Roaring Boys (4 page)

So, close to the old London Bridge with its houses and shops, Henslowe built one of the two most famous early playhouses, the Rose. Until relatively recently it was thought that the Rose was not built until 1592 but new research, following the discovery of its foundations in 1989, suggests that it opened in 1587 and was extended and improved five years later. In 1596 Francis Langley built another theatre on the Bankside, the Swan, and it is because of the drawings of it made that year by Johannes de Witt that we know something of what the Elizabethan playhouses looked like inside, although some of the details in the drawings do not fit what is now known about the interior of such theatres. However, the overall plan was right. Facing the audience as they entered a playhouse was the very large and high thrust stage, at the back of which was a gallery, area and ‘discovery space’ which could be concealed with a curtain. The stage itself was covered by a thatched roof supported on pillars and up above everything was a top storey, ‘the hut’, in which stage technicians worked and from which a trumpeter announced that a play would be performed that day. Three tiers of sheltered galleries ran round the walls; the big open space in front of the stage open to the elements, ‘the pit’, was for those standing to see the show.

In spite of the new playhouses, to keep within the law, acting companies still required patrons even if they were no longer attached to their households; among these were the Earls of Pembroke, Warwick, Derby, Essex, Worcester, Sussex, and Lord Strange. The two most prestigious noblemen to give their names to such companies were undoubtedly the Lord Admiral and the Lord Chamberlain, although it must be pointed out that patronage did not provide financial security; they were not subsidised in any way by those under whose name they performed. Such official recognition did, however, give the companies real status, bringing with it regular invitations to appear at Court.

Both companies were led by actors of exceptional ability in Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage. The Lord Admiral’s Men were particularly associated with Henslowe and the Rose Theatre, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men with Burbage, first at The Theatre, then at the Globe. The companies were made up entirely of ‘Men’ because it was illegal for women to act on a public stage even if the ladies of the nobility regularly appeared at Court in interludes and masques, sometimes sporting costumes which elsewhere would have outraged public decency.

They worked on a sharer’s system. Anything from half a dozen to a dozen of the most prominent people involved would put up a set sum of money, ‘a share’, in a particular company and theatre. Such sharers would include entrepreneurs such as Philip Henslowe, whose
Diaries
are one of our greatest sources of information on Elizabethan theatre, any financial backers, several of the leading actors in each company, and very possibly the wardrobe and props masters and the ‘Bookman’ or ‘Bookkeeper’ who was in charge of all the scripts, ensuring that they did not fall into the wrong hands, as well as seeing to the copying out of ‘the roles’. On occasion even a playwright could become a sharer as we know because William Shakespeare was one. Ben Jonson sought to emulate him, borrowing money from Henslowe to buy a share in the Lord Admiral’s Men, although he gave it back fairly rapidly. Jonson’s continual indebtedness to Henslowe is duly recorded in the
Diaries
.

The average acting company consisted of fifteen actors plus half a dozen apprentices. Apart from the sharers, the rest of the actors were ‘hired men’, taken on for anything from a single performance to a whole season, and it is likely that the companies also hired in people, to work backstage, assisting with stage effects and props as these became more elaborate, and helping with dressing and make-up. The young apprentices worked hard for their keep, doing all the running around, helping with effects such as working bellows for stage smoke, playing small parts like the devils who drag Faustus down to Hell and pages to noblemen and kings, before graduating to small speaking parts such as the fated princes in
Richard III
. Finally, the most talented had their ‘three years to play’ the women’s roles.

Having a settled base in London did not prevent actors from going out on regular tours. Leading actors from, say, the Lord Admiral’s Men would organise a tour with members of the Earl of Pembroke’s Men or Lord Strange’s Men, the temporary touring company travelling under one or other name. There were regular touring venues throughout the country such as Northampton, Coventry, Worcester, Gloucester, Shewsbury, Bristol and Exeter, but the companies would also set up and perform in the smaller towns en route. Tours took place for a variety of reasons: because a certain number of towns were used to having an annual visit from a theatre company and a loyal audience expected it; because audiences were thin on the ground in London; or when the authorities ordered the playhouses to close due either to public disorder or sickness. Not surprisingly, acting companies escaping from the plague in the plague years were quite likely to find themselves physically prevented from coming into a country town by citizens prepared to stone them out.

