Roaring Boys (3 page)

Their idea of entertainment, however, was a broad one. The very same audiences which crowded into the Rose and the Globe to laugh at
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
or enjoy the poetry of
Twelfth Night
were equally happy to visit the Bear Pit the following day or stand at the front of the crowd at Tyburn to watch the public hangings. But theatre opened up for them whole new worlds: those of kingship and its power and responsibilities in the great historical epics, of hubris followed by nemesis as portrayed in the characters of Marlowe’s great over-reachers, of betrayal and murder set alongside the foibles of humanity in the great tragedies and comedies of Shakespeare – not to mention the nature of love.

A play’s a true transparent crystal mirror,
To show good minds their mirth, the bad their terror.

Thomas Heywood,
Apology for Actors
(1612)

B
y the time Heywood wrote these words a visitor to London could have joined audiences at eight or nine playhouses and even if, as was likely, not all of them were open for business at the same time, he or she might well have had the choice of anything up to a dozen plays from which to choose within the space of a week. Hundreds, indeed thousands, of people might pack into any one performance at a large theatre such as the Globe when it was full to capacity, a good many of them, of course, standing for the privilege. Shrewd actors such as Edward Alleyn and playwrights like William Shakespeare had become very wealthy men; there was money to be made in the theatre for both actors and writers even if all too many of them let it slip through their fingers and drank or gambled it away. The actor Richard Burbage was just as much a star to the audiences of his day as Sir Laurence Olivier or Sir Ian McKellen four hundred years later.

However, by then theatre had become properly established. It was nothing like as easy for the pioneers of a quarter of a century earlier; indeed it would have been almost impossible for them to imagine what the future might hold. Companies of players did not, of course, suddenly appear from nowhere once playhouses started being built. Plays had been regularly, if seasonally, performed since early medieval times by the various guilds, and cycles of religious dramas such as those of the York, Wakefield, Coventry and Chester Mysteries and the Cornish ‘Ordinalia’ were popular and provided a welcome break in the working year. No doubt some of those craftsmen taking part were talented actors but they were quite definitely amateurs. At major festivals such as Christmas or May Day there was lighter fare like the Mummers’ plays which might well incorporate, along with their regular characters, those of Robin Hood and Maid Marian. Noblemen and other wealthy landowners would also keep among their servants those able to perform ‘interludes’ for the entertainment of guests, though these were hardly theatrical performances as we understand them and often took place while everyone was eating, drinking and chatting.

Gradually the repertoire grew, first with the appearance of the morality plays, of which the best known example is
Everyman
, though still as the name suggests with a religious theme; then, mainly for private consumption within schools and colleges, broader and more adventurous drama. In 1534, when Henry VIII was still on the throne, Nicholas Udall became headmaster of Eton College. He had a keen interest in drama and wrote a number of plays for the boys, one of which,
Ralph Roister Doister
, still survives. It was immensely popular and there are references to it being performed years later. Its comic theme was to influence a whole generation of professional playwrights, for the main character, Doister himself, is a swaggering, roistering, woman-chasing, cowardly buffoon with a high opinion of himself, who gets his comeuppance at the hands of a determined lady. Doister is a likely prototype for the Falstaff of
The Merry Wives of Windsor
.

By the time Elizabeth came to the throne, bands of players along with tumblers and musicians were travelling around the countryside playing in the towns and villages, especially at fairs and on public holidays, offering drama which was pure entertainment. The general population loved the arrival of the players and flocked to see the plays but their betters took a very different view of the matter. Players were considered no better than the ‘sturdie beggars’, tinkers, vagabonds, thieves and masterless men who roamed the countryside in bands. As to what they performed, plays were ‘the Devil’s sermons’ and those who performed them should be whipped out of town with the other travelling scum. Such was the prejudice that actors realised drastic action was needed if they were to survive, and it was fortunate that the growing wealth and ostentation of the aristocracy was set to provide it. Actors were suddenly in demand as it became the fashion for a lord or earl to have his own company of players as part of the household. Their patrons’ desire to advertise their wealth and success thus enabled the actors to perform legally and without fear of the consequences, so long as they were officially known by the name of their patron as, for example, the Earl of Leicester’s Men.
¹

