by Judith Cook
The new work began appearing in the mid-1590s, dramatists coming as it were on stream from then until the early 1600s. By the mid-1590s to 1600 there were also two new theatres on the Bankside demanding new material. The first was the Swan, built in 1596 by Francis Langley, and it is the famous sketches of its interior by Johannes de Witt that have given us a good idea of what the other playhouses of the amphitheatre type looked like inside. But both the Rose and the Swan were to have a far more important rival. No doubt the Burbages had noted the growing popularity of the Bankside as a theatrical venue in general, and the success of the Rose in particular, and might well have considered building another theatre across the river anyway but as it happened they were overtaken by events.
The land on which The Theatre was originally built in 1586 was leased from a Giles Allen and by 1595 the lease had come up for renewal. But three years later the matter still had not been resolved for Allen and the Burbages (James and his two sons, Richard and Cuthbert) had been wrangling ever since over the terms, conditions and cost of the new lease. Allen, convinced that the Burbage family had made a fortune out of The Theatre, was demanding a vastly increased price for a new agreement and therefore refused to meet the Burbages even halfway. The Burbages, on the other hand, argued that this was not the case since in order to build The Theatre in the first place, James had borrowed the enormous sum of one thousand marks (about £660) from his father-in-law and the repayments, plus interest, had been a continual drain ever since. The position had now reached stalemate. Allen then laid it on the line: either James Burbage agreed to the new terms or he could go elsewhere, making the threat on the assumption that Burbage would realise there was nothing to be gained and would give in to his ultimatum.
He did not know his man. Taking advantage of a clause he had had inserted into the original lease which stated that if he spent more than £200 on the building he was free to dismantle it and remove it ‘overnight’, towards the end of 1599 James did just that. The Theatre was taken down and its materials shipped over to the Bankside and rebuilt, much to Henslowe’s chagrin, a stone’s throw from the Rose. The litigation with Allen was to rumble on for several years but the winner was undoubtedly the Burbage family who now owned the biggest and best theatre of its type of its day. It was called the Globe. Whether out of pique or fear that the Globe might seriously affect his takings, Henslowe promptly built another theatre, the Fortune, north of the river in Golden Lane, Cripplegate. By the end of the decade, therefore, there were three working theatres south of the Thames, the Rose, Swan and Globe and three to the north, the old Curtain, the Fortune and another amphitheatre, the Red Bull, a playhouse with a reputation for having rather more downmarket audiences and rougher tastes than the other five.
The newcomers were ten or more years younger than their predecessors and although a decade might make little difference to a farm labourer in Warwickshire or a shopkeeper in Devon, London was a different world and, after Elizabeth’s reign of over forty years, times were changing. Again with the exception of Ben Jonson, we know little in any detail of the lives of the dramatists and some remain very shadowy figures. It was the work that mattered, not the writer nor practitioner and the playwrights, however popular, had little or no status in the latter years of Elizabeth or the early reign of King James I. Only a few had the right even to describe themselves as ‘gentlemen’, and they leave behind no chroniclers.
We know from the Thomas More script that Thomas Dekker, pamphleteer, essayist and reporter, was already involved in the theatre scene in the early 1590s, as was Thomas Heywood, although neither had as yet made their individual mark. Heywood, born in Lincolnshire and the son of a clergyman, was first an actor, then a prolific writer of plays and pageants, claiming at one time that he had written some two hundred which seems unlikely. Few scripts survive, however, the two best known being Fair Maid of the West and A Woman Killed with Kindness.
John Webster, who was, according to T.S. Eliot, so ‘much possessed by death, And saw the skull beneath the skin’, was the son of a wealthy coachmaker. The family lived in Hosier Lane, near Smithfield, and possibly that ‘possession’ or obsession with death had something to do with the fact that he was born within earshot of the bell that rang before the executions of Newgate prisoners and in a parish in which the vicar, John Rogers, the very first of Queen Mary’s martyrs, had been burned at the stake in front of his wife and children on 4 February 1555. The first mention of his working in the theatre is when he was advanced money by Henslowe to write a play with Dekker, Thomas Middleton and the poet Michael Drayton called Caesar’s Fall, and another on what for him would seem a most unlikely subject: Christmas Comes But Once a Year. The two great plays for which he is known, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, both based on true historical incidents, show the blackest of creative imaginations.