Leaving London for the provinces was always a chancy business and a good many tours proved to be financial disasters, one good example being that of a company led by Burbage, especially set up for a tour during the winter of 1592/3 (when plague closed the playhouses), which was so unsuccessful that its members had to sell everything, including all the costumes and props, leaving them with only what they stood up in. On another occasion Edward Alleyn, fearing a similar fate, sent home to his wife Joan (Henslowe’s stepdaughter), via a kinsman who had called in to see the show, his best white waistcoat and other garments ‘to be put safely away until his return’. Future correspondence, he told her, should be sent to him in Shrewsbury c/o Lord Strange’s Men, which suggests, given how long it must have taken to send a letter, that the actors must have remained there for some time. Copies of correspondence between Edward and Joan Alleyn, when the former was on tour, are among Henslowe’s papers and give a good idea of what exercised an actor who was away from home for weeks. Alleyn’s pet name for Joan was ‘Mouse’:

‘Mouse, you send me no news of anything,’ he complains. ‘You should send of your domestic matters, such things as happen at home, as how your distilled water proves this or that or any other thing you will . . . and, jug, I pray you let my orange tawny stockings of wool be dyed a good black against I come home to wear them in the winter. You send me no word of your garden but next time you will remember this, in any case, that all the bed which was parsley in the month of September, you should sow with spinach for then is the time. I would do so myself but we shall not come home ’til All Hallows tide, so farewell sweet Mouse.’

The letter was addressed to ‘Mr. Hinslo on the Bankside, right over against the Clink’.
⁶

Joan replied that she had seen to the dyeing of his stockings, had bought a good new bedstead and was busy planting out the spinach, but had been unable to buy the cloth he asked for as the plague had shut down the shops and the merchants. Nor had she been successful in selling his horse as he had also asked her to do. The best offer she had received was only £4 ‘so I have sent him into the country until your return’.

It also seems that English players did not confine themselves to touring in England. There are a number of somewhat scrappy reports of actors performing in Germany and of a company drawn from the Earl of Leicester’s Men, which included Will Kempe, Thomas Pope and George Bryan, appearing in 1586 before the Danish Court in – where else – Elsinore. This writer was stunned to be told, when accompanying a theatre director to work in a theatre at Gdynia in Poland in the early 1990s, that there had long been a tradition in what is now Gdansk that Shakespeare’s plays had been performed there before the end of the sixteenth century; a tradition possibly ‘proved’ a year or so later when the foundations of an Elizabethan-type playhouse were actually discovered there.

Those who had warned from the start that the building of the playhouses would lead to the end of all common decency, offering nothing but unlimited licence and immorality, soon considered their worst fears had been realised. In 1578, two years after the building of The Theatre, churchman John Stockwood thundered from the pulpit against the ‘flocks of wild youths of both sexes, resorting to interludes, where both by lively gesture and voices there are allurements unto whoredom’.
⁷
Sour commentator Stephen Gosson, who left Oxford without obtaining his degree, confessed that while up at university he had himself tried his hand at writing plays ‘but I burned one candle to seek another and lost both my time and my travail when I had done’, and thus had learned his lesson. In the
School of Abuse
he writes that those who remain safely within the walls of academe, devoted to their love of learning and seeing ‘but slender offences and small abuses’ within their own walls, will never believe that there are ‘such horrible monsters in playing places’, for the actors, who are little better than beggars, ‘jet under gentlemen’s noses in suits of silk, exercising themselves to prating on the stage, and common scoffing when they come abroad, where they look askance over their shoulder at every man, of whom the Sunday before they begged alms’.
⁸
His warnings apparently unheeded and the theatres increasingly popular, a year later he described actors ‘as the most dangerousest [sic] people in the world’, no longer merely beggars but outright thieves and corrupters of the young, noting that the acting companies were now taking on apprentices to their trade and training them up ‘to this abominable exercise’.

