CARLISLE That honourable day shall ne’er be seen.
Many a time hath banished Norfolk fought
For Jesus Christ in glorious Christian field,
Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross
Against black pagans, Turks and Saracens,
And, toiled with works of war, retired himself
To Italy, and there at Venice gave
His body to that pleasant country’s earth
And his pure soul unto his captain Christ,
Under whose colours he had fought so long. (4.1.92-101)
This is a tricky passage, and its racist language and underlying assumptions about both race and religion might well make it an easy cut in a modern production. That it’s of its time, and indeed, I think, a medievalising moment, doesn’t mean it can’t offend. The point is that Thomas Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, is dead, and therefore he cannot return to England to defend himself against Aumerle, and regain his lands and titles, on that honourable day which Bolingbroke has just envisioned. There seems to be a bit of elaboration of the historical sources here: the historical Mowbray was known as a fighter, and he did go at least to Venice, and to Jerusalem, but as a pilgrim; he caught the plague either while on pilgrimage or on his return to Venice, where he died in 1399, aged thirty-three (he may well have been toiled, worn out, with works of war, but he didn’t die in battle or of wounds). And he is buried in Venice, although Carlisle’s euphemism that Mowbray at Venice gave his body to that pleasant country’s earth might jar a little, as earth is not quite what springs to mind when Venice is imagined. However.
What is Carlisle doing here, therefore? He’s partly laying the groundwork for the rest of the scene, and in particular for the long and significant speech which he will make in a few moments’ time. It’s unsurprising that a bishop should speak in Christian terms, but Carlisle’s language is vivid and apocalyptic. Previously in this scene young men have been scrapping amongst themselves about matters of honour, albeit within a larger, and desperately fraught, political context: Carlisle raises the stakes by citing—as he sees it—a far more significant war, of near cosmic significance, the Crusades. No matter how wrongheaded that might seem to a modern sensibility, it invokes a different set of criteria for rightness and honour. Who in this scene so far fights for Jesus Christ in glorious Christian field, streaming the ensign of the Christian cross, with a pure soul? Not a lot of that going on here. The black pagans (and black here is probably both racial and moral), Turks and Saracens are completely othered, a hellish enemy ranged against the forces of God. In his rhetoric, Carlisle is opening a window to another age, which would seem quite alien (albeit perhaps nostalgically attractive) to an audience even in the 1590s, let alone now, a world of crusader knights and pilgrims grimly doing ‘the Lord’s work’, not petulantly throwing gloves around. (Carlisle has, not impossibly, been reading The Faerie Queene…) Who in this company now assembled is doing that work? And whose side is God on? What is the divine will? Those are the questions that Carlisle is here, implicitly, beginning to raise, and he will continue to do so; this language and this frame of reference–Christian, Biblical, apocalyptic–will continue to matter in the play.
