by Judith Cook
Do but consider what an excellent thing is sleep. It is an estimable jewel, a tyrant would give his crown for an hour’s slumber. It cannot be bought. Of so beautiful a shape is it that even when a man lies with an Empress, he cannot be quiet until he leaves her embracements to rest with sleep. So indebted are we to this kinsman of death, that we owe the better tribute of half our lives to him. He is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together. [However insomniacs must avoid doctors and their noxious potions for even] Derrick the Hangman of Tyburn cannot turn a man off his perch as fast as one of these breeders of purgation.
After chatting on for some time, he finally gets out of bed and, as he reaches for his clothes and gets dressed, gives his advice on what to wear in order to make an impression.
For it is well to try and dress in the fashion. For instance, one’s boots should always be as wide as a wallet and so fringed as to hang down to the ankles. One’s doublet of the showiest stuff you can afford. Never cut your hair or suffer a comb to fasten his teeth there. Let it grow thick and bushy, like a forest or some wilderness. Let not those four-footed creatures that breed in it and are tenants to that crown land, be put to death . . . Long hair will make you dreadful to your enemies, manly to your friends; it blunts the edge of the sword and deadens the thump of the bullet; in winter a warm nightcap, in summer a fan of feathers.
Belatedly they leave Dekker’s lodgings bound for the first tourist attraction and it is clear the young man is amazed at what he sees, the side aisles of the great church being full of stalls, while the middle one is used by those parading up and down to see and be seen, prompting Dekker to remark: ‘Is it not more like a market place than a great house of God?’ He leads his protégé to the stalls of those selling fine cloth, loudly insisting that they are looking for velvet or taffeta for a new doublet. If he is worried about wasting their time, then a good ploy is to ask if there is not something even finer to be had than that they have been shown and, after the stallholder has obliged, ordering several yards of the chosen stuff to be paid for and collected later. Failure to collect it is no problem because the stallholder will soon sell it on. He next turns his attention to those walking in the centre aisle, ‘the Mediterranean’, calling out to all and sundry in a familiar fashion. On someone of note, he advises, ‘you should address him familiarly even though he has never seen you before in his life, shouting out loud that he will know where to find you at two o’clock’.
No visit to St Paul’s is complete without a trip up the Great Tower which costs tuppence:
As you go up you must count all the stairs to the top and, when you reach it, carve your name on the leads, for how else will it be known that you have been here? For there are more names carved there than in Stowe’s Chronicle. [He should take care, though, because the] rails are as rotten as your greatgrandfather [and only recently one, Kit Woodroffe, tried to vault over them] and so fell to his death.
By now, of course, it is time for lunch and the two make for an ordinary without further delay. But even entering such a place should be undertaken in a manner designed to draw attention:
Always give the notion you have arrived by horse. Then push through the press, maintaining a swift but ambling pace, your doublet neat, your rapier and poniard in place and, if you have a friend to whom you might fling your cloak for him to carry, all the better. Let him, if possible, be shabbier than yourself and so be a foil to publish you and your clothes the better. Discourse as loud as you can – no matter to what purpose – if you but make a noise and laugh in fashion, and promise for a while, and avoid quarrelling and maiming any, you shall be much observed.
Remind your friend loudly, for instance, of how often you have been under fire from the enemy, of the
hazardous voyages you took with the great Portuguese Navigator, besides your eight or nine small engagements in Ireland and the Low Countries. Talk often of ‘his Grace’ and how well he regards you and how frequently you dine with the Count of this and that . . . and by all means offer assistance to all and sundry, ask them if they require your good offices at Court? [Or] are there those bowed down and troubled with holding two offices? A vicar with two church livings? You would be only too happy to purchase one.