If Francis Beaumont is to be believed, one of the playwright’s favourite drinking places was the Mermaid Tavern on the north bank of the Thames, close to Blackfriars. Beaumont was the younger half of Beaumont and Fletcher, the two writers almost always being referred to as if they were indivisible, a kind of Elizabethan/Jacobean Gilbert and Sullivan partnership. Both were the sons of gentlemen. Beaumont, the youngest son of Sir Francis Beaumont, Justice of the Common Pleas, went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, but left after a year and was entered as a member of the Inner Temple, having been expected to follow his father into the law. He was, however, able to indulge his liking for the theatre as, unlike the rest of his contemporaries, he had no money worries, having been left part of a substantial estate. John Fletcher had no such financial security. When he was born his father was the Vicar of Rye but soon rose rapidly up the ecclesiastical ladder, first becoming Chaplain to the Queen, then holding two bishoprics in London. But he died suddenly in 1596 leaving nine surviving children and a mountain of debt. The two men started writing together almost at once and there has been much speculation as to the nature of their undoubtedly close friendship and working partnership and exactly how intimate it was. John Aubrey, ever the gossip, wrote of Beaumont ‘that there was a wonderful consimility [sic] of fancy between him and Master John Fletcher which caused that dearness of friendship between them. . . . They lived together on the Bankside, not far from the Playhouse, both bachelors; lay together; had one Wench in the house between them which they did so admire; the same clothes and cloak between them.’ Of their working relationship he wrote, ‘I have heard Dr. John Earles, since Bishop of Sarum, who knew them say that Mr. Beaumont’s main business was to lop the overflowings of Mr. Fletcher’s luxuriant and flowing wit’.3
One of the very finest, and most underrated, of the second wave of dramatists is undoubtedly Thomas Middleton, born in London and the son of a comfortably-off builder, William Middleton, described as a ‘citizen and tiler and bricklayer . . .’. His father died when he was five, leaving him both money and an interest in family property but by the time he was of an age to find it of use, much of it had disappeared due to his mother’s unfortunate second marriage. Seven months after his father’s death she married Thomas Harvey, a grocer who had lost all his own money backing a disastrous expedition led by Richard Grenville and Walter Ralegh, and who had been looking for a chance to recoup his losses ever since. Anne Middleton must have seemed easy prey for a man on the lookout for a wealthy and attractive widow and once he had married her, Harvey did everything he could to get his hands on her and her children’s bequests, a theme of which Middleton was later to make a great deal of use. The situation continued amid growing acrimony until, in spite of the threat of litigation, Anne threw him out of her home. Middleton did go up to Queen’s College, Oxford, but there is no record of his taking a degree there and he soon became known for ‘daily accompanying the players’. It does appear that, unlike many of his theatrical friends, he actually made a happy marriage even if he and his family were perennially hard up. His wife Mary, or Magdalen, Marbeck was the daughter of a clerk of Chancery, Edward Marbeck, a grandda
ughter of the composer and musician John Marbeck and niece to the Provost of Oriel, Dr Roger Marbeck, and it is thought likely therefore that she had been well educated. It is possible that the couple first met through her brother Thomas who was an actor. Middleton most certainly provides some of the very finest roles for women, possibly because he was influenced from his early years by a strong-minded mother and elder sister and also by his wife. Good or bad, Middleton’s women are real women.
Later toilers on the theatre scene include John Ford, John Marston and Cyril Tourneur, the latter the most obscure of all of them, but they were soon to be overshadowed by Ben Jonson. Jonson, a posthumous child, was born in 1572 a month after the death of his father, a figure shrouded in mystery the antiquity and nobility of whose ancestry was to grow over the years with the telling. His mother promptly married a bricklayer who, unlike Middleton’s father, was not comfortably off, and a trade of which Jonson was reminded every time he fell out with Henslowe who was wont to refer to him disparagingly as ‘the bricklayer’s son’ or merely as ‘the bricklayer’. He grew up in Westminster and became a scholar at Westminster School, one of the best in London, and remained proud of the education he had received there, particularly his knowledge of classical languages which enabled him to disparage Shakespeare for having only ‘small Latin and less Greek’. But it seems he was not encouraged to go on to university and on leaving school was apprenticed to his stepfather with a view to becoming a master bricklayer.
However, he soon tired of laying bricks and ran off to the wars in the Low Countries where, he was to brag later, he did great things including challenging a crack swordsman to face-to-face combat in front of the opposing armies, killing him and taking his armour. Jonson was nothing if not an excellent teller of tales. Sometime in 1592 or 1593 he returned to England penniless and jobless and married an Anne Lewis, of whom we know even less than we do of Anne Hathaway. At best they rubbed along. Jonson described her as a ‘a shrew but honest’ and they had several children, two of whom died in infancy, events which he recorded in moving verse.
Shortly after his marriage, he decided to become an actor. Possibly it was because he was not accepted by any of the London companies that, in order to learn the trade, he spent his brief acting career out on the road with a company of strolling players, a fact of which Dekker was to remind him during what later became known as ‘the Poets’ War’. It seems, wrote Dekker ‘that thou has forgot how thou amblest (in leather pilch) by a play wagon in the highway, and took mad Ieronimo’s part to get service among the Mimics’, which presumably means that at some stage he played the leading role in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. He finally returned to London, however, and by 1597 he had attached himself to Henslowe’s company and the Rose Theatre. The attachment was to be sporadic. Jonson would spend the rest of his theatrical life going from one theatre company to the next having rows, which would then be followed either by reconciliations (often brief) or sulking in fits of pique. Jonson was a big man in every way, in size and personality, an evening in his company once described as being like listening to a big drum being beaten in a small room.
According to Henslowe, on 28 July 1597 he advanced Jonson £4 ‘to be repaid on demand’ and on 2 December of the same year, he notes in his Diary, ‘lent unto Bengamin Jonson upon a booke which he was to write for us before Crysmas next after the date hereof which he showed the plot unto the companie, I have lent him in readie money the sum of . . .’; the amount is left blank. On yet another occasion he paid Jonson one pound for a play which Jonson never delivered. Initially Jonson appears to have collaborated with other dramatists on plays which are now lost. One of these was Page of Plymouth which he wrote with Dekker and which was, like Arden of Faversham, based on a real murder for which a Ulalia Page and her lover, George Strangwidge, were hanged in Barnstable in 1589. Another lost play is The Isle of Dogs which he wrote with one of the surviving University Wits, Thomas Nashe. It is presumed to have been a satire of some kind, though there is no record of its subject matter, but whatever it was, it obviously caused deep offence, so much so that Jonson ended up in prison, Nashe having legged it back to Great Yarmouth before he could be arrested, along with one of Henslowe’s actors, Gabriel Spenser. Dating is uncertain but the incident is thought to have taken place sometime between the July and December of 1597 when Henslowe lent him more money.
The next year, however, almost proved fatal for Jonson. He had collaborated on two other lost plays, Robert II of Scotland and Richard Crookback (yet another attempt to cash in on the popularity of Shakespeare’s Richard III), when he found himself in real trouble. He had finally written an original play of his own, Every Man in His Humour and was touting it around hoping for a production. Sources differ as to whether it had a production before or after the event which almost took him to the scaffold. The story is mentioned, briefly, by an appalled Henslowe in a letter to Alleyn who was again out on tour, this time accompanied, unusually, by his wife, Joan. Henslowe had, he wrote, ‘hard and heavy news to tell. . . . Since you were with me, I have lost one of my company which hurteth me a great deal, that is Gabriel, for he is slain in Hog’s Fields at the hands of Beng. Jonson, Bricklayer, therefore I would fain have a little of your counsel if I could, this with hearty commendations to you and my daughter and likewise the rest of our friends. I end from London the 26 September 1598.’4
This was the very same Gabriel Spenser who had shared Jonson’s first sentence of imprisonment and who was an important member of the Lord Admiral’s Men, being one of the sharers. One can only surmise that bad feeling had existed between the two of them ever since. He was talented but, like Jonson, had a short fuse and two years earlier he had quarrelled with a goldsmith’s son in Shoreditch; when the young man had picked up a copper candlestick and threatened to throw it at him, Spenser had attacked him with his undrawn sword, scabbard and all, cracking him over the head and making a gash, according to the inquest report, six inches deep. The unfortunate young fellow had died three days later.
