Roaring Boys

by Judith Cook

  However the theatre world was already changing. Not only were new writers taking the place of old, there were also new actors and one of the two who had dominated the theatre scene for the last decade and more, Edward Alleyn, was now bowing out. He had been appearing on stage less and less often; it is not obvious why. Possibly he found the roles he now played no longer as rewarding as those of the heady days of Tamburlaine and Faustus, but whatever the reasoning behind it, in 1597 he sold his stock in the Lord Admiral’s company (although cannily retaining his share of the theatre profits), and began buying land in Dulwich. Only Alleyn and Shakespeare in the theatrical profession of the day were that careful. However Alleyn did not entirely give up what might be termed the entertainment industry. Henslowe had spent years lobbying to become the Queen’s Bearmaster and when he finally achieved his ambition, Alleyn joined him as Joint Master of the Bears, a strange choice for a man who had been such a great actor. He also became a churchwarden at St Saviour’s and from then on devoted his time to setting up a Foundation in Dulwich, almshouses, a chapel which was consecrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury in person, and finally the College which still exists today. It is easy to imagine that what he would have cherished beyond anything was the accolade of knighthood, something quite impossible at such a time. It would be nearly 300 years before a young man from the village of Halsetown in Cornwall, born Henry Brodribb, was to become the first theatrical knight under the name Sir Henry Irving.

  But in spite of the difficult political climate, the theatre scene at the turn of the century was much enlivened by what became known as ‘the Poets’ War’. Its main protagonists were Ben Jonson (naturally), John Marston and Thomas Dekker. Jonson could never be described as a team player and throughout his life would be quick to give and take offence, which is what happened in 1599 when Marston presented his latest offering. In fact it was not an original piece but a rewrite of an old play called Histriomastix which he had resurrected. Actually he rather admired Jonson so he gave one of the leading characters, Chrisoganus, some of Jonson’s best-known characteristics and habits, attributes which he was later to swear had been intended only as a compliment. That said, however, he must have realised he was taking something of a chance, given Jonson’s choleric disposition. The result was as might have been expected: it is an understatement to say that Jonson took his portrayal as anything but a compliment.

  Every Man In His Humour was in repertoire at the time and he immediately inserted sentences and phrases into the dialogue he had written for the character of a buffoon to suggest it was Marston. To ram the point home he had another character refer to him as ‘a public, scurrilous and profane jester who could scent out a good meal three miles off’. Marston, now furious, struck back, this time with malice aforethought. His next play, Jack Drum’s Entertainment, presented a much more obvious portrayal of Jonson in the person of ‘Mr. Brabant Senior’. While the character still showed vestiges of Jonson’s more likeable traits, he was also portrayed as being extremely pompous and forever pontificating on the correct way to write comedies to those who neither needed nor appreciated his advice, a trait Jonson’s contemporaries found profoundly irritating.

  Jonson described it as a low, insulting parody and, quick as a flash, riposted with Cynthia’s Revels, ridiculing Marston in the role of Hedon and also, for no good reason at all, dragging in his old colleague the good-natured Thomas Dekker who had done nothing whatsoever to draw his fire. Of course the Poets’ War was tremendously good for business and soon the Rose and the Globe were packed out with audiences eager to discover who was going to be insulted next. In retaliation Marston and Dekker combined their efforts in an over-the-top portrayal of Jonson as the swaggering, bombastic Lampatha Doria in What You Will, driving Jonson to finish his next opus, The Poetaster, at top speed. In this the barely disguised Marston and Dekker appear as two terrible hacks, Crispinus and Demetrius, in a Roman gallery of poetic fame in which Ovid comes first while they are rated at the very bottom of the literary scale. Points in this round were awarded to Jonson.

  It is said that in the end even Shakespeare was dragged into it. It was while it was all going on that Will Kempe, who had been for so long Burbage’s star comic, decided to undertake his great ‘Jig’ to Norwich. He was immensely popular and interpreted many of Shakespeare’s early clowns but, like Tarlton before him, he found it restricting to keep to a script, and this may be what finally decided him to give up straight theatre. This can prove a dilemma even today for those who have attempted to make the transition from stand-up comic to comic actor. The theatre director Sir Peter Hall persuaded the comedian, the late Frankie Howerd, to take the role of Bottom in his film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream but he did not enjoy being so confined within a text and refused any offers to play in Shakespeare again. However it is clear that Kempe admired Shakespeare for, apropos the Poets’ War, he wrote:

  Few of the university men pen plays well, they smell too much of the writer, Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis . . . whereas here’s our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down, aye, and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace, giving our poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare has given him a purge that made him betray his credit.

