Roaring Boys (15 page)

. . . what things we have seen
Done at the Mermaid! Heard words that have been
So nimble and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest of his dull life.

Francis Beaumont to Ben Jonson

I
n the December of 1593 Thomas Kyd, broken in mind and body, finally limped out of Bridewell having unknowingly been forced to betray his colleague even after that colleague’s death. When finally told that Marlowe was dead he wrote that he did not like slandering the dead, ‘thus much have I dared in the greatest cause which is to clear myself of being thought an Atheist which some swear he was’. Never charged with any offence and having suffered mightily, he now found himself alone in a cold world, spurned and ignored by his fellow dramatists. Within months he was dead.

We do not know what impact the arrests of Marlowe and Kyd and the subsequent deaths of both had on the rest of the theatrical world, but there are hints. Ben Jonson, in a poem entitled ‘On Inviting a Friend to Supper’, warns against ever including ‘Poley’ among the guests, while Shakespeare’s reference to the ‘dead shepherd’ in
As You Like It
, not to mention the line he gives to Touchstone in the same play, ‘it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room’, suggests that it is likely to have been considerable.

But life goes on and was gradually returning to normal. In 1594 the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon (who was either the Queen’s nephew or her half-brother depending on which theory you believe), formally became patron to Burbage’s company. The first theatre to open full-time after the plague was finally over was one at Newington Butts on the outskirts of Southwark, about which we know almost nothing except that for a period it was shared by both the Lord Admiral’s and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. By the summer of 1594 the theatre companies were clamouring for the reopening of all the theatres, especially the Rose, the prolonged closure of which had severely affected not only the finances of Henslowe and the Companies of the Lord Admiral’s and Lord Strange’s Men, but also the takings of the hundreds of watermen who had become reliant on ferrying theatregoers over the Thames to the Bankside.

In June the Privy Council received a number of petitions on the subject. The first was on behalf of Lord Strange’s Men who complained that they were finding it increasingly intolerable and a great charge to be forever travelling around the country trying to scrape a living and that if they did not soon have a London base in which to play they would be unable to entertain the Queen when next she commanded them to do so. The Rose, they wrote, was essential not only to them ‘but by reason of the passage to and from the same by water, is a great relief to the poor watermen there. And our dismission [sic] thence in this long vacation, is to those poor men a great hindrance’.

Another petition (which is in poor condition) was delivered by the watermen themselves who ‘in the most humble manner complain and sue unto your good lordships, your poor supplicants and, daily, the orators [of] Phillipp Henslo [
sic
] . . . had much help and relief for us, our poor wives and children, by means of the resort of such people to the said Playhouse’. Therefore would they please, please allow the reopening of the Rose for the sake of all concerned. The various petitions finally bore fruit and the Privy Council conceding that the theatre at Newington Butts was not altogether a suitable venue, admitted that the public was finding life tedious without access to plays, and accepted that the poor watermen needed to be relieved. This therefore being the case, ‘the Rose may be at liberty, without any restraint, so long as it shall be free from infection or sickness’.
¹

So the theatres reopened. It was not, however, entirely the end of the Marlowe affair for Robert Cecil finally decided to move against the School of the Night, setting up an official inquiry at Cerne Abbas in Dorset (close to Ralegh’s country home, Sherborne Castle), under the auspices of the High Commission in Causes Ecclesiasticus: its brief to investigate various ‘blasphemous and atheistic matters’. The charges against those taking part in Ralegh’s discussions have a familiar ring to anyone acquainted with either the allegations in Kyd’s confession or the Baines’s Note, but all the investigators could come up with after deliberating for weeks was that one of those attending was said to have dried tobacco on leaves torn from his Bible, that Ralegh had doubts as to the immortality of the soul, plus a few other pieces of hearsay in a similar vein. Among those questioned were Ralegh himself, his half-brother Sir George Carew, Thomas Allen, Thomas Walsingham, Hariot and, somewhat surprisingly, Ferdinand, Lord Strange, Earl of Derby, as, unlike the Earl of Northumberland, ‘Wizard Earl’, he had not figured earlier.
²

But during the investigation Lord Strange died. There were contemporary rumours to the effect that he had been poisoned because he was a Catholic, though this seems unlikely given that his loyalty to Queen Elizabeth had never been in doubt.