It is impossible to sort out who started the fight and whether it was a sudden coming to blows or, as Jonson told it, a more formal meeting in Hogsden’s Fields. Jonson’s version of events is that he had, fair and square, fought a duel with Spenser, not merely set on him looking for a fight, and ‘had killed his adversary’ even though he had been wounded in the arm and Spenser’s sword ‘was ten inches longer’ than his (a story very similar to that about his exploits in the wars in the Low Countries). It seems the authorities were not at first convinced and Jonson was imprisoned and threatened with the death penalty. He saved himself by using the cunning ploy resorted to by the literate of the day, pleading ‘benefit of clergy’. To do this one had to be able to read from the Bible what was known as ‘the neck verse’, the first verse of Psalm 51, which felons able to claim ‘benefit of clergy’ had to read out in Latin to prove their literacy and so avoid the gallows: ‘Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.’ Some people learned it off by heart just in case, especially if they were lowlife and unable to read.
The Middlesex Sessions Rolls notes that Benj. Jonson killed Gabriel Spenser on 22 September 1598 in the Fields by Shoreditch (not far from where Marlowe had taken part in the famous fight in Hog Lane), with a three shilling rapier. That he was then tried at the Old Bailey, convicted on his own confession of felonious homicide and although he had escaped the death penalty, was still taken to Tyburn and there branded on his left thumb with the ‘Tyburn T’.
Whether or not he placed his play before or after his ignominious trip to Tyburn, its production directly involves Shakespeare for it was first performed in 1598 by Burbage’s company and we know from the list of actors, prefixed to the play in the Folio of Jonson’s work in 1616, that Shakespeare’s name is written opposite the role of Mr Knowell. This does not necessarily prove this was the part h
e actually played, only that he took part in its first performance. Soon Jonson was to be in trouble again, but enough for the present. We will leave him for a while drinking with his friends in Mermaid Tavern.
EIGHT
A Visit to the Playhouse
A play’s a true transparent crystal mirror,
To show good minds their mirth, the bad their terror.
Thomas Heywood, Apology for Actors (1607)
Theatre was now fully professional, employing substantial numbers of actors, dramatists, apprentices, stage staff, scenery, costume and wig makers. But what of the vital element without which it would all have been pointless? Enter the audience. So who were they? Playhouse audiences crossed every social and economic boundary, from the patron and his noble friends (although he could also arrange for his players to perform at one of his houses), to the ‘groundling’, hard-pressed to scrape a living sufficient to give him one good meal a day. Certainly there would have been the well off and those who had been to college or, at the very least, were able to read and write but the majority would have been illiterate, which is why very often a play is preceded either by a dumbshow giving a brief résumé of the plot (as in the play within the play in Hamlet), or an actor coming on (as described by Dekker) to present a Prologue speech explaining the nature of the piece the audience is about to see. A good example of this is the Chorus in Shakespeare’s Henry V. What was being offered, in fact, was the equivalent of today’s programme notes.
While we know that audiences were often noisy and that many of them might choose bear-baiting or a Tyburn hanging as their next choice of entertainment, what almost all of them most certainly had was an ability to listen. Their attention span was far greater than that of an average audience, indeed the average person today for obvious reasons. There was no Elizabethan equivalent of zapping around the television stations or surfing the net. They were used to taking in information through their ears, not least because from childhood they were forced to listen to long sermons of a Sunday.