At this point Dekker suggests his protégé pull a handkerchief out of his pocket, bringing with it a paper which falls to the floor. When it is picked up and handed back to him the response should be:
‘Please, I beg you, do not read it!’ Try, without success to snatch it back. If all press you as to if it is indeed yours, say, ‘faith it is the work of a most learned gentleman and great poet’. This seeming to lay it on another man will be counted either modesty in you, or a sign that you are not ambitious and dare not claim it for fear of its brilliance. If they still wish to hear something, take care you learn by heart some verses of another man’s great work and so repeat them. Though this be against all honesty and conscience, it may very well get you the price of a good dinner.
After lunch then where else but to the playhouse? Not to mention advice on how to ruin the performance of an actor, or the reputation of a dramatist, from one who must have suffered the latter at first hand. It must all be planned beforehand. First, the would-be wrecker must not stand with
the common groundlings and gallery commoners, who buy their sport by the penny. . . . Whether you visit a private or public theatre, arrive late. Do not enter until the trumpet has sounded twice. Announce to all that you will sit on the stage, and then haggle loftily over the cost of your stool. Let no man offer to hinder you from obtaining the title of insolent, overweening, coxcomb. Then push with noise, through the crowds to the stage.
So having reached the stage, you clamber on to it, stand in the middle and:
ask loudly whose play it is. If you know not the author rail against him and so behave yourself as to enforce the author to know you. By sitting on the stage, if a knight you may haply get a mistress; if a mere Fleet Street gentleman, a wife; but assure yourself by your continual residence, the first and principal man in election to begin ‘we three’. By spreading your body on the stage and being a Justice in the examining of plays, you shall put yourself in such authority that the Poet [dramatist] shall not dare present his piece without your approval.
Before the play actually begins it is a good idea to set up a card game with the others who are seated on the stage:
As you play, shout insults at the gaping ragamuffins and then throw the cards down in the middle of the stage, just as the last sound of trumpet rings out, as though you had lost. [Then, as the] quaking Prologue rubs his cheeks for colour and gives the trumpets their cue for him to enter, point out to your acquaintances a lady in a black-and-yellow striped hat, or some such, shouting to us all that you had ordered the very same design for your mistress and that you had it from your tailor but two weeks since and had been assured there was no other like it . . . then, as the Prologue begins his piece again, pick up your stool and creep across the stage to the other side.
After some more chat and fidgeting, as soon as the actors appear:
take from your pocket tobacco, and your pipe and all the stuff belonging to it and make much of filling and lighting it. [Then, as the leading actor strides on to begin his great opening speech] comment loudly on his little legs, or his new hat, or his red beard. Take no notice of those who cry out ‘Away with the fool!’ It shall crown you with the richest commendation to laugh aloud in the midst of the most serious and saddest scenes of the terriblest tragedy and to let that clapper, your tongue, be tossed so high the whole house may ring with it. Lastly you shall disgrace the author of this piece worst, whether it is a comedy, pastoral or tragedy, if you rise with a screwed and discontented face and be gone. No matter whether the play be good or not, the better it is the more you should dislike it. Do not sneak away like a coward, but salute all your gentle acquaintance that are spread out either on the rushes or on the stools behind you, and draw what troop you can from the stage after you. T
he Poet may well cry out ‘and a pox go with you!’ but care not you for that; there’s no music without frets.
So, with the feeling of a job well done, it is time for the evening meal. There is, however, one problem. By now there is no money to pay for it:
So you will need to find, to pay your reckoning for you, some young man lately come into his inheritance who is in London for the first time; a country gentleman who has brought his wife up to learn the fashions, see the tombs in Westminster, the lions in the Tower or to take physic; or else some farmer who has told his wife back home he has a suit at law and is come to town to pursue his lechery – for all these will have money in their purses and good conscience to spend it.
On entering the tavern, the young hopeful should call all the drawers (the bar staff) by their given names, Jack, Will or Tom, and ask them if they still attend the fencing or dancing school to which he recommended them. ‘Then clip mine hostess firmly around the waist and kiss her heartily, so calling to the Boy “to fetch me my money from the bar”, as if you had left some there, rather than that you owed it. Pretend the reckoning they give you is but an account of your funds. Aim to have the gulls tell each other “here is some grave gallant!”’
