Roaring Boys (6 page)

From then on his story has overtones of a thriller, for twice while he was up at university he disappeared completely without any explanation, on the first occasion for seven weeks during his second year 1582/3, then again for over half a term during his final year when he was taking his MA. He went down from Cambridge for good at the end of the Lent Term of 1584 and duly applied for his MA to be granted to him, but it was withheld by the university authorities on the grounds that he had spent insufficient time at his studies. What happened next is unprecedented.

In a letter to the college authorities from Walsingham on behalf of the Privy Council, he informs them that ‘whereas it was reported that Christopher Marlowe was determined to have gone beyond the seas to Rheims and there remain, their Lordships thought it good to certify that he had no such intent; but that in all his actions he had behaved himself orderly and discreetly, whereby he had done her Majesty good service and deserved to be rewarded for his faithful dealing’. Therefore Marlowe should be granted his MA and any rumours that he was frittering away his time on the continent quashed ‘by all possible means. . . . Because it was not her Majesty’s pleasure that anyone employed, as he had been, in matters touching the benefit of his country should be defamed by those that are ignorant of the affairs he went about.’
⁵

In other words, Marlowe had been spying for England. The reference to Rheims suggests that he had been attending the Catholic Seminary there, founded by the Englishman, Dr Allen, and originally situated in Douai but more recently moved to Rheims. The seminary was a centre for disaffected English students drawn to the old Faith and was notorious as a hotbed of intrigue and a powerhouse for plots. Allen and his colleagues did not only support Philip II in his proposed invasion of England, but actively assisted those plotting to put Mary Stuart on the English throne. What better way was there of discovering what was going on there than by infiltrating an agent into the seminary in the guise of a dissident Catholic student? Another reason for thinking that this is what he was doing was that in
The Jew of Malta
he has his villain, Barabas the Jew, discuss the merits of poisoning the public wells in order to cause the maximum public panic, the possibility of which was under serious discussion in Rheims at the time.

Becoming a secret agent was not the only major difference between Marlowe and the rest of the new theatrical professionals. He was almost certainly gay and, unlike his contemporaries, he had already made waves as a dramatist and poet before he had even come down from Cambridge. His physical and mental energy must have been prodigious for as well as studying, taking his two degrees and spying for Walsingham, he found time to translate Ovid’s erotic verse, adapt Virgil’s
Tragedy of Dido
for the stage and write the first part of
Tamburlaine
. The play, which introduced theatre-goers to Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’, was first performed in 1587 and became an immediate smash hit rocketing him into celebrity status, a position of which he took every advantage.

Compared to Marlowe, William Shakespeare’s journey to the London playhouses was slow and is largely unknown, as is how he was drawn to the theatre in the first place. One incident which occurred in Stratford when he was fifteen years old is worth recording. Shortly before Christmas 1579 the body of a young girl was found in the River Avon, caught under the bare branches of the willows at Tiddington. It was thought she went into the water on 17 December, but the inquest was not held until 11 February 1580 and it is suggested therefore that in the meantime she was temporarily buried. At the end of the hearing the twelve members of the jury, having heard all the evidence, brought in a verdict of accidental death. It was decided that ‘she, going with a milk pail to draw water from the river Avon, and standing on the bank of the same, suddenly and by accident, slipped and fell into the river and was drowned
and met her death in no other wise or fashion
’ (my italics).
⁶
The latter phrase suggests that there were those who said otherwise, rumours of suicide after being jilted by a lover perhaps? But the jury had obviously given her the benefit of the doubt. Had they brought in a suicide verdict the result would have been a hasty re-interment at some nearby crossroads after the Coroner had announced that the deceased ‘regardless of salvation of her soul and led astray by the instigation of the Devil, threw herself into the water and wilfully drowned herself’, thus forfeiting her right to burial in hallowed ground. Why this sad little story is apposite is because the girl’s name was Katherine Hamlet and her death and subsequent burial recalls that of Ophelia.

Shakespeare, after leaving school at thirteen, went into the family business. The story of how at the age of eighteen he got the much older Anne Hathaway pregnant, subsequently married her in a ceremony which had all the hallmarks of a shotgun wedding presided over by her brothers, of the birth of that child, Susanna, followed by twins, Hamnet and Judith, and his subsequent disappearance from Stratford is too well known to go into further. All we know for sure is that he went away leaving his parents to care for his deserted wife and children, no small responsibility for Mary Shakespeare who still had small children of her own. Shakespeare’s supposedly ‘missing years’ have given rise to a wide variety of theories based on his subsequent work: that he was a soldier in the Low Countries (
Henry
V), studied at the Inns of Court (The
Merchant of Venice
), went to sea (
Pericles
and
The Tempest
), was employed as a tutor by Lord Strange in Derbyshire (any play involving comic schoolmasters) and, of course, that hoary old chestnut, that he simply ran off to London after having been caught poaching on the Lucy estate at Charlecote, just outside Stratford, and then stood around outside the Globe holding the horses of those attending performances until someone noticed him, a theory which falls down somewhat when we know he was in London ten years before the Globe was even built.

