Roaring Boys E-Book

Judith Cook

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 375

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2006

Beschreibung

Here you will find the drinkers, spies, self-publishers, womanisers, fighters and eccentrics who, between them, produced the stunning body of work that characterised the new professional theatre of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans. These ambitious young men filled a yawning chasm in London, living life, as Marlowe put it, on 'the slicing edge' of death. With the help of anecdotes, this book aims to recreate the lives and times of the playwrights and actors such as, Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Jonson, as well as the world in which they lived from 1578 when Burbage built the first 'purpose built' theatre to 1620 when the great age came to its end. Roaring Boys brings these characters and their time to life, along with a taste of what they wrote.

Leseprobe

Chapter emblem: the ghost of Robert Greene, woodcut, 1598

First published in 2004 by Sutton Publishing Limited

Paperback edition first published in 2006

This edition first published in 2007

The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved © The Estate of Judith Cook, 2004, 2013

The right of Judith Cook to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9509 5

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Foreword by Gregory Doran

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Introduction: Dangerous Times – the New World of Theatre

1

The New Professionals

2

The University Wits

3

A Theatre for the People

4

Men About Town

5

Performances, Plays and Politics

6

The Reckoning

7

Deaths and Entrances

8

A Visit to the Playhouse

9

Curtain Fall on the Elizabethans

10

Jacobean Players and Patrons

11

Roaring Girls

12

Shakespeare and the King’s Men

13

An Insult to Spain

14

Exit Ben Jonson

Notes

Bibliography

Foreword

I’m in the middle of putting together a season of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries to celebrate the twentieth season of the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. The Swan was built to stage the plays that had inspired Shakespeare and that he inspired: a huge canon of little-known works. So when Trevor Nunn was preparing to open the Swan, he and Judith Cook thought up the notion of producing an introduction to these neglected playwrights, which appeared as At the Sign of the Swan in 1986. Imagine my delight, then, when I received a letter from Judith asking me to write a foreword to her latest book on the subject.

Royal Shakespeare Company audiences are now more familiar with the plays that were performed alongside the works of Shakespeare at the Rose, the Globe and Blackfriars. In 2002 I produced a season of rare Jacobean plays, which went on to enjoy an unprecedented run in London’s West End, testifying to a vigorously healthy renewed appetite for this repertoire.

Since the Swan opened, we have done most of the major comedies of Ben Jonson, virtually all the plays of Christopher Marlowe, the famous Websters, alongside Marston, Massinger, Middleton, with Ford and Fletcher, and even Shirley and Shadwell. But there are huge gaps – some of the Roaring Boys in this book have hardly had a look-in: very little Dekker, no George Peele yet, and no Robert Greene.

We may know the plays a little more. Judith Cook introduces us to the characters who wrote them. And now I feel responsible. For having read Judith’s excellent survey of the period, and having been introduced to the likes of Robert Greene, in his doublet of goose-turd green, with his wild hair, pointed red beard, and his punk, Emma, sister to Cutting Ball Jack, I feel I ought to honour the acquaintance and put on his plays immediately.

Roaring Boys chronicles those dangerous decades at the end of the sixteenth and start of the seventeenth centuries when British Theatre exploded into being. Judith Cook presents its dramatis personae – Henslowe’s madcap stable of writers. She paints a vivid picture of the theatres for which they were writing, of the audience to whom they performed, and of the police state that controlled them. Her meticulous attention to detail is delightful, and her insights into the role of women, for example, the impact of asylum seekers and regime change in that society, are both revealing and resonant.

I was away on tour in Japan when Judith’s letter arrived. When I got back I accepted her invitation, only to receive an e-mail by return from her son Nick, telling me the sad news of her sudden death. I am sorry I never met her. But her book testifies to her enthusiasm for her subject, her encyclopedic knowledge of the period, and her rare gift for storytelling.

Gregory Doran Stratford-upon-Avon, 2004

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the helpful staff of the British Library, Bodleian Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, the Courtauld Institute, Dulwich College, Dulwich Picture Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Library for their assistance, and Walter Hodges for allowing me to use his drawing of the Rose Theatre. Also Jaqueline Mitchell for her help and encouragement.

Judith CookNewlyn, Cornwall, 2003

Prologue

The scene: a busy early afternoon sometime in October 1591. The place: the Bankside, its gambling dens, brothels, ordinaries (the Elizabethan equivalent of fast food cafés), taverns, the Clink prison (one of five gaols in Southwark), the Bear Pit and the Rose Theatre, built by the businessman and entrepreneur Philip Henslowe four years earlier and now, after several months of closure, reopened, enlarged and improved.

