Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age

by Foss, Michael

  As Greene’s body was undermined by excess, so his art was undermined by success. In 1592, in the last year of his life, he tried to marry the good qualities of the conny-catching pamphlets to a better sense of form. The results are three wistful works of varying success. The Quip for an Upstart Courtier showed what might be done. It is subtitled ‘a quaint dispute between velvet breeches and cloth breeches’ and is a lament for a lost age of simplicity, written in a lively controlled style that owed something to the early graces of his novels, and something to the direct plainness of his pamphlets. The note of regret is what one might expect from a sick and disappointed man, but it seems that his despair was too much for him. In Greene’s Vision he declares that his work was in vain and worthless, and in his Repentance, the last confession of a sinful man, he damns his life entirely.

  Greene’s sad end was related in picturesque detail by his enemy Harvey. After a ‘fatal banquet of pickle herring’ he lay amid his lice and begged for a penny-pot of malmsey. His friends and fellow writers deserted him, and his only companions were his mistress, his landlady and her husband. He was down to one shirt, his doublet, hose and sword being sold for three shillings; he owed his landlord £10. Here Greene’s printer took up the story. On the last night he heard that his deserted wife was well and sent him good wishes; he was glad, confessed that he had wronged her, and, knowing that his time was short, wrote her a letter: ‘Sweet wife, as ever there was any good will or friendship between thee and me see this bearer (my Host) satisfied of his debt: I owe him ten pound, and but for him I had perished in the streets. Forget and forgive my wrongs done unto thee, and Almight God have mercy on my soul. Farewell till we meet in heaven, for on earth thou shalt never see me more.’ He died on 3rd September 1592. His kind hostess crowned him with a garland of bay leaves and buried him in New Churchyard, near Bedlam.

  ‘He inherited more virtues than vices’, Nashe wrote in defence of his friend against the sour criticisms of Harvey. ‘Debt and deadly sin, who is not subject to? With any notorious crime I never knew him tainted.’ Unlucky, weak and wilful rather than bad, Greene might have passed unnoticed in a more forgiving time. Nor was he a rebel against society and country. To him, ‘fair England’ was the ‘flower of Europe’; London, with its vigorous trade, was equal to the ‘strongest city in the world’; and even English courtesans, he wrote in his Never Too Late, ‘are far superior in artificial allurement to them of all the world’—their looks ‘contain modesty, mirth, chastity, wantonness and what not’. Indeed, so far as he had political views, he regarded England as ‘this glorious Island’ corrupted from ideal simplicity by foreign, especially Italian, ways. Like many wild, indulgent men, he was a natural conservative and moralist. The pastoral sentiments of one of his gentle, conventional poems expressed well enough the world he could not find:

  Sweet are the thoughts that savour of content,

  The quiet mind is richer than a crown,

  Sweet are the nights in careless slumber spent,

  The poor estate scorn fortune’s angry frown,

  Such sweet content, such mind, such sleep, such bliss

  Beggars enjoy when princes oft do miss.

  When Greene came to manhood, there was no room already prepared for him in the English scheme of things. The universities, in their new secular life after the Reformation, were turning out young scholars at a great rate. By the middle of Elizabeth’s reign there were already too many of them, as the famous schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster pointed out. Living high at university, and having a good opinion of their abilities, these young men were then put out in the world and found nothing for them to do. They drifted to London looking for patrons and jobs, and they tried their hand at writing, for that was one task they were qualified to do. But the profession of hack writer as yet hardly existed. In former ages the writer had been an amateur, one who combined a love of literature with a place that paid his wages—in the Church, in the government, in trade, or in the nobleman’s household. Or the writer had been a man of independent means himself. Now, in the late sixteenth century, there was at last a growing public in London that would make commercial writing a possibility. But the market was difficult and badly organized, and the young learned wits, haughty and privileged until then, had to grub for their living, they had the difficult task of reconciling their pretensions with their needs. It is no wonder that many went astray.

