by Judith Cook
However one of the immediate beneficiaries of the new reign was the company of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. James enjoyed plays and masques and almost straight away became their personal patron, the seal of royal approval giving them the title of the King’s Men, Henslowe’s company and those of the Earls of Oxford and Worcester later coming under the patronage of the Queen and Prince. We know that the King’s Men were asked to perform at Court as part of King James’s very first Christmas festivities and that the company performed Measure for Measure on Boxing Day and Love’s Labour’s Lost and ‘the play of Errors’ over the following days. If that seems quite a heavy schedule, director Gregory Doran, in his foreword to a new edition of the play Eastward Ho! points out that, according to Henslowe’s Diary during the 1594/5 season at the Rose Theatre, the Lord Admiral’s Men performed thirty-eight plays, twenty-one of which were new. There was no such thing as a long run of a popular play; audiences expected a different play to be performed every day.
Apart from George Chapman, Shakespeare was now by far the most senior and established survivor of the handful of playwrights who had come to prominence in the late 1580s and early 1590s, for the turn of the century had seen the death of two of the remaining University Wits, George Peele and Thomas Nashe. In neither case is the date of their demise certain. Peele probably died some time around 1598–9 although he was credited with Merry Conceited Jests of George Peele, Gentleman as late as 1605. Francis Meres wrote in his Wit’s Treasury that Peele died of ‘a loathsome disease’, which might well have been true since he drank heavily and slept around. Nashe almost certainly died in 1601 and various suggestions have been put forward as to the cause, since he was only thirty-four years old, including plague or a stroke. An anonymous tribute to him says:
Let all his faults sleep with his mournful chest,
And there for ever with his ashes rest.
His style was witty, though it had some gall,
Some things he might have mended, so may all.
Yet this I say, that for a mother wit,
Few men have ever seen the like of it.
But whatever their faults, Jacobean Londoners were keen playgoers, writers remained in great demand and there was plenty of work to choose from. Records show that a mixture of familiar and new works were produced in 1604 including Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Othello. Macbeth, widely considered to be a compliment to James’s ancestry and his expertise on the subject of witchcraft, is generally dated a little later. There was also Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois (a rather dull historical piece), and his All Fools; The Honest Whore by Dekker and the emergent John Webster, who possibly also wrote The Play of Sir Thomas Wyatt; Westward Ho!, another Dekker collaboration; Heywood’s If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody and Marston’s The Wise Woman of Hogsden, The Malcontent and the intriguing The Dutch Courtesan; and Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy. Tourneur is a somewhat shadowy figure whose father spent his life in the service of the Cecil family and there is a strong suggestion that he, like Marlowe, was recruited into the secret service. He is best known for the splendid Revenger’s Tragedy, although some academics now want to credit Middleton with its authorship.2
One reason for the doubts over its provenance is that Tourneur’s manuscripts, along with many others from the same period, were later destroyed by ‘Warburton’s cook’ some time in the eighteenth century. Sir John Warburton, who lived from 1682 to 1759, was an avid collector of almost anything, including old manuscripts, and over the years had managed to obtain the original ‘books’ of a number of Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, including some of those of Jonson and Middleton which are now recorded only as ‘lost plays’. He lived hard, drank heavily and unfortunately failed to look after his acquisitions properly. In 1729, to keep himself in drink, he sold one batch of manuscripts to the Earl of Oxford but later most of his collection of rare plays was, through the ignorance of his servant and cook, Betty Baker, ‘unluckily burned or put under pie bottoms . . .’ and a list of some fifty-five ‘lost plays’ exists in his own handwriting.
True to his promise Jonson had devoted himself to tragedy and written Sejanus, set in the period of Tiberius Caesar. Anne Barton in her biography of Jonson writes that it was a play he wrote very much to please himself but also to ‘demonstrate how a Roman tragedy ought to be composed’.3 He actually presented his script to the King’s Men in 1603 but it does not seem to have been greeted with much enthusiasm and it was some time before it was put on. Anne Barton suggests that Shakespeare himself might well have insisted on cuts and rewriting – after all he was not only the house playwright and a shareholder but likely to be acting in it; if so, even he was unable to make a success of it when it was finally staged at the Globe. It did not go down well with audiences. Jonson was furious and blamed the King’s Men, going so far, when he later had Sejanus published, as to describe the script as played as ‘a ruin’ that had ‘suffered no less violence from our people here, then the subject of it did from the rage of the people of Rome’, pointing out that his tragedy had been torn limb from limb as had his protagonist. Nor, to add insult to injury, was that the end of the matter, for he was then hauled before the Privy Council to answer a charge of Popery in the acting text, although he seems to have been able to satisfy the authorities on that score and the matter was dropped, which is possibly why he thought it safer to return to comedy.
Eastward Ho! was commissioned from Jonson’s old antagonist, John Marston, in 1605 for the company of the Children of her Majesty’s Revels, a company of boy actors of which he was a shareholder. Obviously the two had made up their differences for the subsequent script was the result of a collaboration between Marston, Jonson and the older and more experienced George Chapman.