The cast: the people of London, the merchants, cheapjacks, cutpurses and whores (the latter known as ‘Winchester Geese’), the young bloods on the make, the merry wives (some seeking assignations), the bands of apprentice boys out looking for trouble, the hundreds of ordinary folk who have come to see a performance at the Rose of the most popular play of the day, The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. Both before and after they cross the Thames they are at risk, as they battle through the capital’s congested streets, of being run down by the increasingly heavy traffic. As John Stow grumbles: ‘The world now runs on wheels with many whose parents were glad to go on foot.’

Further along the Bankside and going in the opposite direction, his feet squeezed into fashionable boots, is one of the theatrical world’s prime self-publicists, the poet and playwright Robert Greene. His wine-stained doublet is in his favourite colour, ‘goose turd’, a virulent yellowy-green. His red hair is greased into a cone shape behind his head while his beard, according to fellow-poet and wit, Thomas Nashe, ‘is long and red like a steeple, which he cherished continually without cutting, whereat he might hang a jewel, it is so sharp and pendant’. Behind him trudges his mistress, Emma Ball, who has recently discovered that she is pregnant. Her brother is the notorious highwayman Cutting Ball Jack. Several people stop Greene to ask whether he is intending to see The Spanish Tragedy that afternoon, but Greene tells them in an offhand way that he has better things to do with his time.

The real reason is that he dare not show his face at the Rose after having palmed off on to Henslowe and the company of the Lord Admiral’s Men his play Orlando Furioso, assuring them it was a completely new work, for which Henslowe had paid him the substantial sum of twenty nobles – only to discover, after it had been rehearsed and given a public performance, that he had already sold the same script to the Lord Pembroke’s Men who were now touring it around the country.

Meanwhile in the lodgings he shares with Kyd when he is in town, Christopher Marlowe is working on his own new play, Edward II. Currently there is a vogue for historical epics following the success of Henry VI (in which he had had a hand), and Richard III, the tale of Crookbacked Dick written by the newcomer from Stratford-upon-Avon and a play which is rapidly catching up with The Spanish Tragedy in terms of popularity. Not that Marlowe need worry; his very first offering, Tamburlaine, was a smash hit – making him an instant celebrity. However, hardly anyone who will sit, or more likely stand, to see the first performance of Edward II will have any idea what they will be in for. They will soon learn. Marlowe reads over the lines he has given Edward when he tells his favourite and lover, Piers Gaveston, the nature of the entertainment he is proposing for him:

Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape, With hair that gilds the water as it glides, Crownets of pearl about his naked arms, And in his sportful hands an olive-tree, To hide those parts which men delight to see . . .

Kit Marlowe, the first of the gay Cambridge spies, is giving the world his own take on the subject of kingship.

The later years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I ushered in what can only be described as the explosion of a new art form: that of professional drama – and professional drama required professional writers. What follows are the stories of some of those hopeful young men, often from very ordinary backgrounds, who were to find themselves caught up in the excitement, fame and dangers of the London theatre scene.

INTRODUCTION

Dangerous Times – the New World of Theatre

Six days after these were burned to death God sent us our Elizabeth.

Note in The Register (11 November 1558)

If your ambition was to become a celebrated and popular dramatist or a famous and acclaimed actor, then you could not have chosen a better time to be born than the middle or late sixteenth century. No need for Arts Councils, subsidies or writers-in-residence; the theatrical world, desperate to service the new and growing entertainment scene and its huge audiences, was crying out for you and your work. As with Hollywood in the 1930s, the London theatre scene, run by the early entrepreneurs such as Philip Henslowe, sucked in talented writers not only from within the capital (which might be expected), but also from the provinces. A few of the new writers were born into comparative wealth, but far more, including Shakespeare, belonged to the first generation of the sons of artisans to have acquired a secondary education in the new grammar schools.

What might be called the golden age of English theatre lasted roughly from the building of the first proper playhouse in 1576 to about 1620, and there is no doubt that the Queen’s accession in 1558 ushered in an extraordinary era in which the arts could flourish. But before opening a door into the world of the theatre, it might be useful first to have a brief look at what was happening outside in the real world, for there was a dichotomy running through almost every aspect of life and society. Great creativity burgeoned alongside almost routine brutality, awesome magnificence next to appalling squalor, a thirst for new knowledge set against shocking ignorance. Beneath the surface of the Merry England of myth there lurked always the dark, dangerous world of political intrigue, treason, danger and death.

