‘Finished?’
I’ve come short, I think, on the stench of sperm, and the whore-juice from the stews, in the suburbs of London’s good pleasure. The Master of the Rolls might well stop his nose with a flourish and the Bishop of Winchester deplore all whores, but some swore that the stews of Clerkenwell were patronised by the devil himself, who envied their diabolical aromas and collected invisible harvests of them to take back with him and out-smell hell. Maugre its malodorous reputation Clerkenwell was popular with the gallants from the Inns of Court – brave lads indeed to brave the smells of Lucy Negro’s place, Black Luce, the self-styled Abbess of Clerkenwell who had known better days as Luce Morgan, one of the queen’s gentlewomen. And now Black Luce looked after the needs of certain gentlemen who couldn’t always find certain gentlewomen to serve their turn. So she set up a fleshmonger’s in St John Street and there traded in lust and gainful brothelry. In time it became famous. She claimed it was little different from the brothelries of the court, except that it was more open, like the legs of her whores, who were perhaps half a degree less fussy than the ladies of the court in the matter of washing. The stench was legendary.
‘Stiff competition put up, though, lad?’
Stiffly indeed – by the Southwark whores that thronged St George’s Fields and added the unmistakeable odour of sex to the evening air. It would have needed a titan’s windmill to winnow that rank particular wind. But there was a mill of an entirely different sort in Paris Garden Lane, where Shallow and Falstaff lay all night long while the whores ground their pricks to the chimes of St George the Martyr near Lambeth, beating over the fields.
‘So London seethed.’
A bubbling stew of corruption festered under the southside skirts of the city, a licensed stew for Venus’s thrusting vestals.
‘There’s hell again –’
There was darkness, there the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption – and here’s the smell of the blood still.
They took you in, the whores, not telling you they had their monthly curse, and only when you pulled out your pizzle and dressed in the sticky darkness did you smell the blood, drowned out till then by the chorus of other stenches that filled the night: the bad breath, blackened teeth, onion armpits, uncleaned arses. Beneath was all the fiends’.
‘And the gods?’
Little above the girdle, in London’s case, for the whole city was a whore, with her reeking armpits in Shoreditch and Clerkenwell, leaky breasts in Bishopsgate and Cripplegate, and a bellyful of debauchery bubbling within the girdling wall. South of that streamed the stinking river and the filthy skirts of Southwark and Bankside draggling down to St George’s and Lambeth and Newington Butts, dark dens for pimps and punks, adulterers and murderers, cutpurses and cut-throats, all crawling like lice in the seething, shit-sodden underclothes of the Great Whore. And still as I sink into sleep and that delicate butterfly, the soul, escapes the frame and flies south over the city, that’s what I see from on high, what I saw then – London spread out below me in all her abomination and ugliness: her knees in the air, Aldgate and Lincoln’s Inn, and her feet going down to Deptford, Westminster, and to hell. The bridge, that passage in and out of the inferno, was the huge cunt of the cursing waterman’s imagination, and her uterus was the Fleet, pissing its filth into the Thames, that common sewer into which she also shat.
‘Sweet Thames run softly?’
The whole city was a stinking whore.
‘Babylon couldn’t compare.’
It was a hydra, a many-headed monster. Here was the riotous rabble who’d tear you for your good verses or bad or for no verses at all when Satan led the ball. Scholars were hanged with quills and inkhorns round their necks, and players in their own stage garters when this turbulent tide swept over London. They were the arbitrary ocean overpeering of his lists, they were the wild and violent sea, changeable and cruel. They had one mind which was no mind. And when the mob’s blood is up, then no matter who or what you are, make yourself invisible if you can, for mischief, thou art afoot, take thou what course thou wilt.
‘Untameable.’
Christ’s Hospital took them when they were infants, St Thomas’s when they were old and infirm, St Bartholomew’s when they were sick, and Bethlehem’s when they were insane. When they were poor and thriftless they were put into Bridewell for training and correction. Walking from my north lodgings to the Blackfriars, or to find a waterman to wherry me to Southwark and the Globe, I’d pass by Bridewell, and could hear, as I drew near, the screams of those being lashed for harlotry – not inside but outside the prison, offering a public show for those panting, canting, lusting hypocrites who’d gladly have sinned with them, given a fraction of a chance. The mob set off after the cart, tied to the back of which walked the prostitute, with beadles whipping her bare and bloodied back.
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand! Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back – thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind for which thou whipp’st her!
‘But they flogged on, eh? No lack of backs.’
Oh, they were ripe and black for the plucking. Such were the low lives. They had nowhere to go but downwards, though many achieved the ultimate elevation, the only elevation they ever knew, the all too brief one of the gallows.
‘You still go back to Tyburn…’
The road to it began with Topcliffe, Master Topcliffe, chief of secret police, controller of informers and spies, and bosom leopard of Walsingham. Topcliffe, keeper of prison keys, of instruments of torture, of secrets whispered under duress, confessor to racked priests, keeper of their souls and genitals, keeper and cupper also of the queen’s breasts, the part he loved to brag of to his captives on the rack. He had the key to her bodice, so he said, with all the valour of his tongue, grinning into your ear, pouring in the poison. Better than that, he knew how to unlock her cold knees, her chaste thighs. He was keeper of the first quim in the country. The long arm of Richard Topcliffe stretched further than any man’s, reaching deep into the queen and into your heart, closing on its stickiest secrets. Then he accompanied you to Tyburn where he assisted assiduously at your public butchery.
‘Starting with your balls.’
Where a man feels the first tingling of desire – except now it’s the shock of dismemberment, following the formality of that swift simple swing on the gibbet, that leaves him no more than a little dazed and entirely aware, ready to experience in full the agonies to follow, as he is required by law to be and as it is laid down – seeing and alive. The penis is chopped off and the testicles sliced away. And the first thing he sees, looking up, is his privities sprouting from the hangman’s sudden clutch, the first thing he feels is the London air entering the red mouth that was his manhood, a mouth gobbing gouts of blood onto the upturned faces and sprinkling the stage on which he plays – and loses his part. The unkindest cut of all, so you might think, metamorphosed into woman, a red wound between the legs, where once you were a man. Unkind? The hangman has a long way to go until he has exhausted his art. This is but the first cut on the way to butchermeat.
‘Another shambles.’
You’re a screaming freak, applauded by the most appreciative audience in London, the Tyburn playgoers who have come to watch your performance in the theatre of death. This is your public – your last chance to admire the dentistry of the age in all its carious crudity as a thousand mouths howl their derision, spitting and jeering, urging the hangman to move on to the next act, the opening of the belly. Already your private parts have become the public prologue. A dog will be eating them soon. Your innards – how private were they? No one ever saw them, not even your mother, not even yourself. In the twinkling of a blade they too will be staining the London stage, God’s handiwork exhibited as art. But is a man really just so much tripe? The executioner’s trade is truly wonderful. In a moment, he can show you a mystery, and you shall be changed.
‘Most horribly.’
Not unlike the act of love �
�� so Topcliffe liked to say. Consider the first thrust. A man may shoot his sperm into the belly of a woman in a few short seconds. But he can lengthen out the work for half an hour – half a night, it depends on his skill in the old art of love. The executioner should also love his craft, as should the torturer, each employing his tool long and lovingly as he draws apart the seamless curtains of the skin to let daylight enter for the first time. The lover wishes to die slowly – O lente, lente – enjoying to the utmost that last ecstasy as he sinks expiring on his loved one’s breast, but the victim longs for brevity and for an end. The point of death is a pinprick, nothing more, between being and non-being. The process is an eternity of hell.
But for lovers no eternity can be too long – and there are no lovers like theatre lovers, and no theatre to compare with the scaffold, on which the hangman woos the martyr.
‘And yet you gave them no say.’