There is a more prosaic and practical possibility. Since nobody knows when Shakespeare actually left Stratford it could well be that the ‘missing years’ were few. During 1587 five different theatre companies visited Stratford, one of which was the Queen’s Men in June. They arrived in the town two men short for, while they were performing in Oxford, one of their actors, William Knell, was killed in a fight with a fellow player, John Towne. In the evidence given at the inquest, held on 13 June in the town of Thame, it was stated that Knell, fighting drunk, had picked a quarrel with Towne and drawn his sword on him. Towne had been forced to defend himself while calling out to Knell to stop the fight. Knell had refused to do so and Towne ‘fearing for his life’ had struck out and run him through. Towne was therefore now in custody.
⁷

Losing two actors would have been pretty disastrous for a small touring company. For Shakespeare, already drawn to the theatre and frustrated with his life in the family business and with his domestic circumstances, such a situation might well have afforded him the opportunity of a lifetime, the chance to learn his new trade on the road for he, like George Peele, was an actor as well as a playwright. There was also another link with the Knell-Towne fight. Shortly before his death, Knell had married a Rebecca Edwards who, a year later, after a decent interval, then married the actor John Hemings, one of Shakespeare’s closest friends as well as a colleague. Whatever the real truth of the matter, whether on his own on foot or on horseback, or as part of the company of the Queen’s Men, Shakespeare was almost certainly in town to see one of the early performances of
Tamburlaine
.

While their original backgrounds might have been very alike, the characters and personalities of the two young men could hardly have been more dissimilar. Throughout his short life Marlowe was flamboyant, outrageous in his behaviour and opinions, given to outbursts of violence, and courting danger; it was as if from the first he was programmed to self-destruct. Shakespeare, on the other hand, was cautious and hardworking, carefully investing the money he made in property both in London and Stratford, given to romantic attachments and, politically, keeping his head down. But both gave us some of the most wonderful verse ever written.

So, by one means or another, all our first wave of dramatists and their associates, the poets, essayists and pamphleteers, were ensconced in London by Armada year, objects of both envy and antipathy. There are plenty of examples today of how sudden recognition and fame affects those previously unused to either. To be shot from the obscurity of a distant town or village or the backstreets of London and find your name on every poster or billboard as the writer of the play about which everyone is talking is heady stuff – not to mention that with such fame or notoriety come all the trappings, from fans plying you with drink every time you set foot in a tavern and would-be poets hanging on your every word, to women from all walks of life throwing themselves at you. The nearest analogy today is that of the star footballer or pop idol. It is hardly surprising therefore that there were those who would be destroyed by it.

All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women merely players . . .

As You Like It
, II, vii

T
he new breed of playwrights was to produce a new breed of actor. We know very little of the actors who played in the early companies unless, like Knell and Towne, they brought attention on themselves for reasons other than by their performances, but with the emergence of more professional companies based in the playhouses and using the services of professional writers, there emerged the actors whose names have come down to us through the centuries, the two greatest of which in their day were Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage.

Alleyn was born on 1 September 1566 to a Bishopsgate publican who died when Alleyn was four. Shortly afterwards his mother remarried, his new stepfather being a haberdasher. Obviously neither trade appealed to him and what attracted him to the acting profession is not known, but by the time he was sixteen young Edward was touring in Leicestershire with the Earl of Worcester’s Company, possibly having joined them first as an apprentice. We know he was in Leicester at this time because he was hauled up with the rest of the players before the local Justices as the company claimed to have lost or mislaid its vital Licence to Perform, which also set out the details of its patron. They had been brought to court because, in spite of this and in defiance of the Lord Mayor of Leicester who presumably had demanded to see it, they went ahead and performed their plays anyway. Afterwards, when they had been suitably admonished, they apologised to his worship and begged him not to tell their patron.
¹

Richard Burbage was born about a year later into the first truly theatrical family, since his father James had built The Theatre and although James is first described as a carpenter he was by that time an established actor and company manager. So young Richard went straight into the business as a boy player and by the age of thirteen even his brothers were describing him as ‘brilliant’. While in most cases such praise from within the home might be taken with a pinch of salt, in this instance the description was absolutely justified. It is almost impossible now to imagine what the performances of the sixteenth-century actors were like, except that we know their style was almost certainly declamatory since an actor then needed to hold an audience of hundreds, even thousands, in an open-air environment amid plenty of noise, and that they used an accepted series of gestures to denote fear, love, anger and other emotions. It would have been impossible, for example, for Burbage, when playing Hamlet, to lurk behind a pillar and in quiet anguish ask himself ‘to be or not to be, that is the question’. He would have had to stride out to the front of the stage and project his soliloquy right up to the top gallery. And although in terms of some of the great twentieth-century actors, Alleyn has been likened in style to Sir John Gielgud and Burbage, who played a far wider variety of roles, to Sir Laurence Olivier, one of Alleyn’s most famous parts was Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, a mighty despot who set out to conquer the known world, and he was obviously capable of convincing his audience that he was capable of it.

Backing up the two stars was a substantial second rank of good actors such as Henry Condell and John Hemings, who later put together and published Shakespeare’s plays. However it was the comic actors who, like Alleyn and Burbage, were to become household names: the ‘clowns’ Richard Tarlton, Will Kempe and Robert Armin. These clowns were not the white-faced creatures of the circus but much more like the comedians of the nineteenth-century music halls or today’s stand-up comics, and they were hugely popular. Tarlton had been a publican, first in Colchester, then in London where he kept the Saba Inn. He also ran an ordinary in Paternoster Row. He first took up acting in 1577 and by 1583 was one of the twelve founder members of the Queen’s Men. He had a number of famous acts, including one as a drunk and another, in which he made use of his dog, was said greatly to amuse the Queen and it has been suggested that Shakespeare wrote the part of Launce (who is accompanied by a dog) in
Two Gentlemen of Verona
, especially for Tarlton. His fame became such that, even in an era when communication was poor, it spread nationwide, so much so that folk living far from London and unlikely ever to journey more than a few miles from their town or village, would tell each other his best-known jokes. It was said of him that he only had to walk on to a stage for an audience to collapse with laughter, one playgoer, Henry Peacham, writing: