In the course of a long life devoted to drama Heywood suffered many misfortunes, most of them caused by his Catholicism. He was in danger under Henry VIII, prospered under Mary, and fled the country under Elizabeth. He died in exile around 1579, over eighty years old, with his ‘mad merry wit’ intact to the end. Like his father-in-law, he was prepared for any theatrical task, and was actor, orator, pageant-maker and playwright; he was as happy with a rustic farce as with a masque at court. His plays seem to have been written in his middle years. Although he lived forty more years, into another and golden age of literature, his plays are his memorial. In these interludes of limited stage technique (all his pieces are in the medieval form of a debate), he established a strong line of realistic satire and farce; hypocritical rogues, roaring bullies, snivelling priests, termagant wives and hen-pecked husbands were his stock in trade. The anti-clerical satire of The Pardoner and the Friar and the domestic discord of Johan Johan would amuse today as they did then.
By the middle of the 1530s the early group of Tudor play-wrights, from Medwall to Heywood, had given the idea of the new drama. In many ways it was tied to the past. The plays were short, the characters were few, stage business was at a minimum, and there was little action; allegory was still used, moral lessons were still attached, and the characters tended to declaim. In other respects there had been some remarkable changes. Drama was now finally out of the hands of the Church. The new playwrights, even those who were churchmen such as Medwall and Skelton, were writing on secular subjects, and their intention was to amuse as much as to instruct. Instead of the formal interchange between vices and virtues, as in the old morality, a wealth of new matter appeared in the interludes. Sharp details begin to portray contemporary life; a play will show a prisoner in Newgate, give the names of wines available in London, describe games of chance and ways of cheating, or give the news of shipping and the state of the tide. Social commentary and criticism appeared. Rastell in particular had an inquiring and reforming mind. He was interested in language and thought ‘our tongue maternal’ was sufficient ‘to expound any hard sentence’. He was a patriot and chided his country for lack of interest in exploration. He scattered his plays with criticisms of education, government and law; he thought that judges should be appointed for short periods and examined for partiality before reappointment. Indeed, the tone of this early drama, not only in plays by known writers but also in anonymous pieces like Youth, The Holy War and Hickscorner, was pessimistic. The comedy, which often appeared in a sub-plot, was rough and unkind; the drama reflected a time of change when England was worried by the social and religious troubles which More’s Utopia set out so poignantly.
A mirror uncleared is this interlude,
This life inconstant for to behold and see
wrote Skelton in Magnificence. ‘The weeds overgrow the corn’ was the message of the plays.
Secular drama for a fairly wide public had begun. Many different things influenced its development. Education both at school and university, the rediscovery of ancient literature by the humanists, the practice of the fashionable young men at the Inns of Court, and the life at the king’s court, all had a part to play in forming Elizabethan drama.
The Tudor schoolboy was something of an actor. Schooling was largely an education in Latin and much of the instruction, for want of text-books, was by repetition and practice. The staging of Latin plays, in which the boys took the parts, improved the command of the language and helped to keep the scholars interested. The comedies of Terence and Plautus were particularly recommended; they were good entertainment and they had the approval of the humanists for their elegant Latin. Terence was the first classical dramatist printed in England, just before the turn of the sixteenth century, and thirty years later Rastell published a translation of one of his plays under the title Terens in English. The acting that the boys learnt in school made them in demand outside the schoolroom. Courtesy insisted that great visitors to England should be entertained with interludes, naturally given in Latin which was the international language. But Latin was beyond the powers of the professional players and so the boys were called out to perform. The young players, possibly of St Paul’s, acted a ‘goodly comedy of Plautus’ before Henry VIII at Greenwich in 1519. Under their High Master, John Ritwise, the boys of St Paul’s in 1528 played Terence’s Phormio for Cardinal Wolsey and his guests. By the middle of the century most of the famous schools were taking their plays into the houses of the great. The boys of Eton played for Cromwell in 1538; thirty-five years later they were acting for Elizabeth at Hampton Court. At Westminster, the duties of performing were written into the statutes. The students of Merchant Taylors’, under their famous headmaster Richard Mulcaster, were very active. An old pupil of Mulcaster recalled that ‘yearly he presented some players to the court, in which his scholars were only actors, and I one among them, and by that means taught them good behaviour and audacity’. Nor was it only the London schoolboys who acted. There are records of plays by students at Canterbury, Shrewsbury, Beverley and elsewhere.