  In the Quip for an Upstart Courtier, Greene has left an excellent portrait of the Elizabethan author: ‘I espied far off a certain kind of an overworn gentleman, attired in velvet and satin; but it was somewhat dropped and greasy, and boots on his legs, whose soles waxed thin and seemed to complain of their master, which treading thrift under his feet, had brought them into that consumption. He walked not as other men in the common beaten way, but came compassing circumcirca, as if we had been devils and he would draw a circle about us, and at every third step he looked back as if he were afraid of a bailiff or a serjeant.’ Greene himself was such a figure, and he was put to many questionable shifts to keep alive. ‘Poverty is the father of innumerable infirmities’, he complained. Certainly it made him write too much and too quickly; even Nashe admitted that ‘Greene came oftener in print than men of judgement allowed of’. And the same cause made him resort to a little ‘conny-catching’ on his own. Once he sold the same play to two companies; the Queen’s Players bought Orlando Furioso for 20 nobles,1 and when they were out of London Greene resold the play to the Lord Admiral’s men for the same amount.

  Drinking, whoring, a little cheating, a lot of irresponsibility—it is not a great catalogue of crime. Many of Greene’s literary companions were involved in more desperate scrapes than he was. The poet Thomas Watson and the famous playwright Christopher Marlowe were arrested for homicide in 1589, and so too was Ben Jonson in 1598. The tragic dramatist Thomas Kyd was arrested for atheism in 1593; he was imprisoned and tortured, and tried to shift the blame onto Marlowe. Marlowe was a government agent of some kind, and was killed in an obscure brawl at Deptford. Anthony Munday was a paid informer and delivered up to the government Jesuits and Puritans alike. The attractive Thomas Lodge, being the son of a bankrupt, a prodigal and a Catholic, was forced to become an adventurer; he sailed on a couple of piratical expeditions, and afterwards, driven by need to all kinds of writing, showed as good a knowledge of low life as Greene. The equally attractive and brilliantly versatile Thomas Nashe was more than once in trouble with authority. In 1594 he was prosecuted by city fathers, and in 1597 his lodgings were searched by order of the Privy Council. It is no wonder that Greene, knowing the violence and despair of his colleagues, should have warned them, in one of his reforming moods, to note his bad life and mend theirs. ‘Look unto me’, he said in Groatsworth of Wit, addressed especially to Marlowe, ‘and thou shalt find it an infernal bondage. I know the least of my demerits merit this miserable death, but wilful striving against known truth, exceedeth all the terrors of my soul. Defer not (with me) till this last point of extremity; for little knowest thou how in the end thou shalt be visited.’ Less than a year later, Marlowe was dead, stabbed above the right eye at Eleanor Bull’s tavern on Deptford Strand.

  In his penitent mood Greene was hard on his friends and very severe on himself. The picture he gives of himself in Groatsworth of Wit, his Repentance and his Vision is altogether too black and dramatic to be taken as the whole truth. Obviously there were men, and some in high places, far more evil than he was. But the English public, it seems, judged Greene to be as bad as he sometimes thought he was; for both the writer and his countrymen used the same standard of judgment. What worried respectable opinion about Greene and his fellow hacks was their rootlessness, their lack of a place in the scheme of things. The Elizabethans believed in order: the famous passage in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida put this belief best:

  The heavens themselves, and planets, and this centre

  Observe degree, priority, and place,

  Insisture, course, proportion, se
ason, form,

  Office, and custom, in all line of order:

  and the speech goes on:

  How could communities,

  Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,

  Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,

  The primogenitive and due of birth,

  Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,

  But by degree, stand in authentic place?

  Take but degree away, untune that string,

  And hark! what discord follows.