Professional theatre came into being at a time when men were still getting to grips with the idea that the world was round and that it circled round the sun, not the sun round the earth. There was the excitement of the new sciences, of astronomy and mathematics. Secretly and behind closed doors, people were actually questioning the truth of the stories told in the Old Testament, even such matters as how long it really was between the Creation and the present day. We know that such discussions went on because Marlowe attended one such group, often known as the ‘School of the Night’, where questions were asked such as how it could possibly have taken so long for the Jews to reach the promised land, though Marlowe took his criticism of the scriptures further, much further.1 But even while the more sophisticated citizenry were considering such matters, conventional religious belief was still virtually universal. Almost everyone believed that there really was a heaven and a hell, that at the end of your life you had to account directly to God for your misdeeds, and that there would be a Judgement Day when the graves gave up their dead. Most people also believed in witches and witchcraft, not to mention fairies.

The extraordinary renaissance had come about in no small part because of the circumstances surrounding the Queen’s accession. She came to the throne to the acclaim of a fearful and demoralised population which had been exposed for the previous six years to the fires of Smithfield and elsewhere, death at the stake being the punishment meted out to heretics on the authority of a woman totally convinced of the rightness of her actions, a woman who had compounded her unpopularity by taking as her husband King Philip II of Spain. Now Mary Tudor, ‘Bloody Mary’, was dead and the country breathed again. The two lines of verse by an anonymous writer at the beginning of the chapter express the overwhelming feeling of relief.

One of the statements made by Elizabeth at the start of her reign was that she had no desire to seek ‘windows into men’s souls’. Although the church had reverted again to Protestantism and she, like her father, was its defender, she did not want to rule over a country riven by religious tensions. Therefore Catholics who behaved themselves and were loyal to the crown were left alone, so long as they paid their fines for missing church of a Sunday. It was a fine aspiration to which, in the early days, the government on the orders of the Queen did its best to adhere, though as time went by dangers, both internally and from Europe, would combine to prevent its continuance.

Elizabeth’s Court was splendid. From the first she dressed magnificently, decked with jewels, her face framed in the finest of lace ruffs, gowned in enormous farthingales covered in beadwork, seed pearls and embroidery. She employed tried and trusted advisers such as William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, who had stood by her throughout some of the worst times of her life, and Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State to the Privy Council. She surrounded herself with the most handsome courtiers, the prettiest young women and the best artists, musicians and poets of the day. When she went on one of her great progresses around the country, people turned out in their hundreds simply to watch her pass. She was, indeed, Gloriana. Her Court again offers two sides of the coin. Among the favoured poets of the era were Edmund Spenser and Walter Ralegh. Spenser might well laud Elizabeth in The Faerie Queen and Ralegh turn a pretty sonnet when he was not throwing his cloak down for the Queen to tread on, but both were involved in the most appalling acts of violence in Ireland, Ralegh joining in a massacre at which not only unarmed men were put to the sword but where women and children were also slaughtered. Renaissance Man indeed had many facets, but unthinking violence is rarely mentioned among them.

Outside the Court in the City, the hub of commerce, visitors from overseas marvelled at the wealth of the merchants in their great mansions, the shopkeepers and tradesmen of every kind, the thriving markets. England’s great merchant venturers sailed their argosies to every corner of the known world bringing back with them, to City harbours like Billingsgate, exotic cargoes of silks, spices and ivory along with tales of strange people in stranger lands. Outside, in the country, the nobles and the wealthy built themselves grandiose stately homes which they decked with tapestries and furnished with fine furniture. To complete the picture, common land was enclosed to make their parks and great, formal gardens. Yet around the walls of the City of London itself huddled the shanty towns of the poor and those who had trudged up from the provinces to seek their fortune, clusters of dwellings in what we might describe now as ‘no-go areas’, looked on by honest citizens as nothing more than cauldrons of disease and crime. The picture Elizabeth offered to the people of England, and indeed to the world outside, was one of immense confidence, conspicuous consumption, success at home and abroad and the feeling that the English were indeed living in a golden age. But underneath it all that dark, disturbing and dangerous world remained, only a hair’s breadth away.