After their success in Latin, the boys were soon giving performances in English also. At first they gave translations of the classical plays, in particular Terence and Plautus; then they began to act original plays in English, usually comedies influenced by the classics they knew so well. To provide this English fare, school-masters turned playwright, and the most famous of these was Nicholas Udall, one time headmaster of Eton, from where he was dismissed for theft and vice, and later headmaster at Westminster. Udall’s best known comedy, Ralph Roister Doister (c. 1553), showed the good influence of Terence and Plautus. At last the native play was given a clear structure; following the classical models, Roister Doister was divided into acts and scenes; the comic business was well organized; and the characters, sturdy English versions of the Roman types, had strong personalities. To the broad humour of Heywood’s comedy, Udall added better form, better logic, more ingenuity in plotting and greater variety in handling. Classical principles had aided English humour to good effect.
When Tudor boys turned to youths and went from school to university, they still continued their acting. Oxford and Cambridge had always liked drama. Records of the late Middle Ages reveal plenty of activity. There were Christmas plays, and liturgical dramas; there were pageants and mummeries. The Boy-Bishop held his mock rule on the Feast of the Innocents; Christmas Lords directed the merry-making at many colleges; at Merton College, Oxford, the Rex Fabarum—‘the King of Beans’—was the Lord of Misrule from 19th November until Candlemas on 2nd February. With the coming of the ‘new learning’ of the Renaissance, classical drama was taken up, as it was in the grammar schools, and for the same reason. University men acted, wrote the academic playwright William Gager, ‘to practise our own style in prose or verse; to be well acquainted with Seneca or Plautus; honestly to embolden our path’. Seneca was the master for tragedy, and Plautus the master for comedy. And as the schoolboys often played for the court in London, so the undergraduates played for the royal visits to the university.
The academic playwrights usually wrote in Latin, as befitting the dignity of a scholar. But the most delightful and surprising of the university plays was an English comedy called Gammer Gurton’s Needle, acted at Christ’s College, Cambridge around 1563, and written by a certain ‘Mr S. Mr. of Art’. This play was the confirmation that the native comedy first seen in Ralph Roister Doister had taken firm root. Though written by an academic playwright for a learned audience, Gammer Gurton’s Needle was boisterous village comedy, all entertainment and no moral. The tidy influence of the classical drama was there, but well hidden. It was a confident work, rougher than Udall’s earlier play, but better because closer to English life and character. English comedy had come of age.
Education was the nurse of comedy; tragedy was fostered at the Inns of Court. The Inns were not merely places for the training of lawyers. They were the university for the prosperous young gentleman who aimed to make a place in the world rat
her than in the Church. And like their fellows at Oxford and Cambridge the young students of London had a taste for all kinds of revels, masques and dramas. As the colleges had their Lords of Misrule, so Gray’s Inn enacted the mock reign of the Prince of Purpoole. As the boys of the grammar schools and the undergraduates of the colleges entertained the court on occasions, so the young men of Gray’s Inn and the Inner Temple welcomed the monarch to their revels. Elizabeth pronounced herself ‘very much beholden’ to Gray’s Inn, ‘for that it did always study for some sports to present unto her’.
When they turned from the fun of the revels and the formal elegance of the masque to more extended drama, the lawyers preferred the austerity of tragedy. Seneca had long been a favourite of scholars. His melodramatic violence and dark imagination made him a more appropriate master for the worldly young Londoners, who were soon to know the pains of society as they took up their places in Tudor government, than Terence with his lighter talent. The authors of Gorboduc, acted for the Christmas revels of the Inner Temple in 1561–62 and the first blank verse tragedy on a London stage, were Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, two men of affairs who rose high in the country’s service. To a legendary story of English history they added the structure and the gloomy conventions of Senecan drama, and gave it topicality for the England of the Virgin Queen by making the play bear on the question of royal succession. Here were the elements for future success—noble characters falling to violent tragedy seen as a mirror of the contemporary world, and expressed in the flexible poetry of blank verse given form by the Senecan model. This pattern, more or less, was followed in the future productions of the Inns of Court, in Jocasta, mainly by the versatile George Gascoigne, in Gismond of Salern, by various hands, and in The Misfortunes of Arthur, by Thomas Hughes. But by the time this last play was acted, on 28th February 1588, by the men of Gray’s Inn for the Queen at Greenwich, tragedy had passed from lawyers to professionals and was being developed on the public stage.