Modern medicine suggests a more likely cause: dysentery followed by kidney failure. Sixteenth-century poisoners are given far more credit than is their due. Sheer lack of hygiene in food preparation, not to mention the absence of refrigeration, were sufficient to do the job for them. The inquiry dragged on for a while and a number of depositions were taken on oath, but no one was ever brought before either the Star Chamber or the Privy Council, nor was any action taken against Ralegh or any other member of his circle. In the end nothing came of the enquiry and the Commission simply gave up.

During the three years following Marlowe’s death Shakespeare was writing prolifically. He had now become one of the sharers in the company of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the others being Richard Burbage, Will Kempe (before he left for Norwich), Thomas Pope, John Hemings, William Sly, Henry Condell, George Bryan and Augustine Phillips. For those who still seek to prove that Sir Francis Bacon, Marlowe (who had somehow survived Deptford) and even Queen Elizabeth (in between running the country) wrote Shakespeare’s plays, one has to ask how on earth the actors and sharers in the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, let alone the Burbages, could have been so fooled. He was indeed the house dramatist, but
any
playwright of the day would have been expected to be on hand to make any alterations and rewrites that might be needed, just as they are today. That Shakespeare’s was, and is, a towering talent is without dispute but there is little doubt that so prestigious a patron helped to establish his place at the top of the hierarchy of dramatists who, over the next ten years, started writing for the theatre.

The new talent differed in a number of ways from the old University Wits or their colleagues, even though their backgrounds were not dissimilar and it appears that they felt no necessity to give themselves a title which identified them. By the mid-1590s playgoing in purpose-built buildings was no longer a novelty but an accepted part of London entertainment; audiences were becoming increasingly sophisticated and expected a whole range of different kinds of drama sumptuously costumed and preferably with exciting stage effects. Nor, with the possible exception of Ben Jonson, did the new breed of dramatists consider themselves to be rarefied beings but, rather, hardworking professionals, hired to provide scripts to order. In this climate Henslowe’s system proved particularly effective, offering, as has already been pointed out, an advance upfront for one or more writers who would then, if the play was delivered on time and accepted by the actors, be ensured a production at the end of it. Whatever we may feel now about the quality of the writing, whether that of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton or Webster with his extraordinary imagery, there was no long gestation or writing period, no time for agonising over every act or scene, let alone every line. The texts were certainly not written with the idea that centuries later they would be pored over by scholars looking for nuances in every phrase. Anyone who has ever worked on a new play today is well aware of how a script has to be altered, often due to practicalities such as costume changes, how many actors are available, and other such mundane essentials. Whole theses have been written around why a character in classical drama leaves the scene when he does when the real reason might well be that the actor in question had to play at least two parts and exited at that point so that he could change his costume, add a beard, and appear a scene later as somebody else.

The demand for new material was now insatiable. As Sir Trevor Nunn once put it, it must have been rather like Hollywood in the 1930s, sucking in talent from all over the place, throwing writers together to work on a script whether they were compatible or not. One reason was because it was almost unknown for a play to be given two consecutive performances; the programme would change daily and the actors and sharers would see to it that one play was up and running while another was in rehearsal and yet another half finished, the hard-pressed hack scribbling away late into the night. Meanwhile, laboriously and possibly with the help of a hired scrivener, the bookman had to ensure that each part was written out on a separate sheet or roll, from which the word ‘role’ comes, to hand to actors each time a new play went into production. There would be only a handful of copies of the entire script (one to be lodged at Stationer’s Hall), possibly only two, and the actors had to keep their wits about them as only their cue lines appeared on their rolls. This must often have led to some confusion and explains Quince’s testy note to the actor playing Thisbe in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
: ‘you must not speak that yet; that is your answer to Pyramus: you speak all your part at once, cues and all’. One reason for registering the play at Stationer’s Hall was to try and ensure the script was not pirated by a rival company and the bookman was held responsible for keeping the scripts safe.

Possibly because of their workload, the lifestyles of many of the new writers were not as consciously flamboyant or outrageous as those of Greene or Marlowe, although that is not to say that they did not get drunk, fight, or end up before the local Justice of the Peace to be fined or put in prison for disorderly conduct, debt, manslaughter or, if more rarely, because the content of a play had caused offence to someone important or in authority or both. Ben Jonson was to end up imprisoned for both this last and manslaughter.

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.