Engraved end of the fork from the Rose Theatre excavations.
In the 1590s, if you wanted a good day out in London, you went to Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames, and eating was very much part of the pleasure. You ate when you went to a play. You ate as you took in some bear- or bull-baiting for a bit of fun. And if you were a young blade, out on the town and likely to end up in a tavern or a brothel, eating would certainly be among the many pleasures on offer there. Sex does not usually leave a lot behind that archaeologists can study, but food and drink do – and so, surprisingly, has the whole business of going to the theatre in Shakespeare’s London.
Julian Bowsher, of the Museum of London Archaeology, who has pioneered the excavation of Elizabethan playhouses, describes the experience of going to the play:
When you arrived at a Shakespearean playhouse, you entered through a main door and paid a one-penny entrance fee to the ‘gatherer’, who would have held a little money-box rather like a piggy bank with a bright green glaze on it and a slot through which to put a penny. All that we have left of these are bits of broken pottery, as they were smashed open when they were taken back stage. The coins were then put into a large money chest in a back room, which must be the origin of the term ‘box office’.
A sixteenth-century ceramic money-box of the type used to collect entrance money at the Rose and Globe theatres.
This view of London from the South Bank, published in John Speed’s The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1611–12), shows London Bridge and the attractions of Southwark, including the Globe and Hope Theatres in the foreground.
The public theatres of Shakespeare’s London were an entirely new form of (very commercial) entertainment, aimed at every section of society. An indication of just how lucrative they were is that money-boxes account for nearly one-fifth of the identifiable pottery that has been excavated in Elizabethan theatres; they were as commonplace then as cash-desks or credit card readers are today, something every play-goer would have had to walk past before they saw Hamlet or Henry V. Unusually for a playwright, Shakespeare himself was a shareholder in the Globe, entitled to a percentage of its profits – it’s the main reason he became so rich. The smashing open of money-boxes at the end of the day must have been a happy sound for him.
Once the theatre-goers had put their money into the slot and walked into the theatre, it seems that food – the buying and selling, the cracking open and consumption of it – formed a large part of the experience. From the samples that have been collected on site botanists have identified quite a range of foodstuffs. Nuts were popular, and lots of fruit, dried and fresh: grape, fig, elderberry, plum, pear and cherry. A large amount of shellfish was also eaten: mussels, periwinkles, whelks, even a cuttlefish has been dug up. Oyster shells in particular have been found on the site in large numbers, unsurprisingly as they were a popular cheap food at the time: ‘oyster-wenches’, girls selling oysters as street food, were familiar figures in Elizabethan cities, and, because oyster consumption required knives, the standard dagger that every man carried was as much a piece of cutlery as it was a weapon. In the theatre, all this cheap shellfish was winkled out and eaten, and the shells were then dropped on the floor by the groundlings – the people standing in the yard. In other words, the cheap ‘seats’ were associated with cheap food. The only drinks we know about at the theatre are beer and ale; when the Globe burned down in 1613, ‘bottle ale’ was used to extinguish a man’s burning breeches. Ale was a fizzy, bottled drink, and a common complaint in the theatre was the noise of a gaseous bottle being opened, the equivalent to the modern-day complaint about the rustling of crisp packets and sweet wrappers.
After all this drinking, people were going to need to relieve themselves – but, as Julian Bowsher describes, the theatres made no provision for this:
We have a nasty suspicion that dark corners were used by men. There is some evidence that ladies would take some sort of bottle with them. For more serious defecation, the theatregoers would have to go outside somewhere, possibly to the riverside.
Gustus (Taste), from The Five Senses by Crispijn de Passe the Elder, 1590–1637. Shellfish provided a cheap, pre-packed savoury for the theatre-goer. Huge numbers of oyster, cockle and mussel shells have been excavated at the Southwark theatres.
The open-air theatres of Shakespeare’s day depended on daylight. So all public plays were matinees, with performances beginning in the early afternoon and probably running no later than 5 p.m., certainly not in winter. Normally the audience would eat their main meal of the day first, as the Swiss visitor Thomas Platter did when he visited the Globe in 1599:
On September 21st after lunch, about two o’clock, I and my party crossed the water, and there in the house with the thatched roof witnessed an excellent performance of the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius Caesar…daily at two in the afternoon, London has two, sometimes three plays running in different places, competing with each other, and those which play best obtain most spectators.
Shakespeare was competing in a crowded commercial market.
There were no intervals at performances in the open-air theatres, and even in the indoor playhouses like the Blackfriars there were only short breaks for the candles to be trimmed. There was no room for a bar or foyer in the modern sense, so people would be moving around inside the theatre, selling the nuts, fruit, beer and ale which could be consumed on the spot. As Platter again records: ‘And during the performance food and drink are carried round the audience, so that for what one cares to pay one may also have refreshment.’