The changes in comedy and tragedy were done with the encouragement of the court. The development of Tudor drama could hardly have gone on without the active interest of the court. Scholars and lawyers alike entertained the courtiers; the court was the fountain that nourished the popular pageants and masques which taught a later age so much about stage production, about effects, scenery and costume, about music, song and dance. By the reign of Henry VII, the Gentlemen and Children of the Chapel Royal already existed. These were primarily musicians and choristers for religious celebrations who were gradually given the task of organizing the royal entertainments. William Cornish, the Master of the Children from 1509 to 1523, greatly extended the dramatic activities of the Children and was a composer of interludes and masques himself. It seems that John Heywood had begun as one of the Children and no doubt learnt the rudiments of the theatre here. Henry VII was too cold to care for expensive entertainments; he was, wrote Bacon, ‘rather a princely and gentle spectator than seemed much to be delighted’. But when the gallant young Henry VIII and the ingenious Cornish came together in the first year of the new reign, pleasure was the business of the court so that ceremonious revels, interludes, pageants, masques, dumb-shows, dances, theatrical performances of all kinds, were the delight of all the later Tudors. Such was their liking for these entertainments that they were prepared to overlook remarkable failings in those who amused them. Nicholas Udall was a vehement Reformer, a thief and a lecher, yet he still devised shows for the pious and moral Queen Mary; the well-known papist Sebastian Westcott, master of the choir school at St Paul’s Cathedral, produced with his company of boys some twenty-seven plays for Elizabeth. When a professional public theatre at last emerged in the reign of Elizabeth, it did so protected by the crown against the law which frowned upon it; the dramatic companies were licensed by the Queen and supervised by her official, the Master of the Revels.
Public theatre was slow to come. A hopeful start had been made in the first thirty years of the sixteenth century, when Rastell and Heywood were writing their secular interludes, and Rastell set up a stage in his own garden and got together costumes and props to hire to other professionals. In the play Sir Thomas More there is a picture of these early professionals presenting an interlude in More’s house before an audience of burgesses. Strype noted that companies of actors, some amateur and some professional, ‘played at certain festival times, and in private houses at weddings, or other splendid entertainments, for their own profit’. Then, with the coming of the religious troubles, the public theatre made little advance for many years. Secular drama was not in favour with the religious controversialists of the Reformation. The economic and social troubles of the mid-century disrupted the players. Though money could be found for the entertainments and shows of the court, the reliable Discourse of the Common Weal, published about 1549, said that popular ‘stage plays, interludes, May games’ and the like were abandoned because of ‘much expenses’.
The public theatre, when it did arrive, benefited from the pause. Following after Rastell and Heywood, it might have produced little except their old-fashioned secular moralities. As it was, in the long interval of disquiet, amateur players made experiments which later invigorated the public stage. The efforts of the schoolboys, the scholars, the lawyers and the courtiers reformed the drama. Gorboduc became a model for verse tragedy, Gammer Gurton’s Needle for verse comedy, and Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566) for prose comedy. Historical and biographical plays had been written, chiefly by the industrious John Bale, who died in 1563. Stage production and the art of blending music and song with drama had been fostered by the entertainments of the court. All the elements out of which Shakespeare was later to construct his magic were present: they only awaited the men to use them.
By 1557 the churchwardens of St Botolph, in London, were renting their parish hall to players, and they continued to do this regularly for the next eleven years. Nor were they alone. The stability that Elizabeth slowly gave to the country brought the actors back before the public. Small ventures were tried here and there. Elizabeth liked the court revels, though her well-known parsimony prevented her from supporting them with the lavish generosity of her father. Westcott and his company of children from St Paul’s choir school acted for her in 1560, and then every year except one until his death in 1582. The Children of the Chapels Royal were also active under William Hunnis and Richard Farrant. In 1576 Farrant took a lease on some old buildings in Blackfriars, converted them to a theatre for the Children of the Chapel, and began to give performances to a courtly audience. The great men of the kingdom were encouraged to re-form their ‘servants’ into companies of actors. In 1574 the Earl of Leicester, an enthusiastic patron, persuaded the Queen to grant his company a licence under royal patent. This was a wise precaution, for Elizabeth’s government was even then enacting strict laws against vagrancy, and wandering players were liable to severe penalties unless well organized and well protected. Even a royal patent was no absolute safeguard against the enmity of city fathers. In London, the Common Council banned performances within the city limits.2 James Burbage, the first of the famous family, was forced to take his players in Leicester’s Company to the liberties outside the walls. In 1576 he built the Theatre in Shoreditch, the first playhouse designed and built for public performances.
