Cannons in the Canon 4: Hammer'd Iron/Steel in My Head

As discussed in previous posts, Henry Neville owned and operated an ironworks in Sussex from the mid 1580s to the mid 1590s. He was directly involved in the production of "iron ordnance" (cannons). The works of William Shakespeare are suffused with imagery and metaphors from that experience.

The ironworks had a water wheel than ran giant bellows which pushed air into the blast furnace and also ran great hammers that pounded the iron. Here is a nice description of the hammering and why it was necessary (interesting website with photos):

"However cast iron was brittle, and needed remelting and hammering at a finery forge to convert it into highly durable ‘wrought’ iron. Forges now also used waterwheels to power bellows, to re-melt the sows at a high temperature, but their main function was turning huge mechanical hammers to pound the result into short thick iron bars, called anconies. The hammer was attached to a shaft on the waterwheel and could pound the iron up to 60 blows per minute, so forge production was also increased."

This must have been quite noisy! Maddening in fact. Check this:

Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,
Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.
Titus Andronicus, 2.3

The guiding principle of this blog is that people write what they know. They pull on their personal experience in their creative writing. This is a commonplace assumption everywhere except in Shakespeare studies. From before the time of the earliest plays and poems, Neville was involved in the ironworks. So we should expect to find it in the earliest works, and we do. Titus Andronicus is believed to be one of Shakespeare's earliest plays. A search of EEBO doesn't turn up a lot of examples of hammers in the head (click to see the full list):

Another example from one of Shakespeare's early poems:

To dry the old oak's sap and cherish springs, 

To spoil antiquities of hammer'd steel, 

And turn the giddy round of Fortune's wheel;

Rape of Lucrece

It's interesting to connect the "wheel" metaphor here with the trees that are being cut down to fire the furnaces and the springs that are being used and diverted to power the waterwheel. I leave it to you whether that is reading too much into these common metaphors and the fact that "steel" rhymes with "wheel". 

"hammer'd steel" is quite uncommon too. Very few examples, but interestingly George Peele uses the term in The Battle of Alcazar: "plant this negro moore that clads himselfe in coat of hammerd steele" published anonymously in 1594, the same year as the Rape of Lucrece. It has also been suggested that George Peele co-wrote Titus Andronicus. So it's possible this is his metaphor which Shakespeare adopted or vice versa. Very few examples in EEBO:

There are even fewer examples for hammer'd iron. Neville's foundry didn't make steel, it made cast iron. King John has a lot of "iron" talk which I will get into more later, but I leave you with this:

Are you more stubborn-hard than hammer'd iron?  King John, 4.1

Bonus passage from the non-canonical Troublesome Reign of King John:

But who so blind, as cannot see this beam,

That you forsooth would keep your cousin down,

For fear his mother should be used too well?

Aye, there’s the grief, confusion catch the brain,

That hammers shifts to stop a prince’s reign.