Roaring Boys
Page 4
Of Robert Greene we know a great deal more since he wrote copiously of his own life and times. He was born in Norwich about 1560 into what must have been a good family for, although he does not tell us what his father’s trade or profession was, he writes that his parents ‘were respected for their gravity and honest life’.3 He went first to the grammar school in the city and from there to St John’s College, Cambridge, where he studied for his BA degree, before going on to Oxford to graduate as MA. He was extremely proud of having attended both universities. On leaving Oxford he set off on a tour of Europe which took him to Italy, Poland, Denmark and Spain, risky though this last sounds, given the running enmity between the two countries. However, on returning to England some time in 1580 he found it impossible to settle down, took lodgings in London and set about seriously devoting himself to wine, women and poetry. ‘At my return I ruffled out in my silks in the habit of a malcontent and seemed so discontent that no place would please me to abide in nor no vocation cause me to stay myself in.’ A couple of years later, having run through all his money, he returned to Norwich, spent some time in Cambridge, then courted and married ‘a gentleman’s daughter from Lincolnshire’, a pretty fair-haired young woman by the name of Dorothy, and made an attempt at settling down with her in Norwich. Within a year or so she had borne him a daughter and gone home to mother and he was back in London. ‘I deserted her’, he told his friends, ‘because she tried to reform me.’ It might be said here that however badly Peele and Greene might have behaved separately, when they came together as they frequently did, they were worse than the sum of their parts.
The youngest of the Wits, born in 1567, was Thomas Nashe, born in Lowestoft in Suffolk. He was the son of a parson, William Nashe, who at that time was in straitened circumstances (presumably Lowestoft was a poor parish), and his second wife, Margaret. When he was six the family moved to the rectory at West Harling, which appears to have brought with it a better stipend. It is possible that he was educated at home by his father, but whether at home or at a local school, when he went up to St John’s College, Cambridge, money was still tight, so much so that he was of necessity a ‘sizar’ student. Sizar students were those too poor to pay fees or who had no scholarship and undertook menial tasks as servants to pay their way, in Nashe’s case cleaning and serving in the college itself. A graphic and bitter account of what being such a student entailed is given by the Elizabethan doctor and astrologer, Simon Forman, in his own biography.4 The only way he and a friend could go up to Oxford was as servants to two wealthy young layabouts. They were forced to fit their studying around running errands, keeping their masters in food and drink, waiting on them hand and foot and assisting them in their assignations with young women. The two young men in question later took Holy Orders, one becoming a bishop, while Forman, with insufficient time to study, had to drop out. Nashe, however, stuck with it. It might be that it was in Cambridge that he first met Greene, who was spending time there between returning from his travels and his marriage. He would almost certainly have known Christopher Marlowe, who was three years ahead of him. In 1588, having taken his degree, Nashe too made his way to London.
So to two of those outside the circle of the Wits. George Chapman was born in Hitchen, Hertfordshire, about 1560. He was the son of Thomas and Joan Chapman and grandson to ‘George Nodes, Sergeant to the Buckhounds to Henry VIII’. He too had been up to Oxford and gained his degree but unlike Peele, Greene or Nashe he did not make his way straight to London but entered the service of Sir Robert Sadler and served him as a soldier in the Low Countries. Such close contact with real life and the horrors of war might well account for his more sober outlook on life. Thomas Kyd, born in 1558, had no distance to travel to reach his final destination for he was born in the City and baptised on 6 November, just eleven days before Queen Elizabeth came to the throne. His father, Francis Kyd, was also a scrivener, writer of the Court letter of London and a Freeman of the Company of Scriveners, his mother Joan the legatee of a publisher. At the age of seven he was sent to the Merchant Taylors’ School where the headmaster, Dr Richard Mulcaster, was a formidable scholar with a real interest in drama, so the young Thomas learned French, Italian and Spanish as well as the more usual Greek and Latin and must have been introduced to a variety of plays; but although Merchant Taylors had forty-three scholarship places reserved for bright boys at St John’s College, Oxford, Kyd never went up to university. As a result of this he was unfairly looked down on by his more snobbish contemporaries, even though the profession of a scrivener and copyist at a time when most of the populace was illiterate was not only essential but highly respected. Both Greene and Nashe made snide comments about Kyd, although it could just be that jealousy also entered into it for Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy was the single most popular and successful play of its day, remaining in repertoire for thirty years after his death.
But soon it was clear that there were two dramatists who stood out well above the rest. In 1564, within a few weeks of each other, the young wives of two craftsmen each gave birth to a healthy son. Although one lived in Kent and the other in Warwickshire the two families had much in common. In both cases the father had been apprenticed in leatherwork, one then specialising in shoemaking, the other in glove-making and tanning. Both men, at the time of the birth of their eldest sons, were in comfortable circumstances although each would later run into debt, due in no small part to their predilection for litigation.