Its underlying theme, one which was to prove very popular with Jacobean dramatists, is the gaining and acquisition of wealth and what people will do to obtain it. In this case it is ‘Sir Petronel Flash’ who is to marry Gertrude, the daughter of a wealthy goldsmith, solely for her money. Her father encourages the match, believing that he is buying not only into the nobility but into even more wealth. Both are to be disappointed. Towards the end of the play after a series of adventures, most of the main protagonists arrive at the Blue Anchor Tavern, presumably situated in a dockland area like Deptford, having decided to try their luck in the New World whither they are bound in a vessel captained by one Captain Seagull.
After a heavy night on the drink the adventurers duly set off on their epic voyage but are shipwrecked almost straightaway. The first survivors are convinced that they have been stranded on the French coast. Cold, wet and having lost all their money and possessions they finally attract the attention of two passers-by who are addressed by their reluctant spokesman in an early version of Franglais, only to discover that the shore on which they stand is not the coast of France but that of the Isle of Dogs: their ship had never even left the shelter of the Thames. It is during the exchange when their situation is made clear to them that disparaging remarks are made about ‘the King’s thirty pound knights’ and dim Scotsmen. No doubt the audience thought it hilarious. But not everyone was laughing. Sir James Murray, one of the King’s favourites who had gone to see the play, was enraged at what he considered a gross insult to the King and his nobility, not to mention all Scotsmen, and immediately complained to James who promptly ordered the arrest of all three playwrights.
How fortunate it is then that Jonson was later able to give his own version of subsequent events to William Drummond, who duly recorded the story. He had much to record, for Jonson had invited himself to stay with Drummond in his Scottish home, where he spent night after night talking about himself. According to Drummond, Jonson told him that he was not arrested but ‘voluntarily’ imprisoned himself with Chapman and Marston, who had been thrust into gaol for ‘writing something against the Scots in a play, Eastward Ho!’, and that he had chosen to share their fate when he learned ‘the report was that they should have their ears cut and nose
s’. Further, that after the three were finally released from prison (without injury), at a subsequent feast to celebrate his homecoming, Jonson’s ‘old mother drank to him and showed . . . a paper which she had (if the sentence had taken execution) to have mixed in the prison among his drink, which was full of lusty poison, and that she was no churl, she told him, for she minded first to have drunk of it herself’.4
This moving anecdote, that Jonson had ‘voluntarily’ gone to prison with his mates, and that his dear old mum was prepared to poison both herself and him rather than that he should suffer the disgrace of having his nose and ears slit, was believed right up to 1901 when letters from Chapman and Jonson, addressed to various members of the nobility during their time in prison, were discovered in a collection of seventeenth-century manuscripts owned by a Mr T.A. White of New York. From these it was discovered that the reality was, to say the least, somewhat different. For a start Marston never went to prison at all, nor is there any suggestion that Jonson ‘volunteered’ to go to gaol: he had no option. Once incarcerated, so far from playing the swaggering hero with the noble mother, he spent his entire time writing obsequious letters to various titled people pleading with them to get him out.
One of these was addressed to ‘The Most Noble Virtuous and Thrice-Honoured Earl of Salisbury’, Robert Cecil himself, in which Jonson informs him:
I am here, most honoured Lord, unexamined and unheard, committed to a vile prison, and with me a gentleman (whose name may perhaps have come to your Lordship), one, Mr. George Chapman, a learned and honest man. The cause (would I could name some worthier, though I wish we had known none worthy of imprisonment), is (the word irks me that our fortunes have necessitated us to so despised a course) a play, my Lord.
After much more in similar vein he concludes:
But lest I be too diligent for my excuse that I may incur the suspicion of being guilty, I become a most humble suitor to your Lordship that with the honourable Lord Chamberlain (to whom I have in like manner petitioned), you will be the grateful means of our coming answer; or if in your wisdom it shall be thought unnecessary, that your Lordship will be the most honoured cause of our liberty. Where freeing us from one prison you shall remove us to another; which is eternally to bind us and our muses, to the thankful honouring of you and yours to posterity; as your own virtues have by many descents of ancestors ennobled you to time. Your Honour’s most devoted in heart and words – Ben Jonson
Whether it was his sycophantic letters or Chapman’s more restrained correspondence that finally brought about their release is not known, but by the beginning of October 1605 they had both been freed. Nor is it recorded anywhere that Jonson threw the party at which his aged mother is alleged to have waved a paper of poison at the assembled throng. However, it is known that on 9 October he did attend one. It was a party given by Robert Catesby, one of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot, which was timed to take place just under four weeks later.5
The first decade of the seventeenth century also saw a new and major development on the theatre scene. As early as 1595 when the Burbages and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were still based at the original Theatre on the north side of the Thames, James Burbage had felt the need to expand. At that stage he had no plans to move his main enterprise south to the Bankside but he was already having trouble with the freeholder and must have considered the possibility that at some stage he might well have to do so. What he had in mind now, however, was something quite different, a theatre building which was not dependent on the weather and offered its audiences more comfort. Since these two factors alone meant that he would be able to charge more for admittance, such a venue would surely be very profitable. He decided therefore, when he was offered the opportunity, to buy a large and imposing building in the fashionable district of Blackfriars and convert it into a ‘private’, i.e. covered, theatre. It was, as Gurr says, to be ‘an emphatic shift upmarket’.