From the first the Queen had been well aware of the dangers besetting her. All those endless negotiations over marriages which she never had any intention of going through with, the delicate and secret embassies to Europe, the stately dances of diplomacy, were designed with only one end in mind: to keep the Queen on the throne and the country safe from foreign invaders. The obvious threats were from Spain and France but there was also danger much nearer home. In 1560, two years after Elizabeth’s accession to the English throne, King Francis II of France died and the following year his widow, the young Mary, Queen of Scots, returned home. Unsurprisingly, given her charm, looks, position and lack of judgement, she soon became a honeypot for ambitious men wanting to marry her and get their hands on the levers of power. She chose disastrously, marrying her cousin, Lord Darnley, in 1565. Within three years she had given birth to the heir to the Scottish throne, had very possibly been complicit in the murder of her husband, had scandalised her government by involving herself with the Earl of Bothwell and, after arrest and imprisonment, had escaped to England seeking sanctuary.

Despite the long history of enmity with Scotland, Elizabeth reluctantly agreed to her plea with the result that from that day until her death over twenty years later, Mary was the ready-made figurehead with a claim to the English throne around which malcontents and Catholic plotters could gather. Indeed, within a year of her arrival the Catholic Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland were planning rebellion, while the Catholic Earl of Norfolk, Thomas Percy, was making overtures of marriage to her, which she was encouraging for all she was worth. Popular romance has Mary as a martyred heroine, taking little or no part in the activities undertaken in her name, but she was soon sending messages to the Spanish Duke of Alva asking for help for the Earls. ‘Tell your master’, she wrote to him, ‘that if he will help me, I shall be Queen of England in three months.’ No doubt about that then.

The Privy Council got wind of what was afoot and Norfolk was sent for and shrewdly advised to be honest with the Queen. Later, as he faced execution, he wished he had been. Instead, what followed was the abortive Northern Rebellion which was put down with great savagery, some eight hundred of the Earl’s followers being hanged. Northumberland fled to Scotland but was later returned to England and executed. Elizabeth refused to act against Mary on the grounds that there was no certain proof that she had been party to the plot, but so major an insurrection thoroughly unnerved both the Queen and her government, and matters were soon to deteriorate further. In February 1570 Pope Pius V issued his notorious Bull of Excommunication against the Queen, the result of which was to make it almost impossible for her government to separate faith from politics as had hitherto been the case. The Pope had put English Catholics in an impossible position: if they remained loyal to the Queen they were disobedient to the commands of the Holy Father in Rome, yet if they obeyed his edict it followed that they were traitors to the Queen. The Bull made the position quite clear: all the subjects of the English realm were freed from their oaths of allegiance ‘and all manner of duty, fidelity and obedience’. But even that was not enough. The Pope ‘commanded and enjoined all and every subject and people whatsoever that they shall not once dare to obey her or her laws, directions or commands, binding under the same curse those who do anything to the contrary’. In other words those remaining loyal to the Crown faced automatic excommunication. More than that, it was now open season for assassins.

In 1572 the Ridolfi Plot led finally to the execution of the Earl of Norfolk, a deed accompanied by a demand from Parliament for Mary’s head. Again Elizabeth refused. Then in August, while she was staying at Warwick Castle, the news was brought to her of the horrific massacre of Huguenots which had taken place on St Bartholomew’s Eve, first in Paris then spreading out to other towns and cities, bringing with it an influx of asylum seekers into England. By the 1580s storm clouds were gathering from every direction. In 1583 there were two more plots, those of Somerville and Throgmorton, both designed to pave the way for a Spanish invasion. That both failed was due in no small part to the intelligence-gathering skills of Sir Francis Walsingham’s agents. Then, in 1586, intelligence reached the Queen’s spymaster of yet another, the initiator being a naive country gentleman by the name of Antony Babington. The government had had enough and were absolutely determined that Mary should go. To ensure this she had to be implicated beyond any shadow of doubt; Walsingham therefore infiltrated into the circle of the conspirators his own best secret agent, Robert Poley. The result, as everyone knows, was not only the downfall and unpleasant deaths of the plotters but the eventual execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.