  It is suggested that the ‘purge’ is the character of the ludicrous Ajax in Troilus and Cressida. But whether Shakespeare took a hand in it or not, it seems that eventually even Jonson ran out of steam and finally grew tired of his war. In his original Preface to The Poetaster, spoken by Envy, he takes a number of swipes at his critics and their spy-like suggestions and ‘petty whisperings’. But by the time he reaches his ‘Apologetical Dialogue’ at the end of the published script of the play and after describing how some with better natures had found themselves drawn into the quarrel, he declares that he is fed up with the whole business and from now on will turn his considerable talent to writing tragedy. But that was not quite the end of the matter, for Dekker, who had done nothing to offend Jonson, was still feeling sore. In his play Satiromastix, put on a few weeks after Poetaster, he actually uses one of Jonson’s own characters, Captain Tucca. To make absolutely sure the audience is in no doubt who it is supposed to be, Dekker says that it would have been impossible to invent such a swaggerer. Since the play was performed by Burbage’s company, presumably Shakespeare, as both a sharer and resident dramatist, was happy to go along with it. In any event for some time after this, Jonson did turn his attention to writing those tragedies now rarely, if ever, performed. But at some time he must have made it up with Marston for in 1605 both of them were to end up together in gaol.5

  All too soon Shakespeare and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were to find themselves in a situation compared to which the offending of Lord Cobham was nothing. The origins of the position they were to find themselves in go back to 1599 when the government decided to send a major force to Ireland. There had been two further attempts by Spain to land troops there, in 1596 and 1597, and by 1599 Elizabeth’s intelligencers were returning with news of increased shipping movements off Corunna. Finally, after much persuasion on his part, Elizabeth agreed to her favourite, the Earl of Essex, leading the army even though his last military foray had been a failure and he had subsequently offended the Queen by his behaviour. It was not a popular move, not least with Sir Robert Cecil. Essex rode off to war in magnificent style, cheered on by the population, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men took advantage of the general feeling of patriotism to mount a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry V. Simon Forman, who had watched and described Essex’s triumphant exit from London, went home and cast the Earl’s horoscope, coming up with the result that: ‘There seems to be at the end of his voyage negligence, treason, hunger, sickness and death. At his return treachery shall be wrought against him; the end will be evil to himself, for he shall be imprisoned or have great trouble.’ Which one has to admit would prove prophetic.

  Essex’s subsequent history is well known: his laid-back approach to the job of pacifying Ireland, his
extravagance, the rout of his army by Hugh O’Neill at the Battle of Yellow Ford which inflicted on the English army its greatest ever defeat in Ireland, followed by his secret negotiations with O’Neill to see if he could do a deal with the Irish leader once the Queen was dead. Forman’s forecast was only too accurate for his treasonable dealings were indeed betrayed to the Queen and were followed by his mad dash home, where he burst into the Queen’s bedchamber to fling himself at her feet and ask for pardon. Yet again he played on her weakness for him and yet again he seemed to have got away with it and was first placed under what amounted to house arrest, then allowed his freedom so long as he did not come to Court.

  It is hard not to believe that he then became deranged as he embarked on the plot that was to bring him to the scaffold, a proposed coup in which he would capture the Queen, force her to dismiss his enemies, and allow him to take over the running of the country. The coup was set to take place on 8 February 1601. So sure was he that he would succeed that he commissioned a special performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II to be performed at the Globe Theatre. The choice was very specific, dealing as it does with Richard’s forced abdication in favour of his enemy, Henry Bolingbroke. Totally unaware of the implications, Burbage duly agreed to the Earl’s request.

  Yet it seems there had always been a difficulty with regard to Richard II, for it had proved so unpopular with the Queen that Richard’s great deposition scene, when he is forced to hand the crown to his cousin and enemy, Henry Bolingbroke, was removed from all three versions of the play published during her lifetime. Giving evidence after the event, the actor Augustine Phillips said: ‘Sir Charles Percy, Sir Jocelyn Percy and the Lord Mounteagle, with some three more, spoke to some of the players to have the play of the deposing and killing of Richard II to be played, promising them forty shillings more than their ordinary to play it.’ Then, in an effort to extricate himself, he added: ‘Where this examinate and his fellows were determined to have played some other play, holding the play of King Richard to be old and so long out of use that they should have small or no company at it. But at their request this examinate and his fellows were content to play it the Saturday.’ And play it they did, to a packed house.

  News of the performance soon reached the Privy Council and Essex was summoned to appear before them at once. He never arrived. The following morning he marched on Whitehall at the head of three hundred swordsmen, despite the attempts of the Lord Chief Justice to prevent him. But this time there were no cheering crowds at the roadside and no one rose up to join him. Within hours he and his closest allies had fled to his house and barricaded themselves in, finally surrendering to Lord Nottingham and Sir Henry Sidney after they had threatened to blow up the house with everyone in it.

  The Lord Chamberlain’s Men now found themselves in a frightening situation. It was common knowledge that when the Queen had learned of the performance of Richard II she had raged, in fury, ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that?’ She then went on to state, wrongly, that ‘this tragedy was played some forty times in open streets and houses’. The actors must have waited in a state of dread as the Earl and his closest allies were brought to trial by their peers. Essex’s partiality to the play was brought up at his trial, that he was ‘often present at the playing thereof . . . and with great applause giving countenance and liking to the same’. Potentially awful consequences now stared the company in the face: writers and actors had suffered imprisonment and worse, and playhouses had been closed down, for far less.