Under the auspices of a powerful patron, players were able to continue touring so long as they were available to perform for him whenever they were required to do so, and we know of a number of inns and taverns, particularly in London, regularly visited by acting companies ‘where money is paid or demanded for hearing plays’. In 1567 John Brayne, a grocer, and the brother-in-law of James Burbage (father of the famous Richard), paid out £8 10s for scaffolding for plays performed at the Red Lion in Stepney. ‘James Burbage was a joiner’, notes M.C. Bradbrook in
The Rise of the Common Player
, ‘and knew all about scaffolding’. Another inn, the Bell, was so often used by players that they stored their costumes there, while the landlord set about acquiring stage props and properties which could be hired out to acting companies for a fee. Some inns became particularly associated with individual companies and we know that the Earl of Leicester’s Men played regularly at the Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street.
²

Faced with the growing number of actors’ companies and in an attempt to gain some control of what was going on, in 1572 the government brought in the notorious Vagabonds Act, which lumped together all the various groups travelling around the countryside, however loosely organised. According to the Statute:

all Fencers, Bearwards, Common Players in Enterludes & Minstrels not belonging to any Baron of this Realme or towards any other honourable Personage of greater Degree; all Jugglers, Pedlars, Tinkers and Petty Chapmen, and have not Licence of two Justices of the Peace at the least, whereof one to be of the Quorum when and in what Shire they shall happen to wander . . . shall be taken and adjudged to be deemed Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdie Beggars.

It was, therefore, absolutely essential to have a patron, with the result that theatre flourished.

Two years later, as Bradbrook points out, in the March of 1574, it struck someone at Court that since whatever the prohibitions brought in and the dire punishments threatened, such entertainment now appeared to be here to stay, instead of continuing to put obstacles in its way, why not try and make some money out of it for the Exchequer?
³
How would it be if the government offered licences for places in which plays could legitimately be performed? That way money could be made in the form of a new tax, while an eye could also be kept on the content of the plays that were being put on. The Lord Chamberlain, therefore, wrote a civil letter to the Lord Mayor of London putting forward this excellent notion and requesting that it immediately be put into practice, only to be met by an outright refusal. The principal reason given for this was that the City Fathers, and they alone, had the power to restrict assembly and keep control of what went on in the City and such a power therefore could not be delegated to anyone else. However, when the situation was looked into further, it appeared that the City had already seen the money-making possibilities of such a scheme and were themselves busily collecting money from players ‘for poor relief’ by allowing them the privilege of playing within the city walls and that this was a practice they had no intention of giving up.

For a while, the Lord Chamberlain continued to negotiate, suggesting ways and means by which such poor relief could continue, but when the Lord Mayor remained adamant, he overruled his objections and the first Letters Patent were given to the Earl of Leicester’s Men under the Great Seal of England on behalf of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth I. They were granted to James Burbage, John Perkyn, John Laneham, William Johnson and Robert Wilson:

to use, exercise, and occupy the art and faculty of playing comedies tragedies interludes stage plays and such other like as they have already used and studied or hereafter shall use and study as well for the recreation of your loving subjects as for our solace and pleasure . . . as also to use and occupy all such instruments as they have already practised . . . to shew publish exercise and occupy to their best commodity . . . as well within our City of London and liberties of the same, as also within the liberties and freedoms of any of our cities, towns and boroughs, etc. as without the same, any act statute proclamation or commandment to the contrary not withstanding, provided the said comedies tragedies interludes and stage plays be by the Master of our Revels (for the time being) before seen and allowed and that the same be not published or shewen [sic] in the time of common prayer or in the time of great and common plague in our said City of London.