But no sooner had one hazard been put behind her than the Queen was beset by others. Although ‘the Spanish Armada’ of 1588 is usually referred to as the single attempt by Philip II to conquer the English, Spain had actually prepared for an invasion the previous year, not with flotillas of galleons but by vessels towing barges full of soldiers over from the Low Countries; and it might well have succeeded had it not been for the English raid on Cadiz which destroyed some of the fleet. The real Spanish Armada was a far more hazardous venture for the Spaniards than the first would have been and was soundly defeated by a combination of superior English seamanship in more manoeuvrable ships and the appalling weather. Her leadership of the country during that time and the vanquishing of the Armada was Elizabeth’s finest hour, her speech at Tilbury worthy of Shakespeare. But Spain’s determination to invade did not end there; there were at least two other abortive attempts afterwards, with Ireland being used as a base. No one can pretend that what England did in Ireland during the last half of the sixteenth century was anything of which to be proud, but it should also be remembered that the government considered their western neighbour to be their Achilles’ heel.

The great flowering of the dramatists in the 1590s was therefore accompanied by increasing paranoia on the part of the government, the implementation of draconian laws against Catholic ‘Mass priests’, along with other repressive legislation to deal with civil unrest. In 1593 the latter would catch in its net both Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, at the scene of whose murder we come across once again that very same Robert Poley who played such a vital role in the bringing to justice of the Babington plotters. From then until the Queen’s death in 1603, there was war in Ireland, continuing uncertainty as to the succession since Elizabeth refused to name King James of Scotland as her heir, and the abortive final plot, that of the Queen’s last great favourite, the inept Earl of Essex, whose arrogance finally brought him to the block. Nor did the death of the Queen and the subsequent coronation of James VI of Scotland as James I of England make the profession of dramatist any less hazardous. Anti-Catholic feeling became even more ferocious, factionalism even more intense at Court where the King was swayed by a succession of favourites. It was an age in which almost anything could be bought.

Throughout it all, mostly unaware, or uncaring, of the affairs of state (with the exception of the threat from the Armada), the people of London packed the playhouses. The times might be dangerous but the people were well able to live with that. Death was ever present and, in Marlowe’s words, they lived ‘on the slicing edge’ of it: death from disease, particularly from the regular epidemics of plague, death at the hands of a robber in the street, or following a quarrel at a time when insults led easily to fights and men routinely wore swords and daggers, while for women there was always the very real fear of death in childbirth or the dreaded puerperal fever associated with it.

Their idea of entertainment, however, was a broad one. The very same audiences which crowded into the Rose and the Globe to laugh at The Shoemaker’s Holiday or enjoy the poetry of Twelfth Night were equally happy to visit the Bear Pit the following day or stand at the front of the crowd at Tyburn to watch the public hangings. But theatre opened up for them whole new worlds: those of kingship and its power and responsibilities in the great historical epics, of hubris followed by nemesis as portrayed in the characters of Marlowe’s great over-reachers, of betrayal and murder set alongside the foibles of humanity in the great tragedies and comedies of Shakespeare – not to mention the nature of love.

ONE

The New Professionals

A play’s a true transparent crystal mirror, To show good minds their mirth, the bad their terror.

Thomas Heywood, Apology for Actors (1612)

By the time Heywood wrote these words a visitor to London could have joined audiences at eight or nine playhouses and even if, as was likely, not all of them were open for business at the same time, he or she might well have had the choice of anything up to a dozen plays from which to choose within the space of a week. Hundreds, indeed thousands, of people might pack into any one performance at a large theatre such as the Globe when it was full to capacity, a good many of them, of course, standing for the privilege. Shrewd actors such as Edward Alleyn and playwrights like William Shakespeare had become very wealthy men; there was money to be made in the theatre for both actors and writers even if all too many of them let it slip through their fingers and drank or gambled it away. The actor Richard Burbage was just as much a star to the audiences of his day as Sir Laurence Olivier or Sir Ian McKellen four hundred years later.

However, by then theatre had become properly established. It was nothing like as easy for the pioneers of a quarter of a century earlier; indeed it would have been almost impossible for them to imagine what the future might hold. Companies of players did not, of course, suddenly appear from nowhere once playhouses started being built. Plays had been regularly, if seasonally, performed since early medieval times by the various guilds, and cycles of religious dramas such as those of the York, Wakefield, Coventry and Chester Mysteries and the Cornish ‘Ordinalia’ were popular and provided a welcome break in the working year. No doubt some of those craftsmen taking part were talented actors but they were quite definitely amateurs. At major festivals such as Christmas or May Day there was lighter fare like the Mummers’ plays which might well incorporate, along with their regular characters, those of Robin Hood and Maid Marian. Noblemen and other wealthy landowners would also keep among their servants those able to perform ‘interludes’ for the entertainment of guests, though these were hardly theatrical performances as we understand them and often took place while everyone was eating, drinking and chatting.

