Roaring Boys (27 page)

Rest in soft peace and asked, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson, his best piece of poetry.

There had been no more children and the Jonsons had drifted apart. As he told Drummond later, he had not ‘bedded’ Anne for five years.

With regard to his work his plays, particularly
Volpone, The Alchemist
and
Bartholomew Fair
, remained popular and he had also had considerable success with the more recent
The Devil’s an Ass
, performed by the King’s Men. The story is that of an apprentice demon who feels he is being given tasks far beneath his ability and so persuades Satan, much against the latter’s better judgement, to send him up to earth to corrupt the City of London. Arriving in the heart of the City, he assiduously sets about trying to corrupt the merchants, bankers and city fathers only to find he is completely outclassed. Finally, unable to cope, he has to beg Satan to rescue him, promising that he will make ropes out of sand and catch the wind in a net, rather than ‘stay me here a thought more’. Whereupon an infuriated Satan arrives in a clap of thunder to take his failed demon back to Hell. Since financial malpractice, corruption and conmen are still with us, it is not surprising that a recent production of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company was a great success.

But Jonson was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the theatre due to the the popular passion for elaborate masques. While he was prepared to write these, since he was well paid for doing so, he felt as many writers do today that his work was being swamped by what we would call designers’ theatre. Paired most often with the most famous stage designer of the day, Inigo Jones, he was finding that his words were now secondary to exotic sets and magnificent costumes, leading him to confide to Prince Charles that ‘when he wanted a word to express the greatest villain in the world, he called him “an Inigo”’.

When he arrived in Scotland his first port of call was Edinburgh, where he received a civic reception in recognition of the publication of his works two years earlier, even though there were those back home who had accused him of arrogance for so doing. It was also to acknowledge that he was about to receive an honorary degree from the University of Oxford. While in the city he was caught up with none other than John Taylor, ‘the water poet’, he who had been howled off the stage of the Hope Theatre for failing to entertain a rowdy audience with a supposed insult competition and his poetry. He, too, had walked the whole way but through necessity rather than choice and by the time he reached Edinburgh he was in a sorry state. His must have been the first sponsored walk for before setting out he had persuaded a number of people to pay sums of money to him on his return if he successfully completed the round trip. He must have been in a bad way, for Jonson felt sufficiently sorry for him to help him out financially.

He then went on to Hawthornden. Presumably Drummond had actually invited him to stay but he could hardly have known what he would be in for. Soon Jonson was nightly regaling his host and his friends with London Court scandal and theatrical gossip. As he began drinking his way steadily through Drummond’s cellar he also moved on to his favourite subject: himself. How when young he was ‘much given to venery’, that he thought ‘going to bed with a maid nothing to the enjoyment of the wantonness of a wife’ (someone else’s wife, that is), and that while married he had lain with another woman diverse times who allowed him all privileges ‘except that last act that she would not agree to’. Quite possibly many women did not allow full sexual intercourse with their lovers; Elizabethan or Jacobean women of childbearing age and normal fertility were playing Russian roulette every time they made love.

Whether Drummond, who seems to have been a quiet and studious kind of person, appreciated such confidences he does not say. He made a note of Jonson’s opinions of other writers, such as ‘that Chapman’s translations of Homer and Virgil . . . were but prose; that Donne, for not keeping of the accent [beat] deserved hanging; that Sharpham, Day and Dekker were all rogues . . .’. That ‘Drayton feared him’, ‘Francis Beaumont loved too much himself and his own verses’ (a case of the pot calling the kettle black), ‘that he once beat Marston and took his pistol from him’ and that Marston ‘wrote his father-in-law’s preachings and his father-in-law his [Marston’s] comedies’. That the boy actor, Nathan Field, was ‘his scholar’, and that ‘Markham was a plagiarist and a base fellow like Thomas Middleton’. Also that Shakespeare, in a play, had ‘brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where there is no sea nearer than some hundred miles’.