The martyrs? No. I told you, no, their mouths are stopped. I kept my own mouth closed, never told my thinkings, kept on the player’s mask, the false face of no man, everyman, the squint of the butcher’s boy from Stratford – taciturn, tactful, night-tripping Will, invisible, inaudible, sweet Master Shakespeare.
‘Master chameleon.’
Keep yourself private if you don’t want to become that most public spectacle of all, the leading man, the chief actor in the theatre of blood, London’s favourite show, with the groundlings up front and God and his angels watching discreetly from heaven. No deus ex machina ever descended to that bloody stage – that’s a fable, friend, and Tyburn was real, and really was the end.
‘And so –’
And so I built my fortunes on London’s other stage, where blood was not real and men were harmless shadows of themselves. Old Burbage had put up the Theatre at Shoreditch a decade before I arrived on the scene, but when I came up, the wooden O in Curtain Close was newly built and two hundred yards closer to the city walls on the other side of Holywell Lane.
‘That was Lanham’s stage.’
Built to beguile the anguish of the hour, when men need more than life itself affords. It brought the people streaming across the fields and brought the Puritans to the brink of madness. It also brought us much needed cash when we played it as Chamberlain’s Men in the nineties. But long before then Jerome Savage had built another stage in Newington in Surrey. It might have been a mile south-west of the bridge by my legs, on the other side of St George’s Fields where the whores aired their tails.
‘The old archery butts were there.’
So we called it Newington Butts, with a glance at the arses of the whores, though Ben Jonson, never one to glance, never called it anything but Newington Fucks. Savage never even troubled to give it a name.
‘What’s in a name, as you’ve said, lad?’
Scarcely necessary then. You built a theatre and men would swarm as fast as they did to the drabs. Playgoing and whoring – each offered a relief and a release from the grubby world. The theatres were blossoming all over London. And then came the Swan and the Fortune and the Hope, opening like roses, like prostitutes, the name means the same.
‘Ah, the Rose!’
The rose of all the world was the Rose itself, the Great Whore, built on the stews in the Clink liberty between the river and Maid Lane – by that great controller of stews himself –
‘Henslowe.’
Whoremaster and usurer, in partnership with son-in-law Ned Alleyn. They were still building it when I came on the scene and what a start it had! Marlowe had just come up from Cambridge with a bomb in his pocket, the manuscript of a new play. He tossed it into the Rose and down went all before him. Marlowe was only twenty-three – and seven years off a dagger in the brain. But Tamburlaine had arrived and Alleyn was the man. And Henslowe was up to his balls in box clover. Yes, that was the Rose of London – till we built the great Globe itself.
‘The road to ruin.’
If you wanted to go to hell really cheaply with the crowd, all you had to do in ’88 was roll up to the Rose and walk straight in for a penny. That’s why the Puritans hated plays so bitterly, even more than they hated pipes or cups or whores – anybody could pay for it, all could afford to go to hell every afternoon of the week, and all were punished. In some whores you could stand six at a time and still find room for more. But in this particular rose, the Henslowe Hole, the Rose of all the world, there was standing room six times cheaper than that offered by your average whore – forget Nell Farthing, who rose and fell night and day in her Maiden Lane just yards from The Rose itself. And if the Rose were really hell, it was a lot more humorous than heaven, so men reckoned, if heaven’s joys were measured by a Puritan prick. Easier to put an erection on an icicle in a Dutchman’s beard.
‘That requires some imagination.’
Whores and actors are not so far apart – both faking it for cash, and both die and rise again. But the Puritans accepted the whores as they could never accept the actors. Whores descend from Eve, theology sound as Genesis. The prostitute was easy to understand and to embrace. She was recognizable – her feet go down to death, her steps take hold on hell, her cunt is a cauldron of unholy lusts, and there is no whore without Eve. No Eve, no sin; no sin, no damnation; no damnation, no redemption – no Christ, no Church, no Pope. And no Pope, no Reformation, no Puritan to oppose the Great Whore herself, Babylon the great. The whores of London, kept the Puritan in his post, gave him his living. The Puritan could not exist without the whore. Whoredom was as needful to his church as it was to fallen man, fornicating his life away in London.
