Even them?! Loving the neighbour in Shakespeare and early modern England

Rejection always cuts deeply, but perhaps especially so when your would-be lover uses religious language to tell you that the feeling’s not mutual. This is the lot of Shakespeare’s Silvius in As You Like It. Silvius loves Phoebe. He pleads with her to return his love. Instead, he receives her retort: ‘Thou hast my love, is not that neighborly?’ (3.5.96)

The words Shakespeare gives Phoebe allude to the ethic of neighbour-love that has its origins in the Bible’s instruction to ‘loue thy neighbour as thy selfe’.¹ Ask almost any playgoer in As You Like It’s first audiences and they would have made the connection. For, in early modern England, the injunction to love one’s neighbour as oneself functioned as the normative ethic in a culture that was soaked through with Christian ideas and ideals.

I’m working on a project that investigates neighbourliness via Shakespeare and Shakespeare via neighbourliness. A Folger Virtual Fellowship has given me the opportunity to undertake research which has greatly enriched my understanding of how early modern people interpreted the ethic of neighbour-love and how the ethic impacted their interactions with one another. In this post, I’ll focus on a few of the rare books and manuscripts housed in the Folger that have helped illuminate these two questions for me. I’ll also drop back in on As You Like It along the way.

Who is my neighbour?

Implicit in the two questions I raise in the previous paragraph is this prior question of how early modern people categorized the neighbour. Both then and now, one’s understanding of what it means to love one’s neighbour as oneself depends, of course, on who one thinks one’s neighbour is.

In A Christian Dictionary, the Church of England pastor and author Richard Wilson (1562/3-1622) encapsulates the two main responses to this question that I have come across in the sources I’ve read. A Christian Dictionary was the first concordance of the Bible in English and proved to be highly popular – eight editions appeared between 1612 and 1678.

Here is Wilson’s entry for ‘Neighbour’ in the Folger’s 1616 (2^nd) edition of A Christian Dictionary:

When I read this entry, I was struck by how Wilson has the two definitions speak to one another. Interestingly, nearness is the common criterion for deciding who one’s neighbour is. In the first definition, it is the nearness of inanimate objects – the houses in which people dwell. In the second, it is the nearness of identity. The fact that two people are human and alive – near to one another in ‘kinde or blood’ – makes them neighbours.

By quoting the biblical ethic of neighbour-love, this second definition also stresses the moral significance of the neighbour. What I find interesting is that after establishing that one’s neighbour is any other human being, Wilson adds the phrase, ‘and doth or may stand in need of vs’. I read this phrase as Wilson’s explanation of what it means to love one’s neighbour. Who is my neighbour? Everyone, but especially anyone who might need one’s assistance.

This emphasis on one’s responsibility to provide practical help for one’s needy neighbour takes us back to Wilson’s first definition. Especially for ordinary early modern English people, it was most likely the neighbours they physically crossed paths with whose needs they could, and were obligated to, meet. Together, Wilson’s two definitions of ‘neighbour’ point to how the ethic of neighbour-love landed in the everyday for early modern English people. Their expectations of what neighbourliness looks like in practice include charity, hospitality, advocacy, friendship and care.

Everyday neighbourliness

I’ll now give three brief snapshots from the Folger’s manuscript collection that illustrate how the injunction to love one’s neighbour as oneself shaped early modern people’s expectations of one another, as well as their actual behaviour.

Care and charity feature in the medical formulas for ‘Particular Salves’ in the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London’s Medical Miscellany (1634). These recipes initially sent me down a ‘what plant is that?’ rabbit hole. ‘An Excellent Salue for wounds &cetera called the Gentlewomans Iewell’ requires finely powdered ‘Olybanum and Masticke’, while the following recipe, ‘Another very Excellent Medicine for the same’ includes the powdered ‘Rootes of Round Aristolochia, or Birthwort’.

One ingredient used in both recipes was especially surprising to me – a sizeable measure of tobacco. Step one of ‘Another very Excellent Medicine for the same’ involves grinding two pounds of tobacco leaves with one pound of ‘hogges greace’ and then stirring in a cup of red or claret wine. A potent mix indeed! I’ve since learned from the Spanish physician Nicolás Monardes’ influential book Ioyfull nevves out of the newe founde worlde (1577) that tobacco was thought to cure many ailments – from ‘all olde Soares’ to ‘cankered Ulcers’, ‘Ringewormes’ to ‘greate Scabbes’ (folio 44 verso).

But my main interest in the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries’s recipes is the instructions about their use. These focus the users of these formulas on other people’s needs. The ‘Excellent Salue’ ‘may be vsed by all good Gentlewomen, that helpe the poore for Gods sake./’ Similarly, people who brew up the second recipe are told: ‘The which yow may keepe for your poore wounded neighbour; It is good for old and filtly vlcers of the Leggs and other partes of the Body./’ This directive implies a degree of knowledge about one’s neighbour’s pus-filled ulcers that makes me feel just a little queasy.

A lack of neighbourly charity is the occasion for William Basset’s letter of January 15, 1594/95 to Richard Bagot of Blithfield. Basset writes on behalf of the parson of Cheadle: ‘How vncharytably the parson of chedall (good mr Bagott) hathe byne dealte withall by hys froward neyghbours it seemes well known vnto so you’. Basset asks Bagot, who already knows the parson’s troubles and has ‘pytyed his wrongfull vexaciones’, to intervene personally.

Basset’s description of what he hopes Bagot will achieve is striking: ‘I trust that you will beestowe your traveylls vnto bromley on fryday next to effect a frenshyp betwyxt them’. Friendship, rather than say, just an end to the neighbours’ hostile treatment of the parson and mutual toleration, seems like an idealistic goal in this situation. Basset’s hopes for the parson and his neighbours suggest the high value which early modern people placed on neighbourly relationships.

Speaking of hopes, the things a person prays for or devotes their mind to contemplating are particularly revealing of what they hope for themselves or others. Take, for instance, Lady Elizabeth Ashburnham’s prayers and meditations which she records in Instructions for my children, or any other Christian (1606). These include her prayer that God will help her to ‘be charitably affected towardes all that be in want and miserie’ and, under the heading ‘A godlie and fruitfull meditation,’ her paraphrase of the biblical ethic of neighbour-love: ‘Loue god above all things, and thy neighbour as thy selfe’ (folio 74 recto, folio 3 verso).

When As You Like It’s Phoebe invokes the biblical ethic, she does so in jest – to tell Silvius that she does not love him, much to his dismay. But this direct allusion points to how the idea of neighbour-love sets the tone for the play. The sense of goodwill, care, and responsibility towards one’s real-life neighbours which Richard Wilson, the Society of Apothecaries, William Basset, and Lady Ashburnham convey permeates Shakespeare’s comedy.

Shakespeare presents his audience with many scenarios in which characters in great need of neighbourly love receive it from others who owe them nothing. The old shepherd Corin’s desire to ‘relieve’ the weary, hungry travellers he meets – Rosalind, Celia and Touchstone, who have fled the usurping Duke Frederick’s tyrannical rule – and his ‘welcome’ of them is just one example (2.4.65-90).

Today, as social and political polarisation divides families, neighbourhoods, and societies, the idea of neighbour-love seems like nothing but wishful thinking. So much of the discourse in the public sphere provokes us to view the neighbour – physical or virtual – as a figure of suspicion. My explorations of how Shakespeare re-presents the profound biblical ethic on the stage will, I hope, offer us a glimpse of another way.