As for the Court, Queen Elizabeth ‘never saw herself in the mirror after she became old’, Leicester’s wife, affirmed Jonson, ‘poisoned him with a potion given to her to cure faintness’, while Sir Philip Sidney had been ‘no pleasant man in countenance, his face being spoiled with pimples’. He claimed close friendship with Sir Walter Ralegh, who had been foolish enough to have sufficient faith in him to send him to France with his own son to keep an eye on the lad. Jonson blamed his own subsequent activities, concerning ‘damsels’ and getting drunk, on the proclivities of young Ralegh who, from time to time, had to haul his mentor back to their lodgings ‘on a cart’. He also confided in Drummond that during his time in prison after killing Gabriel Spenser, he had for a short time become a Catholic convert, a recusant, ‘and that at his first communion, in true token of reconciliation, he had drunk out all the full cup of wine’. After the way he was getting through his host’s wine, Drummond was hardly surprised to learn that on occasion, after a heavy evening’s drinking, ‘he [Jonson] hath consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he has seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians fight in his imagination’.

Finally, to Drummond’s great relief, Jonson at last set off back home to London, leaving his host to contemplate a cellar full of empty bottles. ‘He is’, wrote Drummond,

a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others, given rather to lose a friend than a jest, jealous of every word and action of those about him (especially after a drink which is one of the elements in which he liveth), a dissembler of ill parts which reign in him, a bragger of some good that he wanteth, thinketh nothing well but what either he himself or some of his friends and countrymen hath said and done. He is passionately kind and angry, careless either to gain or keep, vindictive but if he be well answered, at himself. Interpreteth best saying and deeds often to the worst, oppressed with fantasy, which hath ever mastered his reason: a general disease in many poets.
³

Either unaware or uncaring of the reputation he had left behind, on 10 May 1619 Jonson wrote to Drummond asking if he would undertake a little research for him on a project on which he was engaged, sending along with his good wishes to Drummond his regards to a formidable list of people he had met while staying with him. There is no record of Drummond’s reply but he deserves a vote of thanks for recording Jonson’s stay in such detail and also how the fame of the London dramatists had spread far enough north for people to want to hear about them at first hand.

The golden age of the playwrights was now rapidly drawing to its end although the early 1620s still produced some interesting work, one example being a play rushed on to the stage while the events on which it was based were still a talking point.
The Witch of Edmonton
was a joint collaboration by Thomas Dekker, John Ford and William Rowley. Rowley, a contemporary of Ford, wrote almost entirely in collaboration with other people. In 1609, after making little headway as a dramatist in his own right and somewhat against the trend, he became an actor with the Duke of York’s (late Prince Charles’s) Men mainly playing comedy parts. He would, however, continue to collaborate on scripts, not least with Middleton on
The Changeling
.

The Witch of Edmonton
was given its first performance not long after the supposed witch, who gives the play its title, was hanged for witchcraft at Tyburn on 16 April 1621. On 27 April, only eleven days later, a pamphlet was published,
The Wonderful Discovery of Elizabeth Sawyer, Witch, Late of Edmonton
, written by ‘Henry Goodcole, Minister of the Word of God, and her continual visitor in the Gaol of Newgate’, in which he detailed her supposed witchcraft and the crimes she was alleged to have committed, a copy of which must have been picked up by one or other of the writers. Given the eerie thrill such a subject was likely to give an audience, it must have seemed to them that a play based around such an immediately topical instance of witchcraft was likely to be a real crowd-puller. For there is no doubt that most of the population shared the views of King James, believed in witches and would continue to do so for some considerable time. Twenty years later Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins was to oversee the hanging of sixty women in Essex who had been accused of witchcraft.

In a period when any eccentric old woman, especially if she was unfortunate enough to have some physical deformity, could all too easily be made a scapegoat for all local ills, Elizabeth Sawyer fitted the picture only too well as by all accounts she was an unprepossessing-looking woman with only one eye. During her interrogation she was asked how she had suffered this loss, to which she replied: ‘With a stick which one of my children had in hand; that night my mother did die it was done, for I was stooping by the bedside and by chance did hit my eye on the sharp end of the stick.’ The means by which she was made to ‘confess’ to witchcraft hardly bear thinking about but during the inquisition she told her torturers that the Devil had appeared to her in the shape of a dog, sometimes black, sometimes white, and that he had ‘sucked’ her blood from a special teat which she had for that purpose. He had asked for her ‘body and soul’, or he would tear her to pieces, and when she agreed taught her a three-word Latin spell. She had finally been brought to the attention of the authorities by a local JP, Arthur Robinson, who had carried out a ‘test’ to ‘prove’ she was a witch. The test consisted of setting fire to some thatch from her roof while she was out and if this brought her running back, then it would prove her guilt. Needless to say, seeing the smoke, she did run back home and on such flimsy ‘evidence’, followed by interrogation, she was convicted.