  But who were these turbulent hacks? Greene was a poor man’s son, Marlowe was the son of a shoemaker, Nashe, Dekker and many another were born poor. They were educated, yet they had no profession (for hack author was not recognized as a proper vocation); they lived as gentlemen and consorted with rabble; they wrote on all topics, even society and government, in a way that authority found suspicious. In a word, they were disorderly themselves, and a force for disorder in others. Gabriel Harvey, himself a ropemaker’s son and a scholar, but acceptably placed as a university tutor, voiced the conventional view when he accused Greene for the ‘contemning of superiors, deriding of others, and defying of all good order’; and in another place he prayed that Greene’s works ‘have not done more harm by corruption of manners, than by quickening of wit’. Greene in his remorse accepted this criticism, for he was at heart a patriotic Englishman. He accused himself and Marlowe of ‘atheism’, though by this he meant not so much religious unbelief, but bad living, questioning of authority, and acts against the well-being of the State.

  Greene no doubt longed for the place that Elizabethan society was not yet ready to accord to the hack writer. Perhaps part of his animosity against the actors and the playwrights attached to the theatrical companies was because they had achieved an acceptance, almost a respectability, that the hack prose writer had not. In Elizabeth’s time, the theatre, like gambling, was a suspicious business; but again like gambling, the royal patents given to the various theatrical companies protected the stage and gave its servants a certain place in society.

  But insecurity made Greene the writer he was. Because he had no settled place he sank; and because he needed to live by his pen he wrote about the world he knew. With him and a few others of his kind a note of common reality enters into English literature that had hardly existed before. And though this kind of writing was not always very accomplished, literature gained, for a large part at the bottom end of society that had been hidden before was suddenly illuminated. The conny-catchers, the rogues, the cheats, the cross biters and the bullies were not just types as they sometimes had appeared in the medieval ‘merrie tales’. They were figures taken from close observation who talked and swore and tricked in the pamphlets as they did in life. Greene’s experience in the shadows affected his art. He was one of those who helped to bring English fiction out of the foolish, artificial country of romance and to root it firmly in the ground of ordinary life. He became also, because he was one of them, the chronicler of the dispossessed, the portraitist of a sombre society that lay beneath the glittering successes of Elizabeth’s reign. Injustice and cruelty walked in the world he pictured, where too rapid social changes had left so many wandering, lawless and in despair.

  1 The noble was a gold coin worth 6s. 8d.

  11

  Tudor Playwrights

  WHEN THOMAS MORE was a boy serving in the household of Cardinal Morton he took part in the dramatic interludes presented in the winter for the great man and his guests. These entertainments in the hall at Lambeth were at first a kind of morality play, simple allegories bringing home religious and moral lessons. Then, as repetition weakened the moral and wearied the onlookers with the dull formality of the drama, Henry Medwall, the Cardinal’s chaplain and resident playwright, tried to enliven the performance, having in mind pleasure rather than instruction. In Fulgens and Lucrece, written around 1497, he suppressed the allegory and told a secular tale of a wooing with plenty of incident and some characterization joined to a sub-plot of coarse rustic humour. The result was not a great play, but the audience found it ‘right honest solace’ for leisurely gentlemen in the contented hour after dinner. Since 1485 the times had been peaceful, and the country was becoming prosperous. Men were ready for whatever ingenious and attractive tales the playwright could devise for them.

  A few years later when the poet John Skelton began his brave campaign against the rising churchman Thomas Wolsey, he framed his first condemnation in the form of a morality. The cumbersome Magnificence, a monument to the eccentric garrulity of the poet, is more static preaching than lively drama, but the author perceived that the stage was a good place for an attack on a public figure and his policy; a play was as useful for satire, criticism or denunciation as it was for moral instruction.

  Drama in England began in the Church and most dramatic performances in the Middle Ages were connected with religion. Theatre was a part of religious instruction. Mystery, or miracle, plays, such as the cycles presented in York, Chester and Wakefield, were based on biblical stories and given by the guilds of the town. Later, the morality play reflected the favourite medieval habit of allegorizing, putting in simple dramatic form the struggle of the virtues and the vices for the soul. Performances of the mystery cycles continued even into the seventeenth century, and moralities were still written in the reign of Elizabeth, but slowly drama began to lose its intimate connection with religion.

  Secular plays were not unknown in the Middle Ages. Travelling minstrels and players went their rounds, as Shakespeare has pictured them in Hamlet; by 1469 they had formed their own guild with a charter granted by Edward IV. In the countryside, folk festivals and holidays were enlivened by mummery and simple plays. In the towns, expensive pageants, often on mythological or historical themes, were devised for great occasions such as the entertainment of an ambassador or a royal wedding. In the houses of the rich, the lordly amateurs had a passion for the new ‘interlude’, or short play. Special servants were hired whose duties included acting; in 1473 Sir John Paston spoke of one employed ‘to play Saint George and Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham’. The plays themselves have largely disappeared, but some of the subjects have been recorded. Many interludes were about the popular heroes of the romances—Sir Guy, Sir Eglamour, Robert of Sicily and the like. Others were about St George, or Robin Hood—‘very proper to be played in May games’. Sometimes fragments of a play have been preserved, and these show a variety of topics from the bawdy Interludium de Clerico et Puella to the incestuous Dux Moraud.

  Performances of secular interludes were occasional and haphazard. But as settled times came with the reign of Henry VII men began to think more of ease and entertainment, and drama was looked at with new eyes. Since aristocratic patrons—Cardinal Morton and the Earl of Northumberland for example—wanted interludes, writers began to consider the form; they discovered with Medwall and Skelton that the drama had unsuspected virtues. Renaissance scholarship helped by unearthing new sources, new examples, new stories, and new uses for plays. The introduction of printing into England spread this new knowledge. A renewed interest in plays flourished among those who loved the arts, and foremost among the new enthusiasts was Sir Thomas More, so that the beginnings of Tudor drama seemed a family affair, centred round his fine intelligence and genial personality.

  The fascination of the theatre had caught More early. As a boy in Morton’s house he would ‘suddenly sometimes slip in among the players and make a part of his own there presently among them’. He met Henry Medwall and saw the new art Medwall had given to the interlude; perhaps he had acted under the direction of the playwright. In his youth, said his contemporary John Bale, More was a writer of comedies. Although none have survived one may guess at their virtues, for the English works of More abound in both humour and dramatic conversations. Soon More had no time to spend on comedies, and having led by example he was later content to encourage others. His practical interest in drama was taken up first by his brother-in-law John Ras
tell, and then by his nephew John Heywood.

  Rastell was a lawyer from Coventry who eventually became a printer in St Paul’s Churchyard. Law books and plays were the specialities of his press; of the eighteen plays printed before 1534 no less than twelve were printed by him and his son William. From his press came plays by Medwall, Heywood, possibly Skelton, and of course those by Rastell himself. Without the efforts of Rastell and his son the early Tudor drama might have disappeared like that of the Middle Ages. It was natural for a lawyer to print law books, but for the Rastells the printing of plays was a duty of love. John Rastell, despite a busy career as lawyer, printer, then M.P. and later agent for Thomas Cromwell, was active in all kinds of dramatic ventures. He was a deviser and producer of pageants, being entrusted with some of the design for the Field of Cloth of Gold at Guisnes in 1520. When he built a new house in Finsbury Fields, in 1524, he erected a stage in the garden; with the help of his wife and a tailor he designed and made costumes, curtains and hangings which he hired out. And he was a playwright himself, perhaps producing his own pieces on his own stage.

  Rastell was not the most skilful writer, but his interludes showed the way drama was going. The Four Elements was on the thoroughly secular subjects of astronomy and geography, and included some far-sighted, patriotic remarks on the need for English voyages to the New World. In this interlude the old medieval allegory was still used, but in Calisto and Melibea1 (taken from the famous novel La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas) individual characters take the place of the old personifications. While Rastell’s interludes were rather stiff and, in their desire to teach a lesson, not far from the medieval moralities, the plays of his son-in-law John Heywood were a great advance. With Heywood, pleasure came before instruction and natural events drove out the artifices of allegory. He was among the first, wrote Thomas Warton, who ‘introduced representations of familiar life and popular manners’.