The theatre areas were generally surrounded by inns, which served as the pubs, restaurants and cafés of the time. We know that the Rose, Globe and Fortune Theatres each had a tap house attached, where refreshments were prepared. In Shakespeare’s company, one of its members, John Heminges, had the responsibility for running the tap house built next to the Globe, which presumably contributed directly to the company’s profits. These booming new theatres also supported the many lucrative catering establishments of Southwark. It is much the same along the south bank today, where popular restaurants crowd together from the restored Globe to the National Theatre and Royal Festival Hall.
The audience at the reconstructed Globe Theatre at a performance of Henry IV, Part 1, 10 July 2010. At the Globe, the modern London theatre-goer can experience something of the feel of a performance in Shakespeare’s day – although with the benefit of modern facilities.
While the groundlings bought apples or oysters, or opened a beer, the rich would have brought their own, more up-market food, with their own glasses and cutlery. It was this kind of person who dropped the elegant fork that was excavated in the Rose Theatre. It would undoubtedly have belonged to someone with cosmopolitan tastes, someone probably of some social status. We can no longer attach a name to the initials ‘A.N.’, to discover who it was that might have owned this particular fork and carelessly left it or dropped it near the expensive seats at the side of the stage. But Shakespeare, who was acting on the Rose stage around the time, might well have known who the fashionable, fork-wielding ‘A.N.’ was.
One might imagine a lord or gentleman, having lunched before the show, taking his dessert at the theatre in his private room. These privileged areas (what the dramatist Thomas Heywood called ‘a place…onely for the Nobilitie’) often seem to have been adjacent to the stage; they may have had separate entrances, so the elite didn’t have to mingle with the groundlings who paid a penny to stand in the yard, or they may have been reached through the ‘tiring room’, the back-stage area, to allow the quality to chat with the players.
Forks were something of a novelty in the 1590s, when this one was dropped, and a disagreeably foreign novelty for the no-nonsense English, who preferred to eat with their fingers. Julian Bowsher explains:
The travel writer Thomas Coryate went to Italy in 1608 and came home saying: ‘They’ve got these strange things over there that they eat with, called forks, and they’re made of iron.
’ He brought one back with him and was ribbed mercilessly for it, with everyone saying, ‘What are you doing with this funny foreign thing?’
In table manners, just as in sword-fighting, Italian elegance in late Elizabethan London was for most people suspect, flashy and foreign. So to find a fork like this one next to cheap mussel and winkle shells is a powerful demonstration of the social range of a Shakespearean audience. These plays were quite clearly aimed at the whole of society.
But consumption was not just for the spectators. While the audience was drinking fizzy ale, they were sometimes watching actors enjoying a much more lavish feast on stage. In many Shakespeare plays, eating food is a moment of social spectacle and high theatricality and, inevitably, of character-revealing truth. For Falstaff – Shakespeare’s epic glutton – every scene brings hope of a potential new feast:
FALSTAFF: My doe with the black scut!
Let the sky rain potatoes. Let it thunder to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’, hail kissing-comfits, and snow eryngoes. Let there come a tempest of provocation, I will shelter me here.
Joan Fitzpatrick, a historian of Elizabethan food, explains what Falstaff’s cosmic banquet would have meant to his audience:
Potatoes would have been considered very exotic, very new to an English audience. Most ordinary people probably would never have seen or come across a potato. So Falstaff is chic with his foreign food. He then goes on to ‘kissing comfits’, something that would have sweetened the breath. It was an indulgent food, associated with romance, an aphrodisiac. The last thing that he asks for is eryngoes, the candied root of the sea holly, which is also considered an aphrodisiac.
We can be confident that the archetypal Englishman would not have been eating kissing comfits and eringoes with a foreign fork, but someone out to impress at the Rose Theatre clearly was.
In turning up such a wide array of food remains – from lowly oyster shells to elegant sucket forks – archaeologists have demonstrated just how different the English public theatre was from the mostly court-based theatres on the continent. In London, courtiers and commoners alike came to one building. Whether they ate with their dirty fingers or with the refinement of cutlery, the whole audience was sharing the experience of the same play. Shakespeare’s astonishing variety of characters on stage simply mirrored the social mix of his audience.
CHAPTER FOUR
Life Without Elizabeth
PORTRAIT OF THE TUDOR DYNASTY
The really big political questions – in Britain at least – have often been the ones that nobody has dared to speak about. As late as 1936, the constitutional crisis threatened by King Edward VIII’s relationship with Mrs Simpson was widely discussed in the American and Continental press, but the topic was entirely absent from British newspapers.
In the 1590s, the people going to see Shakespeare’s plays would certainly have been talking among themselves about the big constitutional issue of their day, but Queen Elizabeth had by law forbidden any public discussion of it. It was the question that had been central to English politics for over a generation: who would succeed the ageing monarch? In 1936 the constitutional crisis was largely about sex and religion, much as it had been exactly 400 years earlier, in 1536, when Henry VIII had had Anne Boleyn executed and begun to dissolve England’s monasteries. In the 1590s, it was about something even more important – national survival.
