earth revolving around the sun, the moons of Jupiter revolve around that planet, making Jupiter, named for the king of the Roman gods, the center of his own little nutshell of infinite space. While Galileo's book on these observations had not yet been written, the theories of Copernicus, Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, and others were known in England in the early 1600s, and people were interested in new ideas in all the sciences.

English scientists like William Harvey attended school in Italy, where Galileo was experimenting and teaching. Thomas Digges was a student of Queen Elizabeth's astrologer and alchemist John Dee, and a contemporary of Shakespeare's. Digges challenged the fixed cosmology of Aristotle and Ptolemy, observing a supernova and determining that it was farther from the earth than the orbit of the moon was. In 1576 and in later revisions of the Almanac published by his father, Digges added a picture of a heliocentric universe, and because stars do not orbit the sun, he placed the stars in the margins outside the circles of the planets - in infinite space! Because the second husband of Digges's widow was executor of William Shakespeare's will, it is well within the realm of possibility that he had seen a copy of the almanac. Much of the scientific revolution of the 17th Century came after his death in 1616, but scientific ideas were already within Shakespeare's orbit.

The story of Galileo, two popes, numerous high church officials, other scientists and philosophers, and the official Inquisition is long and complicated, with the first accusations of heresy coming in 1613 and his final trial and conviction taking place in 1633, after twenty years of censorship and harassment but relative freedom. It was a satirical book published in 1632 that got him in the most trouble - "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" - which had a foolish character who defended the Ptolemaic view of the universe. Many of the opinions of the stupid character were those of Pope Urban VIII, and troublemakers convinced the Pope that the character was meant to depict him personally, after he had given the astronomer a lot of leeway. The Pope was not amused. After his conviction, Galileo was under house arrest until his death in 1642, but he still was able to do physics experiments and even wrote a book about them - "Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences" - published in the Netherlands in 1638.

Answer: William Dampier

Well worth a read is Mary Floyd-Wilson's article "Hamlet, the Pirate's Son" from the journal "Early Modern Literary Studies" Special Issue 19 (2009) 12.1-11 (you can find it online). This article explains why Shakespeare's audience would have had no problems associating the Baltic Sea and other waters between Denmark and the British Isles with piracy, because a Viking tradition lived on in the 17th Century.

However, our histories of the 17th Century and the years preceding and following it lead our thoughts of pirates farther afield, into the Caribbean and other places where English buccaneers were encouraged to prey on merchant ships as well as naval vessels of enemy nations. William Dampier was one of those pirates, but even in his early years at sea, he was a keen observer of everything he encountered, from tides and currents to flora and fauna to people and customs. And he wrote things down in lively narratives, with descriptive details that make the reader feel part of the expedition.

William Dampier's influence was profound. Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin carried his writings with them on their travels and found his facts to be accurate and his methods worthy of imitation. Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" and Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" fictionalize Dampier's experiences and owe much to his voice. His descriptions of Australia piqued interest and planted the seeds that led to further exploration and settlement, and (according to a blog on the website of the Royal Society) he brought new words to the language: "barbecue", "avocado", "chopsticks" and "sub-species" to mention a few. He regaled people of all classes with his tales as they sat together in coffee houses, and he held his own with the fellows of the Royal Society of London, which had been chartered by Charles II in 1660. Another good read is Diana and Michael Preston's book "A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer, The Life of William Dampier" - a title that pretty much sums it up.

Answer: Huguenots

In 1598, two years before the 17th Century officially began, the Edict of Nantes was signed by Henry IV of France. Like many nations in the tempest that was Reformation Europe, Henry was born into the Roman Catholic tradition, was raised as a Huguenot Calvinist, and returned to Catholicism, perhaps for more than one reason, but certainly to gain the crown of France in 1593, famously saying, "Paris vaut bien une messe" ("Paris is well worth a mass"). The Edict of Nantes granted a number of civil rights to Protestants and allowed Protestant colleges to exist in specific towns. Shakespeare leaves it unclear whether Laertes is headed back to a Catholic school or a Calvinist one; but since he goes to Paris, he would be in a university not simply Catholic but strongly engaged in fighting heresy. The politically powerful Cardinal Richelieu was a graduate of the University of Paris and would become chancellor of the Sorbonne, its college of theology. He was consecrated as a Bishop in 1607, at the age of 19. When Louis XIII became King of France at the age of nine, with his mother as regent, Richelieu gained even greater influence for the Catholic Church.

After uprisings in the 1620s, aided by England, Huguenots fought for more power but were defeated. They retained religious rights under the Edict of Nantes but lost political rights, and during the reign of Louis XIII, their status was constantly threatened and unsure. In 1685, Louis XIV renounced the Edict of Nantes that his grandfather had enacted, opening up the Protestant minority in France to persecution, even torture, and exile, as their religion became illegal according to the new Edict of Fontainebleau. Protestant pastors had to convert to Catholicism or get out of the country within two weeks. Protestant lay people, on the other hand, were forbidden to leave. They left, anyway, with around 400,000 Huguenots fleeing to the Protestant nations of Europe and to colonies overseas.