‘And the players?’
With the players it was the contrary. Actors descend from neither Adam nor Eve but from Satan, who came onto the world’s stage disguised as a serpent. It was the first costume and the devil the original actor, and a good one too. His tongue dropped honey and Eve was taken in. She fell down and worshipped him and her suddenly naked navel became the entrance to the theatre. That’s why Puritans and players could never live together. Our false idols lined the route to hell – Dick Tarleton, Ned Alleyn, Bill Kempe popular as primroses – and so the player was far more damnable than the whore.
‘Mass magic.’
Your whore can take in only one man at a time. If a dozen a day go through her she’s doing well by doing ill. But a single player, he could command an entire theatre-load of spectators in one speech. In one word.
‘Why, they would hang on him –’
As if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on. One word? I tell you even a word was not necessary. Windy suspiration of forcèd breath, a sweeping gesture, your fingers on your lips I pray, yes, even silence. Even the very thought of silence. To die: to sleep; no more.
‘No more.’
And that’s how it was done. Nailed them to the ground and galleries and kept them from the pulpits, lured them to the theatres instead, to applaud the actors to the very echo that should applaud again, to wait breathless in the London afternoon for the next word, for the very next syllable. Oh yes, the player could do all this, all this and more. He was the god of the groundlings, idol of the aristocrats. The Puritan, though he played the orator as well as Nestor, could never sermonise an audience into such submission. Even the silver-tongued friar who made the fields his pulpit – the audiences walked over his ghost, trampling him into daisies, and streamed straight into the theatres. Fear had been the weapon up till now. But now seduction was stronger than fear, and seduction was in the air – no, it was the air, the very air we breathed. And all the Puritan could do was rage.
‘Conscience, morality, divine reason?’
It was the theatres that brought men’s humanity out of chests and closets and whispering chambers and placed it up on stage, where a handful of poor players, with four or five most vile and ragged foils, right ill disposed in brawl ridiculous, blazoned it to the world. As for right reason, the fear of God, wisdom, understanding, the knowledge of the holy – ah, these are not the stuff as dreams are made on, these are but pa
le shadows of people beside the player’s ability to be a walking mirror to everyman, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure, to make every spectator in that wooden circle see himself standing up there, standing up in the world for exactly what he is: man, tragical-comical, historical-pastoral, aspiring-despairing, delighted-deluded, in love, in hate, in heaven, in hell, a thing of darkness and of light, a lover, a tyrant, a madman, a poet, a dragon, a worm. So the poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage was rich in that one enormous regard, his ability to see himself and present himself in the round and inside out by a species of sorcery that left the Puritan gaping.
For the player was the man who showed you life as it is, not as it ought to be, who said what he felt, not what he ought to say.
‘Truth’s a dog must to kennel, I remember from somewhere.’
But a man’s occulted guilt can itself unkennel in one speech, and guilty creatures sitting at a play are struck so to the soul that suddenly their spirits are off the leash and barking out the theatre, howling through the world. Did the spectator leave the theatre a purged and purer person? Or did he leave it corrupted? All a player can say is that he sent the theatre-goer out more human than he’d come in – which is the end of art and no bad boast: to make us more ourselves, not less ourselves, as the Puritans would have had it, by plucking us out of the murk and mire of humankind.
Whatever the truth, the Puritan feared the player. And he feared the play, which staged several players, and the playhouse, which put out many plays. Theatres were outposts of hell, Satan’s garrisons. Hell was an occupying force in England and its legions were in London, where the traffic of the stage took two thousand to hell in two hours. A frightening figure. Worse – with half a dozen plays running on any given afternoon the theatres were capable of ushering the entire cast of London into hell in ten days flat – which ought to have pleased your Puritan. So many souls bound straight for hell, with damnèd speeches buzzing in their ears, surely all the greater space for the elect and élite of God in their silent white heaven. But that perhaps is what they feared most – being with themselves.
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