Roaring Boys

by Judith Cook

  Losing two actors would have been pretty disastrous for a small touring company. For Shakespeare, already drawn to the theatre and frustrated with his life in the family business and with his domestic circumstances, such a situation might well have afforded him the opportunity of a lifetime, the chance to learn his new trade on the road for he, like George Peele, was an actor as well as a playwright. There was also another link with the Knell-Towne fight. Shortly before his death, Knell had married a Rebecca Edwards who, a year later, after a decent interval, then married the actor John Hemings, one of Shakespeare’s closest friends as well as a colleague. Whatever the real truth of the matter, whether on his own on foot or on horseback, or as part of the company of the Queen’s Men, Shakespeare was almost certainly in town to see one of the early performances of Tamburlaine.

  While their original backgrounds might have been very alike, the characters and personalities of the two young men could hardly have been more dissimilar. Throughout his short life Marlowe was flamboyant, outrageous in his behaviour and opinions, given to outbursts of violence, and courting danger; it was as if from the first he was programmed to self-destruct. Shakespeare, on the other hand, was cautious and hardworking, carefully investing the money he made in property both in London and Stratford, given to romantic attachments and, politically, keeping his head down. But both gave us some of the most wonderful verse ever written.

  So, by one means or another, all our first wave of dramatists and their associates, the poets, essayists and pamphleteers, were ensconced in London by Armada year, objects of both envy and antipathy. There are plenty of examples today of how sudden recognition and fame affects those previously unused to either. To be shot from the obscurity of a distant town or village or the backstreets of London and find your name on every poster or billboard as the writer of the play about which everyone is talking is heady stuff – not to mention that with such fame or notoriety come all the trappings, from fans plying you with drink every time you set foot in a tavern and would-be poets hanging on your every word, to women from all walks of life throwing themselves at you. The nearest analogy today is that of the star footballer or pop idol. It is hardly surprising therefore that there were those who would be destroyed by it.

  THREE

  A Theatre for the People

  All the world’s a stage

  And all the men and women merely players . . .

  As You Like It, II, vii

  The new breed of playwrights was to produce a new breed of actor. We know very little of the actors who played in the early companies unless, like Knell and Towne, they brought attention on themselves for reasons other than by their performances, but with the emergence of more professional companies based in the playhouses and using the services of professional writers, there emerged the actors whose names have come down to us through the centuries, the two greatest of which in their day were Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage.

  Alleyn was born on 1 September 1566 to a Bishopsgate publican who died when Alleyn was four. Shortly afterwards his mother remarried, his new stepfather being a haberdasher. Obviously neither trade appealed to him and what attracted him to the acting profession is not known, but by the time he was sixteen young Edward was touring in Leicestershire with the Earl of Worcester’s Company, possibly having joined them first as an apprentice. We know he was in Leicester at this time because he was hauled up with the rest of the players before the local Justices as the company claimed to have lost or mislaid its vital Licence to Perform, which also set out the details of its patron. They had been brought to court because, in spite of this and in defiance of the Lord Mayor of Leicester who presumably had demanded to see it, they went ahead and performed their plays anyway. Afterwards, when they had been suitably admonished, they apologised to his worship and begged him not to tell their patron.1

  Richard Burbage was born about a year later into the first truly theatrical family, since his father James had built The Theatre and although James is first described as a carpenter he was by that time an established actor and company manager. So young Richard went straight into the business as a boy player and by the age of thirteen even his brothers were describing him as ‘brilliant’. While in most cases such praise from within the home might be taken with a pinch of salt, in this instance the description was absolutely justified. It is almost impossible now to imagine what the performances of the sixteenth-century actors were like, except that we know their style was almost certainly declamatory since an actor then needed to hold an audience of hundreds, even thousands, in an open-air environment amid plenty of noise, and that they used an accepted series of gestures to denote fear, love, anger and other emotions. It would have been impossible, for example, for Burbage, when playing Hamlet, to lurk behind a pillar and in quiet anguish ask himself ‘to be or not to be, that is the question’. He would have had to stride out to the front of the stage and project his soliloquy right up to the top gallery. And although in terms of some of the great twentieth-century actors, Alleyn has been likened in style to Sir John Gielgud and Burbage, who played a far wider variety of roles, to Sir Laurence Olivier, one of Alleyn’s most famous parts was Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, a mighty despot who set out to conquer the known world, and he was obviously capable of convincing his audience that he was capable of it.