There was a general acceptance that London was overpopulated and filthy, with what amounted to open sewers running down the middle of the streets, not to mention the notoriously appalling state of the River Fleet, yet killjoys like Gosson and Stockwood were far more concerned by the ‘filth’ purveyed by the theatres than the raw sewage in the streets or the carcasses of dead animals floating down the Fleet. ‘What availeth it to have sweet houses and stinking souls?’ boomed Stockwood. God, he warned, would be noting the names of those who listened to the players rather than to preachers.

But such critics were whistling in the wind and there was one vital and missing ingredient from all that had gone before. With the ever-increasing popularity of the playhouses, the rapidly increasing professionalism of the theatre companies and the apparently insatiable demand for entertainment, there was, above all, a desperate need for plays of all kinds. Which is where the writers take centre stage, the lifestyles of many of whom would exceed the bigots’ wildest nightmares. Enter the roaring boys.

. . . how many nets soever there be laid to take them, or hooks to choke them, they have ink in their bowels to darken the water; and sleights in their budgets to dry up the arm of every magistrate.

Stephen Gosson,
School of Abuse
(1582)

B
y the time the new professional playwrights were having their first works staged, London was already becoming a considerable tourist centre for the out-of-town visitor to see and marvel at. There were the lions at the Tower of London, the great church of St Paul’s, packed with stallholders selling every kind of ware including souvenirs, the Bear Pit on the Bankside, not to mention London Bridge with its splendid shops and decaying heads on poles at its north end to give the onlooker a
frisson
of horror.

A young hopeful born and bred in London only had to walk into one of the playhouses and offer his services to Henslowe or Burbage, or collar a sharer in one of the companies and do his best to sell himself and his idea. For those from well out of town, from Devon, Norfolk or, indeed, Warwickshire, it would have been a considerable journey, made on horseback if they had sufficient funds, otherwise on foot, possibly augmented with lifts in carriers’ carts – and without any certainty of success. Nor would they know their way around when they finally arrived and would need lodgings. Not surprisingly, in the early days these were mostly in the vicinity of The Theatre and The Curtain, in Shoreditch, Bishopsgate and Finsbury. No doubt some were soon parted from their money for the City teemed with those eager to part a fool (which is how most provincials were regarded) from his money, either by straight theft or more cunning ploys.

However, they were quick to learn and towards the end of the 1580s a newcomer to London, bent on visiting one of the playhouses and taking refreshment in a popular tavern before the afternoon’s performance, might well find himself sitting in a corner quaffing his ale or sack watching a noisy group of young men sprawled around a table swapping jokes and anecdotes and making sure everyone present knew who they were. Indeed the author of the day’s entertainment might well be among them and at least some would be members of the circle known as ‘the University Wits’.

The earliest of these were ‘the Oxford men’ and included John Lyly, poet and playwright, George Peele, actor and playwright, Robert Greene, he of the pointed hair and beard and goose-turd green doublet, and the poets Thomas Watson, Thomas Lodge and Matthew Roydon. By the time we catch up with them in the late 1580s they had been joined by the poet and dramatist Christopher Marlowe, and the young, adder-tongued Thomas Nashe, poet and pamphleteer. There might also have been other playwrights and poets present, those who for various reasons never belonged to that particular magic circle. Among the outsiders was George Chapman, for not every ‘Oxford man’ sought to join the Wits, while Thomas Kyd and William Shakespeare left school without going on to college, spending their time earning a living by more practical means, Kyd as a professional ‘scrivener’ and Shakespeare working in his father’s business. However, whatever their previous history might be, by 1590 Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe, Chapman and Kyd were the leading figures in the first wave of professional dramatists, with Shakespeare coming up fast behind.