The building had been part of the old monastery of the Black Friars which Henry VIII, on the Dissolution of the Monasteries, had handed over to his then Master of Revels. It had a continuing theatrical connection, for in the 1570s it was used by the Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal for storage, possibly, rehearsals and also for a certain number of performances, but by the 1590s it was mostly let out for lodgings. It seemed to the Burbages to be the ideal venue, fashionably situated with a wealthy audience within convenient strolling distance, yet easily reached from the south side of the river.
But apparently the wealthy citizens of Blackfriars did not relish the idea of a new centre of culture in their midst and petitioned the Privy Council to forbid its use on the grounds that:
It will be a great annoyance and trouble, not only to all the noblemen and gentlemen here inhabiting but also a general inconvenience to all the inhabitants of the same precinct, both by reason of the great resort and gathering together of all manner of vagrant and lewd persons that, under colour of resorting to the players, will come thither and work all manner of mischief, and also to the great pestering and filling up of the same precinct . . . and besides, that the same playhouse is so near the Church that the noise of the drums and trumpets will greatly disturb and hinder both the ministers and parishioners in time of divine service and sermons.
This sounds like nothing so much as an objection to an application today to open a nightclub. James Burbage had hoped that, as the Lord Chamberlain himself lived nearby, he would have pressed their case, but he was to be disappointed for, as the Privy Councillor responsible for the playhouses, Henry Carey signed the order preventing the change of use for the building to go ahead. It was necessary therefore to shelve the whole plan and anyway by 1599 the Burbages and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were fully occupied rebuilding and reopening the remains of the old Theatre on the Bankside as the new Globe.
On the death of James, Richard inherited the building on which they had tried to recoup some of their expenditure by letting out sections of it. Yet it would seem that parts of the building were used after that by the Blackfriars Boys, one of the popular ‘boy companies’ who gained a reputation in the early 1600s for performing satirical comedies, and that the local people had no objection to that. Whether it was because there was no precedent or their neighbours had changed their minds, in 1608 Burbage was finally granted permission to go ahead. The opening of a second venue meant that he now had far more flexibility. Soon the Blackfriars was joined by other new theatres. North of the river, the Boar’s Head in Whitechapel was added to the Curtain (still in use after all these years) while Henslowe had built a second theatre, the Hope (which also doubled as a bear pit), on the site of the old Bear Garden close to the Globe and the Swan.
With their establishment in the Blackfriars Theatre Burbage’s company, as Gurr points out, ‘with their kingly title and unique repertoire of Shakespeare’s plays became the outstanding company in every way, whether they were performing at the Blackfriars or the Globe’. Their pre-eminence as the King’s Men no doubt encouraged the company to undertake the ‘extravagance’ of maintaining two playhouses. It gave the company real flexibility. They could play in the Globe in the summer, where it was possible to pack in an audience of three thousand and thus maximise their profits, and in the winter, or if the weather was bad, in the new theatre where both players and audience were protected from the elements, which meant there was far less chance in future of having to cancel performances. From now on the company, if it wished, could play six afternoons a week.
ELEVEN
Roaring Girls
. . . it pleased our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, without the assistance of man . . . from the time of his conception to be begotten of a woman, born of a woman, nourished by a woman . . . he healed women, pardoned women, comforted women . . .
Emilia Lanier, The Virtuous Reader (1611)
Women are noticeably absent from the theatrical world of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans in no small part because, unlike the situation in Catholic Spain or the Italian
states where it was considered a perfectly respectable profession, in England it was still against the law for a woman to appear on stage. Presumably their only professional contact with the players’ companies was as seamstresses making, repairing or cleaning costumes and laundering what was washable. That they were not allowed to perform is somewhat ironic as, throughout the period when the prohibition was in force, wealthy ladies could regularly disport themselves in court masques, often in a daring range of costumes, without in any way damaging their reputations. When, after the Restoration, women were finally allowed into the acting profession, the term ‘actress’ was virtually synonymous with that of ‘whore’.
So, as we know, women’s roles were played by the boys until their voices broke and it must have added to the comedy of situations such as that of Viola in Twelfth Night and Rosalind in As You Like It to see a boy playing a girl masquerading as a boy. But it is often asked how such young lads could possibly have coped with roles such as those of Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra or, indeed, Beatrice-Joanna in The Changeling. But having seen Mark Rylance’s all male productions at today’s Globe, one wonders if that might not also have been a possibility in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Not to mention the possibility that a character like the nurse in Romeo and Juliet might have been played by a middle-aged actor as a kind of pantomime dame as in the film Shakespeare in Love. What we do know is that on the other hand, apart from rare exceptions such as Nathan Field, the boy actors did not successfully make the transition to male roles.