  Backing up the two stars was a substantial second rank of good actors such as Henry Condell and John Hemings, who later put together and published Shakespeare’s plays. However it was the comic actors who, like Alleyn and Burbage, were to become household names: the ‘clowns’ Richard Tarlton, Will Kempe and Robert Armin. These clowns were not the white-faced creatures of the circus but much more like the comedians of the nineteenth-century music halls or today’s stand-up comics, and they were hugely popular. Tarlton had been a publican, first in Colchester, then in London where he kept the Saba Inn. He also ran an ordinary in Paternoster Row. He first took up acting in 1577 and by 1583 was one of the twelve founder members of the Queen’s Men. He had a number of famous acts, including one as a drunk and another, in which he made use of his dog, was said greatly to amuse the Queen and it has been suggested that Shakespeare wrote the part of Launce (who is accompanied by a dog) in Two Gentlemen of Verona, especially for Tarlton. His fame became such that, even in an era when communication was poor, it spread nationwide, so much so that folk living far from London and unlikely ever to journey more than a few miles from their town or village, would tell each other his best-known jokes. It was said of him that he only had to walk on to a stage for an audience to collapse with laughter, one playgoer, Henry Peacham, writing:

  Tarleton, when his head was only seen,

  The Tirehouse door and tapestry between,

  Set all the multitude in such a laughter,

  They could not hold for scarce an hour after.

  He was particularly famous for the ‘jigs’ which he performed at the end of the show, song and dance acts which were often cheeky, satirical and risqué. He also played parts in various dramas, even writing one of his own, The Seven Deadly Sins, but it is likely that, ad libber that he was, he found sticking to a set script difficult and was likely to have been a loose cannon among the more serious actors who had carefully learned set lines and where to stand on the stage to say them.

  Of William Kempe and Robert Armin we know considerably less. Kempe’s main claim to fame is that he left the theatre to dance a widely reported ‘jig’ from London to Norwich, that he wrote an entertainment called Nine Days Wonder and played the comic roles in Shakespeare’s early works, such as Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. He is also credited, perhaps wrongly, with being the original of the actor criticised by Hamlet for speaking far more than has been set down for him. Robert Armin, on the other hand, was not so much a clown as an actor capable of more than comedy since legend has it that he played both the Fool in King Lear and Feste in Twelfth Night, and to do so convincingly he must have had a more serious side to his talent. He
also wrote plays of his own, one of which has the self-explanatory title The Two Maids of More-Clacke.

  The common factor binding so many theatre people together in the early days, the dramatists, actors, costume and prop makers, and inventors of special effects, was, undoubtedly, that great entrepreneur Philip Henslowe. Anyone who saw the film Shakespeare in Love must have laughed heartily at the opening sequence in which Henslowe is seen with his booted feet being held over a fire by his creditors who are demanding money from him. In real life, however, he was a great deal more canny. It is little short of a miracle that so many of his papers dealing with the day-to-day running of the Rose Theatre and his association with writers and actors, along with notes and letters, survive to this day and are the single best contemporary source of how the Elizabethan theatre actually operated. The diaries and papers first came to light in the eighteenth century and were found lying among others of lesser interest in the library of Dulwich College. The various ‘books’ of the Diary had started out as a record of Henslowe’s brother’s interests in mining and smelting in the Ashdown Forest between the years 1576 to 1581, but they were then passed on to Philip, who used them initially to record the income and expenditure of his timber business and only later for details of his theatrical activities.

  From 1582 onwards, therefore, he records which plays were in repertoire, how much was taken at the door, notes of advances made to dramatists commissioned to write plays on the basis of a synopsis or ‘plot which they had presented to him’ (a truly revolutionary notion), inventories of costumes, scenery and props, along with what he had paid out for the equipment necessary for special effects. There are also a fair number of critical comments, not least when he had to bail a writer or actor out of gaol, most often for being either drunk or disorderly or after they had been arrested for debt.

  He also fancied himself as something of a physician and there are a number of notes of the remedies that took his fancy which he might well have inflicted on his actors, such as ‘take ants and stamp on them, then strain them through a cloth and mix with swine’s grease, then stamp on knot grass the same and take the juice and mix with strainings of eggs and put in the ear which will help cure deafness’. Another ‘cure’ consisted of frying earthworms ‘a dozen times at least’ and pounding up the mess to make an ointment, or mixing a variety of herbs and flowers before boiling them all up ‘with the urine of a boy’. Therefore it comes as no little surprise to discover that when it came to his own health Henslowe was not averse to consulting his local doctor, Simon Forman, for more professional advice, and his various complaints, and Forman’s remedies for them, are duly recorded in the latter’s Casebooks. He was also deeply superstitious and there is a section on useful spells to ward off everything from the evil eye and the plague to ‘making a fowl fall dead’. Would that such a record had come down to us from the Burbages.2

  Even without having his boots set on fire, the real Henslowe appears in the Diaries as a somewhat comic figure with an eye to the main chance, as is shown by his absolute determination to become the Queen’s own bear-keeper, an ambition which seems to have been far more important to him than any desire to go down in history as the person who first brought together so much talent and put it on the stage. For it is a simple fact that just about every playwright of any note wrote first for Henslowe, many having their plays performed by the Lord Admiral’s Men, the company with which he was most closely associated. Among these was the young William Shakespeare with the Henry VI trilogy, in the writing of which it is thought he was assisted by others including Marlowe; also Titus Andronicus which is entirely his own work. Both were written before he moved on rapidly to become Burbage’s house playwright, a position he was to hold for over twenty years, making him a unique figure in the dramatic world of his day.