Several different storylines converge at the end of the play but Dekker is credited with that of Elizabeth Sawyer, whom he treats in his version of events with considerable sympathy. From the first we are shown how she is continually persecuted by the people around her to the point where she finally decides that if, in spite of everything she can do or say, she is still regarded as a witch then she might as well claim to be one and see if there is anything to be gained from it since she is continually being blamed for cattle falling sick or crops being blighted. But then matters became far more serious.

‘Sir Arthur Clarington’, an unflattering and thinly disguised portrait of Arthur Robinson JP, has palmed his pregnant mistress off on an unsuspecting young man (with whom she has also slept) who, since he loves her, agrees to marry her, believing the child to be his. But when he goes home to tell his family that he now has a wife, before he can do so he is more or less ordered by his father to marry a local heiress to save them from ruin. Unable to tell his parents the truth, he duly goes through with the second, and bigamous, wedding. When the first wife turns up and is about to discover what has happened, he decides his only recourse is to murder one of them. Then, when his infamy is discovered, he successfully blames it on having been bewitched by Mother Sawyer. Dekker gives Mother Sawyer knowledge of ‘Clarington’s’ prior involvement with the first bride, along with other of his unsavoury secrets, thus making it imperative he rid himself of her. He even shows him doing the ‘thatch test’ to which Arthur Robinson testified in court. The play proved to be a hit. Just how closely Sir Arthur Clarington really did resemble Arthur Robinson JP it is impossible to know. One wonders if he saw it and, if so, whether he either did not recognise himself or thought it best to keep his head down.

Two years later, in 1623, Shakespeare’s old friends and colleagues John Hemings and Henry Condell published thirty-six of his plays in what is now known as the
First Folio
. Sixteen of them had been previously published in his lifetime in ‘Quarto’ editions, but it is not known if he had any hand in their publication or supervised how they were printed. His friends put them together, they said, ‘in order to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive’. A thirty-seventh play,
Pericles
, was added later. Hemings and Condell authenticated the thirty-six plays but presumably had doubts about
Pericles
and
The Two Noble Kinsmen
, which is now credited to Shakespeare and Fletcher.

One last play is worthy of note because it not only caused an almighty furore but almost provoked a war with Spain. In 1624
A Game At Chess
, performed by the King’s Men at the Globe, ran for an unprecedented nine consecutive performances, the first ever long run, grossing the enormous sum of £1,500 at the box office. It also provoked some of the earliest recorded London traffic jams, playgoers blocking the streets in carriages and on foot in their desperation to reach the theatre and find a seat. It also made its author, Thomas Middleton, a wanted man. Hitherto he had kept out of trouble and had recently had considerable success with two very fine plays,
Women Beware Women
and, in collaboration with Rowley,
The Changeling
.

A Game at Chess
is a political allegory about the then rapidly deteriorating relations between England and Spain, its meaning crystal clear to the audiences whose popular opinion it represented. The literary sources of the play were taken from a variety of anti-Catholic, anti-Spanish pamphlets, their content repeated almost verbatim, coupled with unambiguous references to the recent mad venture to Spain undertaken by Prince Charles and his friend the Duke of Buckingham, with the object of bringing back with them a royal Spanish bride; an attempt which failed disastrously. In the play the protagonists are symbolised as chess pieces. The white of course are the English and the White King, James I. The black, from the thinly disguised country of ‘Gondomar’, are the Spanish and the Black King, Philip IV of Spain. During the course of the action the Spanish monarchy and its ambassador are held up to ridicule, the Roman Catholic church is savagely satirised, and in the final scene the whole Spanish nation is consigned to hell.