Soon the Curtain arose nearby; then, in 1587, Philip Henslowe went south of the Thames and built the Rose on Bankside which became the centre of popular theatrical activity. The Swan appeared in 1594; four years later Richard and Cuthbert Burbage, the sons of James, pulled down the old Theatre and took the timber across the river to build the famous Globe. While the theatres were going up, the lordly companies were more and more in demand. They played by the command of the Queen at court, acting in banqueting halls and presence chambers; they played in the public theatres at Holywell, Moorfields, Newington Butts and Bankside; they went on country tours, playing in churches, parish halls, inn-yards, schoolrooms, ‘upon boards, and barrel-heads, to an old crackt trumpet’. L
eicester, Pembroke, Lord Strange, the Lord Admiral, and the Lord Chamberlain were the patrons of the most notable companies; by the end of the century the last two companies were the most famous. The Admiral’s Men were led by Henslowe and Edward Alleyn, and the Chamberlain’s Men were under Richard Burbage with William Shakespeare as playwright.
The public was eager, stages were available, actors had a new-found confidence: only playwrights were lacking. Sentimental or lascivious stories from Heliodorus and Apuleius, or weak versions of the old chivalrous romances, seem to have made up the bulk of the popular fare offered to the public in the first half of Elizabeth’s reign. ‘I may boldly say it, because I have seen it’, the Puritan critic Stephen Gosson wrote in 1579, ‘that the Palace of Pleasure, the Golden Ass, the Æthiopian History, Amadis of France, the Round Table, bawdy comedies in Latin, French, Italian and Spanish, have been thoroughly ransacked to furnish the playhouses in London.’ Gosson was chiefly concerned with public morals, one of the first of the carping Puritans who later utterly condemned the theatre. But Philip Sidney, the upholder of poetry and the opponent of Gosson, also severely criticized the drama, even the more imaginative pieces that came from the academies and the Inns of Court. Writing his Defence of Poesie within a year or two of Gosson’s attack, Sidney could find nothing to praise in comedy, and only Gorbuduc—with reservations—in tragedy. Luckily, better times were ahead.
The first notable development came about through the happy conjunction of a new writer, John Lyly, with a new theatre, that of the Children at Blackfriars. Lyly, a young man just down from Oxford, had a staggering success with Euphues in 1578, and confirmed that triumph with the sequel Euphues and his England two years later. These works of prose fiction were a new blend of careful rhetoric, romantic interest, and lively conversation. These qualities were as suitable for drama as they were for prose fiction, and since Lyly’s patron was the Earl of Oxford, a man who had both a company of children and a company of adult actors in his service, Lyly soon turned his hand to drama. On New Year’s Day 1584 his play Campaspe was given at Blackfriars, and then repeated at court before the Queen, by a company of children drawn from the Chapel Royal, the St Paul’s choir school and Lord Oxford’s own company. Lyly’s second play, Sapho and Phao, appeared at Blackfriars on 3rd March 1584, and for the next six years he continued to write plays for the children which were also seen at court. All his plays, except the Woman in the Moon, were in prose, owing something to Supposes, the prose-comedy Gascoigne wrote for the Inns of Court in 1566. But in all other respects Lyly was a true pioneer. His plays were the first successful romantic comedies. He wrote for an aristocratic audience, and his plays reflected the society of the court: the classical background of the plots complimented the learning of the Queen and her courtiers; the sparkling dialogue was taught to Lyly by the conversation in ante-room and presence chamber; the gallantry, the witty interchange between the sexes was modelled on the graces of courtly behaviour. Heywood’s rough farces and Udall’s country humour seemed now the product of dark ages. Lyly’s sun rose on a new world fashioned by knowledge, leisure and wealth. His characters in Midas greeted the dawn:
Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age Page 26