  Of the two sober dramatists outside the circle of Wits, Chapman and Kyd, Chapman did not begin to write seriously for the theatre until the mid-1590s, partly because he needed to earn money elsewhere since, careful and industrious as he was, he had somehow ended up in the clutches of a notorious money-lender, John Wolfall, and was to spend the next twenty years desperately trying to pay off the debt. It was left, ironically, to the hard-working, self-effacing, mocked ‘little scrivener’, Thomas Kyd, to invent a whole, new and exciting genre. His Spanish Tragedy, first performed in 1591 and one of Henslowe’s biggest hits, ushered in the popular genre now known as the Revenge Plays, establishing a formula which most follow, beginning with either the ghost of a victim, or a relation or lover associated with him, explaining to the audience the events, which have resulted in his becoming a ‘revenger’. The scene is set therefore, as in a Greek tragedy, for a predictable set of events at the end of which the villain or villains pay the price for their crime. En route to the denouement the audience is treated to more murders and sudden deaths, often devised in highly ingenious ways.

  The Spanish Tragedy opens with the ghost of Andrea, recently killed in Spain’s war with Portugal, complaining to the Spirit of Revenge that it has so far done nothing to bring to book those who have murdered his son. After further discussion, the chosen revenger is Hieronimo (or Jeronimo), Marshal of Spain, thus setting him on a course of bloodshed and mayhem which ends with the popular device of a play within a play revealing all. Hieronimo bites off his tongue in order to keep silent as to his motive, although he kindly explains to the audience before doing so. Grand Guignol it might be, but it was wildly popular with audiences and the character of Hieronimo made sufficient impact for the character to be referred to in subsequent plays well after Kyd’s death. He is also generally given the credit for writing an early version of Hamlet, known as the Urr-Hamlet. Nashe, writing of Kyd in his usual disparaging manner, notes: ‘Yet the English Seneca, read by candlelight, yields many good sentences, as “blood is a beggar”, and so forth: and if you entreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches . . .’.3 Other commentators describe the play opening with a ghost, robed in a white sheet and clanking with chains, calling out ‘revenge, revenge!’ However, since the text is long since lost there is no way of knowing how much Shakespeare took from it.

  The point should be made that virtually none of the early professional playwrights would have arrived at the Rose or The Theatre clutching the synopsis, or ‘plot’, of a truly original play in their hands. The vast majority of the drama of the day was taken from a wide variety of sources, many of them well known at least to those who were literate. From their grammar schools they would have been familiar with the comic works of Plautus, the tragedies of Seneca, with Ovid and Greek drama, all read in the original. They could also draw on the historian Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, the source for so many history plays, which was first published in 1575 and added to in 1586, not to mention Chaucer, Boccaccio and Italian literature, and the popular stories, fairy tales and legends of heroes and romantic love told around many a winter hearth.

  Lyly offered his audiences dramatic presentations of the latter, the earliest of which was The Woman in the Moon, and the most popular Mother Bombie. Peele’s first known play, The Arraignment of Paris, based on the Greek myth, was first performed in 1581, three years after The Theatre had been built. It is highly likely that he also took a role in it since for the previous two years he had needed to support himself following a court case on 19 September 1579 when his father was bound over to discharge from his house before Michaelmas ‘his son, George Peele, and all other of his household which have been chargeable to him’; in other words Peele’s rowdy lifestyle, and the kind of friends he brought home with him, did not go down at all well with Christ’s Hospital’s governing body. He went on to join the company of the Lord Admiral’s Men, remaining with them as a player until 1589 when his circumstances improved after he married a lady who brought him a dowry of both land and property. Yet in spite of his dissolute reputation the only play of his that has come down to us more or less intact is his charming and
amusing Old Wives’ Tale, in which two young men lost in a forest are taken in by an old woman who regales them with a series of popular tales which are duly acted out for the audience, including allusions to Celtic mythology where disembodied heads in wells converse and offer advice to various characters. We know from Henslowe’s Diaries that it was very popular, along with his patriotic piece, The Battle of Alcazar, and a biblical play on the subject of David and Bathsheba, which have not survived.

  Greene too wrote lively and popular lightweight pieces based around popular tales, the best known being the comedies Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and George a Green, the Pindar of Wakefield. He took the Italian play Orlando Furioso, made it his own and sold the exclusive rights twice. He also supplemented his income, as did many others including Nashe and Thomas Dekker, writing pamphlets, the most popular of which, A Notable Discovery of Cosenage, dedicated to ‘Gentlemen Readers’, purports to warn readers of the dangers and immorality of the Elizabethan underworld, which he describes in vivid detail, thus ensuring its popularity under the pretence that he is merely exposing sin.

  As well as borrowing ideas from past writers, there were also rewrites of plays already in the early repertoires such as The Famous Victories of Henry V (in which Tarlton took a role), The True Tragedy of Richard III, King Leir and his Three Daughters and The Troublesome Reign of King John, the last attributed to John Bale who died in 1563, who wrote a number of plays to be performed by children. All three were, of course, seized on later by Shakespeare. Elizabethan audiences enjoyed a good murder story just as much as the Victorian playgoers who flocked to melodramas like Murder in the Red Barn and Sweeney Todd or today’s addicts of ‘true crime’ series.