You be the judge

James I and VI liked to term himself Rex Pacificus. Like most politicians who talk a lot about working for peace, he was an appeaser. Inheriting the English throne after Elizabeth, whose foreign policy was defined by breaking Spanish dominance, James appears to have seen the purpose of his own Whitehall government as being to facilitate every Spanish demand. The first high-profile victim of James’s Iberophilia was the war hero and poet Sir Walter Raleigh. Within four months of Elizabeth I’s death in 1603, Raleigh was on trial for treason under the new regime. His death sentence was commuted until 1618, when it was carried out at the direct request of the Spanish ambassador.

Shakespeare’s Globe is staging the trial of Walter Raleigh as a piece of theatre this month. Or ‘Ralegh’, as the programme would have it, using the spelling its hero used most frequently. (Early modern orthography was at best irregular.) Actor-director Oliver Chris — who also tackled constitutional issues in a high-profile turn as Prince William in King Charles III — has spent more than two years working through the original sources for Raleigh’s trial to produce an educated estimate at verbatim transcripts. This being 2018, there’s an immersive twist: 12 members of the audience each night get to serve on the jury. Supposedly, they could even vote to acquit, although one suspects that the clerk of the court might engage in some authentically Jacobean arm-twisting.

It’s a great idea. For those of us who endured Emma Rice’s anti-academic interregnum at Shakespeare’s Globe, it’s a delight to see the indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse being used for its intended purpose — to bring us closer to the experience and practices of Jacobean performance. (Trials in 1603, as in 2018, were surely theatrical performances.) Raleigh’s trial is a moment in British history that gives us a view of London at the crux of massive change.