On the London stage at the same time the popular genre of the history play was being redefined, in fact reinvented. The anonymous history dramas of the earlier sixteenth century have now largely been forgotten, obliterated by the vigour and sophistication of the plays written by Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe in the 1590s. At their core, Shakespeare’s history plays are a dissection of the disputed succession and civil wars of the fifteenth century: the Wars of the Roses. Indeed, it was Shakespeare who created the imaginary moment that came to define the Wars, when a red rose and a white rose were symbolically plucked as a statement of loyalty to either the House of Lancaster or York:
Henry VI, Part 1, Act 2, Scene 4. The garden scene, in which rival lords – the Duke of Somerset and Earl of Suffolk (Lancastrians) and the Earl of Warwick and Richard Plantagenet, then Duke of Gloucester, later York (Yorkists) – chose different-coloured roses to indicate their allegiances, seems to have been invented by Shakespeare.
WARWICK: And here I prophesy: this brawl today,
Grown to this faction in the Temple garden,
Shall send between the red rose and the white
A thousand souls to death and deadly night.
RICHARD: Good Master Vernon, I am bound to you
That you on my behalf would pluck a flower.
VERNON: In your behalf still will I wear the same.
It was a new dynasty, the Tudors, who eventually ended the Wars of the Roses by uniting the different feuding branches of the old royal house. Richard III finishes with a stirring speech by Richmond, the victorious Henry VII, who is about to marry Elizabeth of York and so eventually become Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather:
OVERLEAF: Allegory of the Tudor Succession, by Lucas de Heere, 1571–72. A poem on the frame reinforces Elizabeth’s claims as rightful heir of her predecessors: ‘Successyvely to hold the right, and vertves of the three’.
RICHMOND: We will unite the White rose and the Red.
Smile, heaven, upon this fair conjunction,
That long have frowned upon their enmity!
What traitor hears me, and says not amen?
England hath long been mad and scarred herself,
The brother blindly shed the brother’s blood,
The father rashly slaughtered his own son,
The son, compelled, been butcher to the sire:
All this divided York and Lancaster,
Divided in their dire division;
O, now let Richmond and Elizabeth,
The true succeeders of each royal house,
By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together!
And let their heirs, God, if Thy will be so,
Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,
With smiling plenty, and fair prosperous days!
In these lines, Henry VII, the first Tudor king, is not mincing his words. Hunchbacked Richard (who had brutally murdered his nephews in the Tower) has himself just been killed; Henry is about to install the new Tudor dynasty and put an end, he hopes, to the horrors of the civil wars which had ravaged England in the second half of the fifteenth century.
But from the beginning, one question always remained unanswered: for how long could such a settlement last? There was never not a succession crisis in sixteenth-century England, from Henry VII’s establishment of the insecure new royal house of Tudor, through Henry VIII’s desperate search for a son, and the problems of who would be the next heir during each of Edward’s, Mary’s and Elizabeth’s reigns. It was this contemporary drama of royal succession that gave Shakespeare’s history plays so much bite for his public. If the monarch fell, everybody at every level of society would feel the misery that followed. Fear of instability stalks these plays, and the kings who tensely inhabit them:
HENRY IV: Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-son in an hour so rude,
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down!
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
*
From the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, who would succeed her was the critical question. But while the succession issue could not be openly discussed in the 1590s, it could be pictured – and the pictures that reached the widest possible public were prints, cheap to produce and easily distributed. If you want to know what large parts of the population were thinking, the prints they were buying are valuable evidence, and there is one print that goes straight to the heart of the matter. It was produced in the early 1590s and it shows, on the right-hand side
at the front, Elizabeth I. Behind her, seated on the throne, is her father, Henry VIII, on his left Edward VI, his short-lived son, and on his right Mary Tudor, his elder daughter, with her husband, Philip of Spain. The striking thing about this, of course, is that in the 1590s all the Tudors depicted here except Elizabeth were dead. Henry VIII had died a long time before, and his two other children had also died without producing an heir.
Susan Doran, of Jesus College, Oxford, says the print:
was as near as anyone could get to asking Elizabeth to name her successor. The issue of the succession was a totally taboo subject; it had been so from 1571, when the Treasons Act was passed, which made it treason to discuss the succession, and particularly the title of any potential successors to Elizabeth. This silencing of the issue became an even more significant concern as her reign went on: another Act was passed in 1581, which reinforced the need for silence on the succession. This was the great elephant in the room in Shakespeare’s early life, the fear that dared not speak its name. So when you go to see a Shakespeare play about dynastic difficulties or problems with succession, the English history plays or Julius Caesar, this question was in the air, but not spoken. And of course this was not just in Shakespeare’s plays, but in other plays as well, in masques and entertainments, and the subtext of succession would have been easily read by contemporary audiences.
OVERLEAF: Henry VIII and his family, William Rogers, London, 1590s. The print derived from de Heere’s painting was dedicated to John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury. The Queen’s costume is updated, and a new poem expounds the dynastic message.
Shakespeare's Restless World Page 4