Having made his entrance, he should then make a show of visiting the kitchen to see what is being prepared, returning after a little while to recommend this or that dish before joining one of the innocent countrymen at his table and dining in:
as great a state as a churchwarden among his parishioners at Pentecost or Christmas. For your drink, let not your physician confine you to one particular liquor; for as it is required that a gentleman should not always be plodding away at one art, but rather be a general scholar (that is, to have a lick of all sorts of learning, then away), so it is not fitting a man should trouble his head with sucking at one grape, but that he may be able to drink any strange drink. . . . [At this stage, Dekker recommends] you should enquire which great gallants are supping in a private room then, whether or not you know them, send them up a bottle of wine saying that it is at your expense. Round off your meal by announcing to the whole room what a gallant fellow you are, how much you spend yearly in the taverns, what a gamester, what custom you bring to the house, in what witty discourse you maintain a table, what gentlewomen or citizens wives you can, at the crook of your finger, have at any time to sup with you – and such like.
This sort of behaviour should immensely impress the diners:
who will greatly admire you and think themselves in paradise but to be in your acquaintance. . . . After further such discourse and, possibly, a game or two of dice (which you must take care to win), and the time comes to leave, give your hostess a hearty kiss, down a last flagon, dowse your face with sweet water and when the terrible reckoning [bill] makes you hold up your hand and you must answer it at the bar, you must not abate one penny in any particular, no though they reckon beef to you when you have neither eaten, nor could ever abide it, rare or toasted. [Never argue over the bill for it makes you look] as if you were acquainted with the rates of the market.
After which, with one last flourish, you sweep off into the night leaving those you have entertained all evening to pay the bill.
Eventually it really is time to go home to bed. The street can be a dangerous place late at night, the haunt of thieves and cut-throats, so if you should run into some doubtful character then shout loudly, as if to your man, to hurry along or you’ll ‘pull his cap about his ears’ in the morning. But there is, of course, the possibility that you might be taken for some kind of rogue or desperado yourself and should you therefore have the misfortune to run into the Watch, if you have with a friend with you:
address him loudly as ‘Sir Giles’ or ‘Sir Abram’. . . . It matters not that there is no dubbed knight in your company, the Watch will wink at you for the love they bear to arms and knighthood. If you have no sweet mistress to whom you may retire, then continue speaking loudly how you and your shoal of gallants have swum through an ocean of wine, that you have danced out the heels of your shoes and how happy you are to have paid all the reckoning . . . that this may be published; the only danger in this is that if you owe money, your creditors might get it by the ears which, if they do, you will look to have a peal of ordnance thundering at your chamber door in the morning demanding what you owe. [Should such a misfortune occur, then] you should appear to them in your nightshirt, clutching a glass in your hand and saying that only today have you been purged of your terrible sickness . . . this should drive them quickly back into their holes.
With that Dekker bids his protégé and the reader ‘good night’, promising a whole lot more advice on the morrow ‘but enough is enough, at least for one night. Yet if, as I perceive you relish this first lesson well, the rest I will prepare for you.’
Obviously Dekker was writing tongue-in-cheek – ‘I sing like a cuckoo in June to be laughed at’ – but there is a good deal of truth in it. Regarding the fashion for sitting at the side of the stage very obviously smoking a pipe, we can return to Guilpin at the beginning of this chapter:
See you him yonder who sits o’er the stage,
With the Tobacco pipe now at his mouth?
It is Cornelius that brave gallant youth,
Who is new printed to this fangled age,
He wears a Jerkin cudgelled with gold lace,
A profound slop, a hat scarce pipkin high.
As to bad behaviour in general, according to M.C. Bradbrook, in 1590 Richard Burbage, driven beyond endurance, grabbed a man who made trouble in The Theatre, disrupting the performance, ‘and playing scornfully with this deponent’s nose uttered threats of bodily violence’.3 Nor is it unlikely that playwrights such as Greene and Dekker, who were always short of ready cash, were quite prepared either to pretend to be other than they were or to play on their known talent in exchange for a free meal.