Answer: Denmark

Anne was the daughter of King Frederick II of Denmark, famed for his interest in the military, hunting, drinking, eating, and other manly self-indulgence, not unlike the stereotype of the Danish king seen in Claudius in Shakespeare's play. Anne of Denmark and James VI of Scotland (who would become James I of England) had quite a wedding, two weddings, in fact, both in 1589. They were first married by proxy, the ceremonies performed in different countries. Anne was supposed to travel by ship to Scotland ten days later, but en route the weather caused the Danish party to take a detour to Norway to wait it out. James traveled to Oslo to get her. They had their official wedding together in Oslo (in French, which both the Danish bride and the Scottish groom understood), then went on to meet her mother at Kronborg Castle in...wait for it...Elsinore, the setting of Shakespeare's "Hamlet"!

James also met the future king Christian IV who was twelve, three years younger than his sister, the bride. The couple and their entourage moved on to Copenhagen to watch Anne's sister Elizabeth marry a German duke, and finally sailed home to Scotland, where Anne rode into Edinburgh in a silver coach. Her coronation was equally grand. James's sexuality was in question then and later, but fears that he would not be able to be a husband seem to have been unfounded, and Anne was in love. She gave birth to the crown prince, Henry, in 1594, five years after her marriage, to sighs of relief.

As was tradition, Prince Henry was sent to be raised by a Scottish lord. Anne was not willing to stand for this, as she and her siblings had spent much of their lives with her loving mother Queen Sophie, who even cared for the children when they were sick. Anne's ongoing efforts to gain custody and to bring up her own son caused tension in the marriage. She succeeded in having him accompany her to England when they joined James in 1603.

Anne also stood up to her husband when family members of a close friend and lady-in-waiting came under suspicion and were executed. There were other conflicts. Anne and James each kept their own households, and after several miscarriages and deaths of children, the decision was made to attempt no more pregnancies. Their beloved Prince Henry died at age 18 of typhoid fever, but the second son Charles went on to become king (with his own sad death at 48 that his parents would be spared seeing). Their daughter Elizabeth was the "Winter Queen" of Bohemia, who lived through wars just in time to see the Restoration of the English crown under her nephew Charles II. Elizabeth died in England in 1660, best known as the mother of Prince Rupert, a Cavalier hero of the English Civil War. Elizabeth's daughter Sophia also married a German duke and was the mother of George I, the first king of England in the Hanover dynasty.

Answer: English Civil War

Wittenberg, on the Elbe River in Germany, was the home of Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, who founded its university in 1502. Frederick, who remained Roman Catholic, nevertheless protected Martin Luther from the Inquisition when he defied the church in 1517, listing abuses that needed reformation. Theologian and Greek Professor Philip Melanchthon and Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe also studied and taught at Wittenberg. The most notorious fictional Wittenberg scholar was Dr. Faustus, so when Shakespeare's audience hears that the equally fictional Hamlet, his friend Horatio, and old classmates Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have all been students there, we expect that they have been challenged to wrestle with ideas others might find dangerous. By the middle of the 17th Century, Wittenberg was offering scholarships to working class students who wanted to learn Lutheran theology, so the university was open to social change, as well.

The Protestant King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England in 1603, and on November 5, 1605, his reign almost came to an end when Catholic conspirators packed 36 barrels of gunpowder under the House of Lords just before Parliament was due to open with the King and his son Prince Henry in attendance. The plan, after blowing up Parliament and taking a big chunk out of London in the process, was to seize the nine year old princess, Elizabeth Stuart, and to set her up as queen under the tutelage and protection of Catholic nobles. It is unclear what their plans were for King James's younger son, Charles, who was only five years old but had been named Duke of York earlier that year and perhaps was expected to be with his father, as well.

While the Gunpowder Plot was revealed by a Member of Parliament who had been warned to stay away on opening day, religious and political conflicts continued for James I and later for Charles I, the younger brother who became heir after Prince Henry died at 18. Charles I worshiped as a High Anglican, preferring liturgy and rituals that were much like Roman Catholic customs, and he chose a Catholic queen, Henrietta Maria of France, making conflicting promises he could not keep about tolerance for Catholics in England. His Archbishop, William Laud, rubbed Puritan Protestants in Parliament the wrong way. He tried to impose Anglican worship and the "Book of Common Prayer" on Scottish Presbyterians. Taxes, money borrowed for wars, indecision, closings of Parliament, insistence on absolute power as his "Divine Right" as a king, and many other factors led to the English Civil War, which was not just one war but a series of wars sometimes called the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (England, Scotland, and Ireland). The conflict seemed unending. In 1649, Charles I was tried by the House of Commons and beheaded. The unrest did not end until after the "Interregunum" - a time when the extreme Protestant faction governed without a king - with the Restoration coming in 1660, when the son of Charles I returned from exile and became King Charles II.