Katherine Marlowe’s child was born at the very beginning of February but, as is usually the case, there is no exact birth date as it was not until the nineteenth century that births had to be officially registered. The only record of the birth of a child was when it was baptised and its baptism recorded in the Parish Register, known popularly as ‘the Church Book’. As baptism was considered essential for eternal life and infant mortality was extremely high, the ceremony usually took place as soon as was practicable, generally about three days after birth. Indeed the Book of Common Prayer bade parents not to postpone christening their child beyond the first Sunday or Holy Day after its birth. Katherine’s son, given the name of Christopher after his paternal grandfather, was duly baptised at the Church of St George the Martyr on 6 February. That the baby was safely delivered must have been a considerable relief as her first child, Mary, had died almost immediately after birth.
The Marlowes were established Canterbury craftsmen and Katherine’s husband, John, was the third generation to go into the family business, while the grandfather, Christopher, was considered a ‘warm man’, with a substantial town house in the city and a further property in the Kent countryside consisting of a meadow and twenty acres of grazing rights. John had married Katherine Urry, a Dover girl, on 22 May 1560 at the church where her children would later be baptised. Their home was a fine one in the main street, renowned in its day for carved panelling of such beauty that it attracted a great deal of local envy. It stood on the corner of St George’s Street and Little George’s Lane but both it and the church, apart from its tower, were destroyed in wartime bombing.
Mary Shakespeare’s son was born in April in the family home in Henley Street in the little market town of Stratford-upon-Avon. She had married her husband, also a John, in 1557. John Shakespeare was born in the village of Snitterfield, his father being a tenant farmer on the Asby estate which belonged to the Arden family. John, the first of his family to be apprenticed into leatherwork, had been sent to Stratford to serve his apprenticeship and, once eligible to call himself a master craftsman, he set up in his own right as a glover and tanner and later also as a trader in wool. We know he acquired his first Henley Street house some time in 1552 at an annual ground rent of sixpence, for he is recorded as being fined that year for making a dunghill in the street outside his door instead of under the trees at the end of it like everyone else. John Shakespeare did so well that a few years later he acquired the house next door and knocked the two together to make one substantial property. The second house also had the benefi
t of a garden at a ground rent of thirteen pence a year.
Mary Shakespeare (née Arden) of Asby was an excellent match for any craftsman, and was very definitely well above John’s station in life. She was the daughter of his father’s landlord and came from a family who were said to have been great lords in Warwickshire before the Conquest. She was the eighth child and her father’s favourite, so much so that, almost unbelievably, when he died he left her not only money but the entire Asby estate and the home farm, now known as ‘Mary Arden’s House’. This she brought with her into her marriage, along with a hefty dowry. She too must have awaited the birth of her son with no little anxiety for her first baby, a daughter called Joan, had also died shortly after her birth just like little Mary Marlowe. Tradition has it that William Shakespeare was born on 23 April, St George’s Day (also the date of his death), and that might well be the case for his baptism is duly recorded in the parish Register of Holy Trinity Church on the 26th.
Both boys proved to be strong and healthy; had they not been, then the history of English literature in general and the theatre in particular would have been very different. When they reached the age of seven both left the dame schools where they had learned the alphabet, numbers and other basics from their horn books and went on to their respective local grammar schools. Both the King’s School in Canterbury and the Edward VI Grammar School in Stratford would have offered virtually the same curriculum in which the entire syllabus was based on Latin. In the Lower School they would have come into contact too with the Roman plays of Terence and Plautus. In the Upper School they were introduced to Ovid, alongside more Latin, some Greek, and Rhetoric. Although Holinshed’s Chronicles, so rich a source for Shakespeare, were published while he was still at school it is unlikely they were part of the syllabus, history generally being taught from the works of Plutarch or the earlier Hall’s Chronicle.
It was at the age of thirteen that the boys’ lives diverged dramatically. Marlowe remained where he was at the King’s School in Canterbury until he was fifteen; then, after winning a scholarship designed for those destined to take Holy Orders, he went up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. It is difficult to imagine a less appropriate profession than that of the priesthood. Marlowe’s subsequent immediate career is relatively well known, in no small part due to the number of books which appeared on the four hundredth centenary of his death in 1993. His questing and adventurous mind soon ensured that he stood out among his contemporaries and quite early on he became the friend, possibly the lover, of Thomas Walsingham. Thomas, who would remain Marlowe’s patron until the latter’s death, was nephew to Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s spymaster. Sir Francis was on the lookout for bright young professionals to act as secret agents, rather than the ragtag of informers and intelligencers who made up most of the secret service of the day, and it is assumed that Thomas introduced his friend to his uncle. It is easy to see why espionage would appeal to Marlowe, who had supreme confidence in his own intellect and ability to outmatch anyone that might be set against him. Thus he was drawn into Walsingham’s net and into that shadowy world, both exciting and enticing, from which those who enter can never properly escape.
From then on his story has overtones of a thriller, for twice while he was up at university he disappeared completely without any explanation, on the first occasion for seven weeks during his second year 1582/3, then again for over half a term during his final year when he was taking his MA. He went down from Cambridge for good at the end of the Lent Term of 1584 and duly applied for his MA to be granted to him, but it was withheld by the university authorities on the grounds that he had spent insufficient time at his studies. What happened next is unprecedented.