  Essex and six of his closest associates were found guilty and duly executed. As might be expected of one who never lacked panache, he went to his death exquisitely dressed and with great dignity. He was just thirty-three years old. On the morning of his execution the Queen was in her chamber playing the virginals, when a messenger entered to tell her that the sentence on Essex had been carried out. Nobody spoke. Then the Queen turned back to her instrument and took up the melody at exactly the point where she had left off.

  That no further action was actually taken against Shakespeare, Burbage and the rest of company can only be because they had such a powerful patron as the Lord Chamberlain, who could speak on their behalf and assure both the Queen and the Privy Council that they had put on the performance of Richard II in all innocence, quite unaware of its implications and certainly without any knowledge of Essex’s coup, and be believed. But it had been an extremely close-run thing.

  Within two years all was to change with the death of the Queen on 24 March 1603. Tudor chronicler William Camden wrote: ‘She was a Queen who hath so long and with so great wisdom governed her kingdoms as (to use the word of her Successor who in sincerity confessed so much) the like have not been read or heard of, either in our own time or since the days of the Roman Emperor Augustus.’ The age of Gloriana had passed and the arrival of James VI of Scotland, now James I of England, heralded a new era, a new Court and new ways. It also ushered in a spate of new writing from the biting satirical ‘City’ comedies to the blood-soaked revenge dramas forever associated with the Jacobeans.

  TEN

  Jacobean Players and Patrons

  It is not everyone’s work. The State of Hell must care

  Whom it employs in point of reputation,

  Here about in London.

  Ben Jonson, The Devil’s an Ass, I, i

  The accession of James to the throne was greeted at first with general relief. At last the years of uncertainty over the succession were finally over and the fact that he was now King of both England and Scotland should end the centuries of antagonism and warfare between the two countries; it was also hoped that the new era would put an end to the intrigue and in-fighting at Court. But this optimism did not last long. Whatever people might have thought of Elizabeth, whether they loved or loathed her, she had offered them strong leadership. It was soon obvious that the same could not be said of King James as it became apparent that the country was ruled by a weak, superstitious and wildly extravagant monarch described as ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’.

  The son of a mother he had not seen since infancy and who was considered by some to be a notorious adulteress who had colluded in the murder of his father, Darnley, and by others as a Catholic martyr, he had hardly had a good start. He had grown up pulled this way and that by the various factions at the Scottish Court and was already showing a preference for young male favourites. By the time he arrived in London for the coronation, his Queen, Anne, had given him two sons and a daughter and during the next two years gave birth to two further daughters, neither of whom survived. But at least she had secured the succession, after which it is suggested that there was no longer any physical relationship between the two, so allowing James to devote himself to the pretty young men on whom he lavished not only his affections but vast sums of money.

  ‘The lowering of standards in the court was immediate’, writes Una Ellis-Fermor in The Jacobean Drama; ‘slackness, loss of dignity and increase of expense combined to produce at once dissatisfaction and a feeling of unsteadiness. Plots to depose him (King James) broke out again almost at once, the first as early as 1603 to be followed by the Gunpowder Plot in 1605.’ Whether or not it is true that Robert Cecil, who had been instrumental in securing James’s succession to the English throne, had an agent provocateur among the Gunpowder Plotters is still a matter of dispute but certainly from then on ‘Papists’ were hunted with fanatical zeal. Aware that he owed Cecil a great deal, James created him first Viscount Cranborne in 1604 then, in 1605, Earl of Salisbury. The Gunpowder Plot had confirmed his worst fears and given his suspicion of anything remotely Catholic, his belief in spells and witchcraft, and his ability to take offence at anything he considered to be remotely critical of himself or his entourage, it would seem that the professional life of a dramatist was likely to be every bit as hazardous as it had been during Elizabeth’s last years.

  His Court was rotten with graft and corruption. It seemed that everything was now for sale. It was no longer just the Kin
g’s favourites on whom honours were lavished, and soon James and his advisers had thought up a truly splendid way of filling the country’s coffers: selling titles. Much of today’s nobility who have (or until recently had) seats in the House of Lords owe their status and rank to the fact that an early seventeenth-century ancestor had plenty of ready cash. At the bottom end of the scale for a mere £30 you could buy yourself a knighthood, and so many young men were eager to take advantage of this that the country soon boasted no less than 838 new knights. If you were more ambitious and had more money to spare, then £1,905 would buy you the new rank of knight baronet. Within a comparatively short time the King had created three new dukes, a marquess, no less than thirty earls, nineteen viscounts and fifty-six barons, all strictly for cash in hand, the final total of which is estimated to have been in the region of £120,000. If you could get away with it, it is obvious that such a situation was ripe for exploitation on the stage.

  Disillusion became general. The anonymous commentator quoted at the beginning of the chapter continues: ‘for in London their brother shall die in the streets for cold, he shall lie sick at the door between stock and stock . . . and perish there for hunger. . . . When any (rich) man died, they would bequeath great sums of money to the poor, but now I hear no good report, and yet inquire of it, and hearken for it; but now charity is waxen cold, non helpeth the scholar, nor yet the poor.’1