FIVE
Performances, Plays and Politics
Defer not with me to this last point of extremity, for little knowest thou how, in the end, thou shalt be visited.
Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of
Repentance (1592)
The shadows were now deepening in Gloriana’s England although the climate of the times had been changing since the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, followed by the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. For the threat from Spain did not end with the vanquishing of the Armada. From then until his death two years later, Sir Francis Walsingham’s intelligencers were continually telling him of negotiations going on between factions in Ireland and the Spanish government to land a Spanish force there, a matter of great concern and one proved all too real during the later 1590s when two attempts were made to do just that. No longer were Catholics allowed to get on with their lives so long as they put in an appearance at church or paid their fines for not doing so and anti-Catholicism in general was on the rise. Nor did the Queen’s refusal to name King James VI of Scotland as her heir help, and throughout the decade of the 1590s and up until her death in 1603 there were undercover communications with Edinburgh both on a semiofficial basis and by those who sought to ingratiate themselves with the man who would one day be their King. To add to the general feeling of unease the plague, Nashe’s ‘King Pest’, returned in 1592; the epidemic was to last for well over a year but when the theatres were open audiences flocked in to escape the reality of what was going on around them.
During the early 1590s they had a rich field of drama from which to choose. The dating of plays has academics at each others’ throats not least because the date on which a play was registered at Stationer’s Hall is no real guide, as often the registration did not take place until several years after its first performance even though it was one of the few ways a writer could attempt to protect his work. While there has never been copyright on ideas, unscrupulous dramatists were more than capable of sitting in on a public performance and making notes on the text. But in view of what was to come we know for certain that all Ma
rlowe’s plays had been written by May 1593 even if, apart from the two parts of Tamburlaine, there is disagreement as to the order in which this happened. Several sources however do suggest that his next play was The Jew of Malta, followed by Edward II, then A Massacre at Paris (of which only fragments remain) and finally Dr. Faustus.
The Jew of Malta proved extremely popular even if it was not as exciting as Tamburlaine with its great processions, magnificent court scenes and battles, not to mention the pampered jades of Asia. However the average Elizabethan was deeply suspicious of Jews, associating them with money-lending and worse, and considering them to be devious, cunning and untrustworthy. Therefore Barabas, the Jew of Malta, was bound to be a scoundrel. But Marlowe’s play is not as simple as that. First he brings on to the stage an actor playing the part of a real historical person, Niccolo Machiavelli, considered wrongly by those who had heard of him as the epitome of evil rather than as the devious political pragmatist he actually was. But few in the audiences or beyond were likely to have read The Prince and both Barabas, and Shakespeare’s Richard III, have been described ever since as ‘machiavellian’ villains.
We first meet Barabas checking out his great wealth in his counting house congratulating himself on the amount he has amassed. Almost immediately, however, he is attacked by Christian soldiers who seize his wealth and make off with it simply because he is a Jew. Not surprisingly he is determined to be revenged and we follow his progress to this end, and his playing off of Christians against Muslims, until he meets his death by being boiled in a cauldron. This was obviously the high spot of the afternoon’s entertainment and ‘a Cauldron for the Jew’ appears prominently on one of Henslowe’s lists of current props. There is a good deal of black humour in the play, not least the competitive exchange between Barabas and the Turk, Ithamore, as to who has carried out the most evil deeds and in which Barabas brags that he has sometimes ‘gone about and poisoned wells’, the device suggested to students at Douai. The Jew might be the obvious villain and the Christians supposedly the ‘heroes’, cheering to the echo as he boils away in his cauldron – but Marlowe, in a final twist, reveals that the only honourable men in the play are the Muslims, betrayed then murdered by those very Christians to whom they have offered the hand of friendship.