In a letter to the college authorities from Walsingham on behalf of the Privy Council, he informs them that ‘whereas it was reported that Christopher Marlowe was determined to have gone beyond the seas to Rheims and there remain, their Lordships thought it good to certify that he had no such intent; but that in all his actions he had behaved himself orderly and discreetly, whereby he had done her Majesty good service and deserved to be rewarded for his faithful dealing’. Therefore Marlowe should be granted his MA and any rumours that he was frittering away his time on the continent quashed ‘by all possible means. . . . Because it was not her Majesty’s pleasure that anyone employed, as he had been, in matters touching the benefit of his country should be defamed by those that are ignorant of the affairs he went about.’5
In other words, Marlowe had been spying for England. The reference to Rheims suggests that he had been attending the Catholic Seminary there, founded by the Englishman, Dr Allen, and originally situated in Douai but more recently moved to Rheims. The seminary was a centre for disaffected English students drawn to the old Faith and was notorious as a hotbed of intrigue and a powerhouse for plots. Allen and his colleagues did not only support Philip II in his proposed invasion of England, but actively assisted those plotting to put Mary Stuart on the English throne. What better way was there of discovering what was going on there than by infiltrating an agent into the seminary in the guise of a dissident Catholic student? Another reason for thinking that this is what he was doing was that in The Jew of Malta he has his villain, Barabas the Jew, discuss the merits of poisoning the public wells in order to cause the maximum public panic, the possibility of which was under serious discussion in Rheims at the time.
Becoming a secret agent was not the only major difference between Marlowe and the rest of the new theatrical professionals. He was almost certainly gay and, unlike his contemporaries, he had already made waves as a dramatist and poet before he had even come down from Cambridge. His physical and mental energy must have been prodigious for as well as studying, taking his two degrees and spying for Walsingham, he found time to translate Ovid’s erotic verse, adapt Virgil’s Tragedy of Dido for the stage and write the first part of Tamburlaine. The play, which introduced theatre-goers to Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’, was first performed in 1587 and became an immediate smash hit rocketing him into celebrity status, a position of which he took every advantage.
Compared to Marlowe, William Shakespeare’s journey to the London playhouses was slow and is largely unknown, as is how he was drawn to the theatre in the first place. One incident which occurred in Stratford when he was fifteen years old is worth recording. Shortly before Christmas 1579 the body of a young girl was found in the River Avon, caught under the bare branches of the willows at Tiddington. It was thought she went into the water on 17 December, but the inquest was not held until 11 February 1580 and it is suggested therefore that in the meantime she was temporarily buried. At the end of the hearing the twelve members of the jury, having heard all the evidence, brought in a verdict of accidental death. It was decided that ‘she, going with a milk pail to draw water from the river Avon, and standing on the bank of the same, suddenly and by accident, slipped and fell into the river and was drowned and met her death in no other wise or fashion’ (my italics).6 The latter phrase suggests that there were those who said otherwise, rumours of suicide after being jilted by a lover perhaps? But the jury had obviously given her the benefit of the doubt. Had they brought in a suicide verdict the result would have been a hasty re-interment at some nearby crossroads after the Coroner had announced that the deceased ‘regardless of salvation of her soul and led astray by the instigation of the Devil, threw herself into the water and wilfully drowned herself’, thus forfeiting her right to burial in hallowed ground. Why this sad little story is apposite is because the girl’s name was Katherine Hamlet and her death and subsequent burial recalls that of Ophelia.
Shakespeare, after leaving school at thirteen, went into the family business. The story of how at the age of eighteen he got the much older Anne Hathaway pregnant, subsequently married her in a ceremony which had all the hallmarks of a shotgun wedding presided over by her brothers, of the birth of that child, Susanna, followed by twins, Hamnet and Judith, and his subsequent disappearance from Stratford is too well k
nown to go into further. All we know for sure is that he went away leaving his parents to care for his deserted wife and children, no small responsibility for Mary Shakespeare who still had small children of her own. Shakespeare’s supposedly ‘missing years’ have given rise to a wide variety of theories based on his subsequent work: that he was a soldier in the Low Countries (Henry V), studied at the Inns of Court (The Merchant of Venice), went to sea (Pericles and The Tempest), was employed as a tutor by Lord Strange in Derbyshire (any play involving comic schoolmasters) and, of course, that hoary old chestnut, that he simply ran off to London after having been caught poaching on the Lucy estate at Charlecote, just outside Stratford, and then stood around outside the Globe holding the horses of those attending performances until someone noticed him, a theory which falls down somewhat when we know he was in London ten years before the Globe was even built.
There is a more prosaic and practical possibility. Since nobody knows when Shakespeare actually left Stratford it could well be that the ‘missing years’ were few. During 1587 five different theatre companies visited Stratford, one of which was the Queen’s Men in June. They arrived in the town two men short for, while they were performing in Oxford, one of their actors, William Knell, was killed in a fight with a fellow player, John Towne. In the evidence given at the inquest, held on 13 June in the town of Thame, it was stated that Knell, fighting drunk, had picked a quarrel with Towne and drawn his sword on him. Towne had been forced to defend himself while calling out to Knell to stop the fight. Knell had refused to do so and Towne ‘fearing for his life’ had struck out and run him through. Towne was therefore now in custody.7