It was the first ever official recognition by the establishment of theatre as we know and understand it today and it remains unique. The Letters Patent overrode the ancient rights of the city to determine what took place within its boundaries in the face of dire warnings from the objectors as to the horrors about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting public. There would be, without doubt

the inordinate haunting of great multitudes of people, especially youth, to plays, interludes and shows, leading to affrays, quarrels, and evil practices of incontinency in great Inns, having chambers and secret places adjoining to their open stages and galleries, thus inveigling and alluring maids, especially orphans and good Citizens’ children [who are] under age, to privy and unmeet shows, the publishing of unchaste, uncomely and unashamed fast speeches and doings and the withdrawing of Her Majesty’s subjects from divine service and holy days.

Not only that, such entertainments would lead to the ‘unthrifty waste of money by the poor, sundry robberies by pickpockets and cutpurses, the uttering of popular, busy and seditious matters and many other corruptions of youth and other enormities’, not to mention the possible ‘slaughters and mayhems of the Queen’s subjects by falling scaffolding, breaking frames and stages and the use of gunpowder’.
⁴

The Earl of Leicester’s Men had therefore achieved their aim of official recognition not only for themselves but on behalf of other such companies. Thus emboldened, on 13 May 1576 James Burbage signed a 21-year lease on a building plot in Holywell on the public road between Shoreditch and Bishopsgate not far from Finsbury Fields and at once set about building the first custom-built playhouse. He called it simply The Theatre. His lease contained a clause which said that if he spent £200 or more on the building, he could take it down when the lease expired. He was also supposed to be offered an automatic extension of the lease if he wanted it, although the terms would have to be renegotiated. Within a year The Theatre was joined by a second playhouse, The Curtain, close by. The memory of The Curtain, which remained in use for over thirty years, still lingers on in ‘Curtain Road’ which runs between Old Street and Great Eastern Street. We do not know who built The Curtain but it has been suggested that it was a syndicate of actors and that the two playhouses complemented each other, possibly sharing wardrobe and other storage facilities.

We have no description or sketches of what they were like but theatre historian Andrew Gurr considers it likely that The Theatre was closely based on the design of the rectangular and galleried inn yards in which Burbage and the Earl of Leicester’s company usually played, while The Curtain was more like the ‘wooden O’ familiar from prints of the later Bankside theatres.
⁵
However, unless the foundations of one or the other are discovered during building excavations, as happened with the Rose Theatre in Southwark, we are unlikely ever to know. Although all authorities give The Theatre as the first proper playhouse, other excavations have revealed that there is a possibility that there was an earlier one, the Red Lion in Whitechapel built by John Brayne in about 1567; if this were the case it was not built specifically for the performance of plays but mainly for bear-baiting. While The Theatre and The Curtain were primarily for the production of plays, the stages were also used for a wide variety of other events such as exhibitions of sword-fighting, wrestling, tumbling, vaulting, something referred to as ‘rope dancing’, and possibly, on occasion, even bear-baiting, although that is by no means certain. Even after the building of the two theatres, acting companies continued to give performances regularly in the yards of inns such as the Bell, the Cross Keys and the Bull to the north of the City, the Belsavage in the west and the George in Southwark.

Nevertheless the City Fathers remained unhappy at the close proximity of the two theatres to their boundaries and rarely missed an opportunity to cancel performances or even close them down for weeks at a time at the slightest excuse.

While Burbage’s company played mainly at The Theatre it seems they also played at The Curtain from time to time, although the latter is more closely associated with Philip Henslowe. However, in 1587, with no end in sight to the constant battle between the City authorities and the two theatres, Philip Henslowe turned his attention to the Bankside, an area which had much to commend it as it was well outside the jurisdiction of the City, with easy access either by London Bridge or by the host of boats, up to three thousand of them, plying for trade across and up and down the Thames. There were gardens alongside the river and there were several bear pits, drawing in plenty of trade, for those who also liked bear-baiting. Henslowe might well have commissioned great drama and employed amazingly talented actors, but he was above all a businessman and the Bankside also offered entertainments of a more robust nature: it was notorious for its gaming houses, brothels and low life. Another plus was that he already had his timber warehouse on that side of the Thames and either then, or shortly afterwards, he bought a house on the Bankside, along with a bear pit next door to it.