Gradually the repertoire grew, first with the appearance of the morality plays, of which the best known example is Everyman, though still as the name suggests with a religious theme; then, mainly for private consumption within schools and colleges, broader and more adventurous drama. In 1534, when Henry VIII was still on the throne, Nicholas Udall became headmaster of Eton College. He had a keen interest in drama and wrote a number of plays for the boys, one of which, Ralph Roister Doister, still survives. It was immensely popular and there are references to it being performed years later. Its comic theme was to influence a whole generation of professional playwrights, for the main character, Doister himself, is a swaggering, roistering, woman-chasing, cowardly buffoon with a high opinion of himself, who gets his comeuppance at the hands of a determined lady. Doister is a likely prototype for the Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor.

By the time Elizabeth came to the throne, bands of players along with tumblers and musicians were travelling around the countryside playing in the towns and villages, especially at fairs and on public holidays, offering drama which was pure entertainment. The general population loved the arrival of the players and flocked to see the plays but their betters took a very different view of the matter. Players were considered no better than the ‘sturdie beggars’, tinkers, vagabonds, thieves and masterless men who roamed the countryside in bands. As to what they performed, plays were ‘the Devil’s sermons’ and those who performed them should be whipped out of town with the other travelling scum. Such was the prejudice that actors realised drastic action was needed if they were to survive, and it was fortunate that the growing wealth and ostentation of the aristocracy was set to provide it. Actors were suddenly in demand as it became the fashion for a lord or earl to have his own company of players as part of the household. Their patrons’ desire to advertise their wealth and success thus enabled the actors to perform legally and without fear of the consequences, so long as they were officially known by the name of their patron as, for example, the Earl of Leicester’s Men.1

Under the auspices of a powerful patron, players were able to continue touring so long as they were available to perform for him whenever they were required to do so, and we know of a number of inns and taverns, particularly in London, regularly visited by acting companies ‘where money is paid or demanded for hearing plays’. In 1567 John Brayne, a grocer, and the brother-in-law of James Burbage (father of the famous Richard), paid out £8 10s for scaffolding for plays performed at the Red Lion in Stepney. ‘James Burbage was a joiner’, notes M.C. Bradbrook in The Rise of the Common Player, ‘and knew all about scaffolding’. Another inn, the Bell, was so often used by players that they stored their costumes there, while the landlord set about acquiring stage props and properties which could be hired out to acting companies for a fee. Some inns became particularly associated with individual companies and we know that the Earl of Leicester’s Men played regularly at the Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street.2

Faced with the growing number of actors’ companies and in an attempt to gain some control of what was going on, in 1572 the government brought in the notorious Vagabonds Act, which lumped together all the various groups travelling around the countryside, however loosely organised. According to the Statute:

all Fencers, Bearwards, Common Players in Enterludes & Minstrels not belonging to any Baron of this Realme or towards any other honourable Personage of greater Degree; all Jugglers, Pedlars, Tinkers and Petty Chapmen, and have not Licence of two Justices of the Peace at the least, whereof one to be of the Quorum when and in what Shire they shall happen to wander . . . shall be taken and adjudged to be deemed Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdie Beggars.

It was, therefore, absolutely essential to have a patron, with the result that theatre flourished.

Two years later, as Bradbrook points out, in the March of 1574, it struck someone at Court that since whatever the prohibitions brought in and the dire punishments threatened, such entertainment now appeared to be here to stay, instead of continuing to put obstacles in its way, why not try and make some money out of it for the Exchequer?3 How would it be if the government offered licences for places in which plays could legitimately be performed? That way money could be made in the form of a new tax, while an eye could also be kept on the content of the plays that were being put on. The Lord Chamberlain, therefore, wrote a civil letter to the Lord Mayor of London putting forward this excellent notion and requesting that it immediately be put into practice, only to be met by an outright refusal. The principal reason given for this was that the City Fathers, and they alone, had the power to restrict assembly and keep control of what went on in the City and such a power therefore could not be delegated to anyone else. However, when the situation was looked into further, it appeared that the City had already seen the money-making possibilities of such a scheme and were themselves busily collecting money from players ‘for poor relief’ by allowing them the privilege of playing within the city walls and that this was a practice they had no intention of giving up.

For a while, the Lord Chamberlain continued to negotiate, suggesting ways and means by which such poor relief could continue, but when the Lord Mayor remained adamant, he overruled his objections and the first Letters Patent were given to the Earl of Leicester’s Men under the Great Seal of England on behalf of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth I. They were granted to James Burbage, John Perkyn, John Laneham, William Johnson and Robert Wilson:

to use, exercise, and occupy the art and faculty of playing comedies tragedies interludes stage plays and such other like as they have already used and studied or hereafter shall use and study as well for the recreation of your loving subjects as for our solace and pleasure . . . as also to use and occupy all such instruments as they have already practised . . . to shew publish exercise and occupy to their best commodity . . . as well within our City of London and liberties of the same, as also within the liberties and freedoms of any of our cities, towns and boroughs, etc. as without the same, any act statute proclamation or commandment to the contrary not withstanding, provided the said comedies tragedies interludes and stage plays be by the Master of our Revels (for the time being) before seen and allowed and that the same be not published or shewen [sic] in the time of common prayer or in the time of great and common plague in our said City of London.

It was the first ever official recognition by the establishment of theatre as we know and understand it today and it remains unique. The Letters Patent overrode the ancient rights of the city to determine what took place within its boundaries in the face of dire warnings from the objectors as to the horrors about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting public. There would be, without doubt

the inordinate haunting of great multitudes of people, especially youth, to plays, interludes and shows, leading to affrays, quarrels, and evil practices of incontinency in great Inns, having chambers and secret places adjoining to their open stages and galleries, thus inveigling and alluring maids, especially orphans and good Citizens’ children [who are] under age, to privy and unmeet shows, the publishing of unchaste, uncomely and unashamed fast speeches and doings and the withdrawing of Her Majesty’s subjects from divine service and holy days.

Not only that, such entertainments would lead to the ‘unthrifty waste of money by the poor, sundry robberies by pickpockets and cutpurses, the uttering of popular, busy and seditious matters and many other corruptions of youth and other enormities’, not to mention the possible ‘slaughters and mayhems of the Queen’s subjects by falling scaffolding, breaking frames and stages and the use of gunpowder’.4

The Earl of Leicester’s Men had therefore achieved their aim of official recognition not only for themselves but on behalf of other such companies. Thus emboldened, on 13 May 1576 James Burbage signed a 21-year lease on a building plot in Holywell on the public road between Shoreditch and Bishopsgate not far from Finsbury Fields and at once set about building the first custom-built playhouse. He called it simply The Theatre. His lease contained a clause which said that if he spent £200 or more on the building, he could take it down when the lease expired. He was also supposed to be offered an automatic extension of the lease if he wanted it, although the terms would have to be renegotiated. Within a year The Theatre was joined by a second playhouse, The Curtain, close by. The memory of The Curtain, which remained in use for over thirty years, still lingers on in ‘Curtain Road’ which runs between Old Street and Great Eastern Street. We do not know who built The Curtain but it has been suggested that it was a syndicate of actors and that the two playhouses complemented each other, possibly sharing wardrobe and other storage facilities.

We have no description or sketches of what they were like but theatre historian Andrew Gurr considers it likely that The Theatre was closely based on the design of the rectangular and galleried inn yards in which Burbage and the Earl of Leicester’s company usually played, while The Curtain was more like the ‘wooden O’ familiar from prints of the later Bankside theatres.5 However, unless the foundations of one or the other are discovered during building excavations, as happened with the Rose Theatre in Southwark, we are unlikely ever to know. Although all authorities give The Theatre as the first proper playhouse, other excavations have revealed that there is a possibility that there was an earlier one, the Red Lion in Whitechapel built by John Brayne in about 1567; if this were the case it was not built specifically for the performance of plays but mainly for bear-baiting. While The Theatre and The Curtain were primarily for the production of plays, the stages were also used for a wide variety of other events such as exhibitions of sword-fighting, wrestling, tumbling, vaulting, something referred to as ‘rope dancing’, and possibly, on occasion, even bear-baiting, although that is by no means certain. Even after the building of the two theatres, acting companies continued to give performances regularly in the yards of inns such as the Bell, the Cross Keys and the Bull to the north of the City, the Belsavage in the west and the George in Southwark.

Nevertheless the City Fathers remained unhappy at the close proximity of the two theatres to their boundaries and rarely missed an opportunity to cancel performances or even close them down for weeks at a time at the slightest excuse.

While Burbage’s company played mainly at The Theatre it seems they also played at The Curtain from time to time, although the latter is more closely associated with Philip Henslowe. However, in 1587, with no end in sight to the constant battle between the City authorities and the two theatres, Philip Henslowe turned his attention to the Bankside, an area which had much to commend it as it was well outside the jurisdiction of the City, with easy access either by London Bridge or by the host of boats, up to three thousand of them, plying for trade across and up and down the Thames. There were gardens alongside the river and there were several bear pits, drawing in plenty of trade, for those who also liked bear-baiting. Henslowe might well have commissioned great drama and employed amazingly talented actors, but he was above all a businessman and the Bankside also offered entertainments of a more robust nature: it was notorious for its gaming houses, brothels and low life. Another plus was that he already had his timber warehouse on that side of the Thames and either then, or shortly afterwards, he bought a house on the Bankside, along with a bear pit next door to it.

So, close to the old London Bridge with its houses and shops, Henslowe built one of the two most famous early playhouses, the Rose. Until relatively recently it was thought that the Rose was not built until 1592 but new research, following the discovery of its foundations in 1989, suggests that it opened in 1587 and was extended and improved five years later. In 1596 Francis Langley built another theatre on the Bankside, the Swan, and it is because of the drawings of it made that year by Johannes de Witt that we know something of what the Elizabethan playhouses looked like inside, although some of the details in the drawings do not fit what is now known about the interior of such theatres. However, the overall plan was right. Facing the audience as they entered a playhouse was the very large and high thrust stage, at the back of which was a gallery, area and ‘discovery space’ which could be concealed with a curtain. The stage itself was covered by a thatched roof supported on pillars and up above everything was a top storey, ‘the hut’, in which stage technicians worked and from which a trumpeter announced that a play would be performed that day. Three tiers of sheltered galleries ran round the walls; the big open space in front of the stage open to the elements, ‘the pit’, was for those standing to see the show.

In spite of the new playhouses, to keep within the law, acting companies still required patrons even if they were no longer attached to their households; among these were the Earls of Pembroke, Warwick, Derby, Essex, Worcester, Sussex, and Lord Strange. The two most prestigious noblemen to give their names to such companies were undoubtedly the Lord Admiral and the Lord Chamberlain, although it must be pointed out that patronage did not provide financial security; they were not subsidised in any way by those under whose name they performed. Such official recognition did, however, give the companies real status, bringing with it regular invitations to appear at Court.

Both companies were led by actors of exceptional ability in Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage. The Lord Admiral’s Men were particularly associated with Henslowe and the Rose Theatre, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men with Burbage, first at The Theatre, then at the Globe. The companies were made up entirely of ‘Men’ because it was illegal for women to act on a public stage even if the ladies of the nobility regularly appeared at Court in interludes and masques, sometimes sporting costumes which elsewhere would have outraged public decency.

They worked on a sharer’s system. Anything from half a dozen to a dozen of the most prominent people involved would put up a set sum of money, ‘a share’, in a particular company and theatre. Such sharers would include entrepreneurs such as Philip Henslowe, whose Diaries are one of our greatest sources of information on Elizabethan theatre, any financial backers, several of the leading actors in each company, and very possibly the wardrobe and props masters and the ‘Bookman’ or ‘Bookkeeper’ who was in charge of all the scripts, ensuring that they did not fall into the wrong hands, as well as seeing to the copying out of ‘the roles’. On occasion even a playwright could become a sharer as we know because William Shakespeare was one. Ben Jonson sought to emulate him, borrowing money from Henslowe to buy a share in the Lord Admiral’s Men, although he gave it back fairly rapidly. Jonson’s continual indebtedness to Henslowe is duly recorded in the Diaries.

The average acting company consisted of fifteen actors plus half a dozen apprentices. Apart from the sharers, the rest of the actors were ‘hired men’, taken on for anything from a single performance to a whole season, and it is likely that the companies also hired in people, to work backstage, assisting with stage effects and props as these became more elaborate, and helping with dressing and make-up. The young apprentices worked hard for their keep, doing all the running around, helping with effects such as working bellows for stage smoke, playing small parts like the devils who drag Faustus down to Hell and pages to noblemen and kings, before graduating to small speaking parts such as the fated princes in Richard III. Finally, the most talented had their ‘three years to play’ the women’s roles.