Shakespeare (56 page)

Shakespeare himself could have taken up temporary residence at one of the three hundred inns of the neighbourhood. The Elephant was on the corner of Horseshoe Alley, for example, just a few yards from the Globe. In
Twelfth Night
, written a year or two after his removal to that district, Antonio remarks (1467–8):

But this may be no more than a local joke. If he had lived in the liberty of the Clink, as the records of non-payment of property tax imply, then he would have inhabited the long street which runs beside the Thames just north of Winchester Palace Park. This was the street in which Henslowe also dwelled. In a memorandum, quoted by the eighteenth-century scholar Edmond Malone but no longer extant, Alleyn records that Shakespeare lived close to the Bear-Garden, and in fact the distance is only a few hundred yards. Edmond Malone further claims that Shakespeare lived in this neighbourhood until 1608, a residence of some ten years. For a peripatetic dramatist, that is a long sojourn indeed. He might almost have been described as a gentleman of Southwark rather than as a gentleman of Stratford.

The history of Southwark had for many hundreds of years been associated with public entertainment. A gladiator’s trident has been found here, which suggests that a Roman arena was once constructed in the vicinity of the Globe. In the years immediately preceding the late sixteenth century, however, the area was known for bull-baiting and bear-baiting, for exhibitions of wrestling and acrobatics. It was also the venue for various forms of drama. When the priests of St. Mary Overie (now known as Southwark Cathedral) were singing
“Dirige”
for the soul of Henry VIII in 1547, their prayers were interrupted by the noise of players performing in the neighbourhood. Thirty-one years later the Privy Council was still complaining to the Surrey justices about the prevalence of play-acting in the same vicinity. The evidence suggests that Paris Garden itself had been used as the venue for medieval “folk festivals,” under which quaint term we may include a great many crude entertainments as well as cruel and violent sports.

Chief among those sports has always been animal-baiting. It was a peculiar love of the English, and conducted with a ferocity that horrified continental visitors. A Venetian traveller noted two hundred dogs in “traps,” ready to be set upon bulls and wild bears. There was another sport in which a blind bear was tormented by men with whips; occasionally the maddened animal was known to break free of its chain and run among the crowd. When Shakespeare includes the famous stage-direction in
The Winter’s Tale
, “Exit, pursued by a bear,” the audience would have been able to picture the scene quite precisely.

There was a bull-ring in Southwark by 1542 at the latest, and a new bullring was being built on Bankside in the 1550s. Shakespeare would have heard the roaring from his lodgings by the Clink. The cost of admission was a penny, with an additional penny for a good place in the galleries. In 1594 Edward Alleyn secured the lease of the bear-baiting ring at Paris Garden, in the neighbourhood of the Globe, for £200. A few years later he and Henslowe purchased the office of mastership of the “Queen’s Games of Bulls and Bears.” The bear-pits were an adjunct, not a cheap alternative, to the playhouses. On Thursday and Sunday of each week, the theatres were closed and the animal-pits opened. At a slightly later date Alleyn and Henslowe built the Hope Playhouse, close to the Globe, which was both theatre and animal-pit; the bears were baited on Tuesday and Thursday, plays performed on every other day (except Sunday). It was the same business, run by the same operatives. The reek of the animals must have sullied the actors’ costumes. It is a condition of London life that the atmosphere of a neighbourhood lingers like some fugitive odour in the air; we can say with some certainty, therefore, that Shakespeare lived and worked in a parish characterised by violence and casual cruelty. That is perhaps why Southwark provided more soldiers for the realm than any other area apart from the city of London itself. More than a third of its householders were watermen, and watermen were well known throughout England for their abusive behaviour and foul language.

There was a “sanctuary” at Paris Garden from the early fifteenth century, and the neighbourhood had a history of criminal association and criminal practice. It had also been a haven for many and varied groups of immigrants, known as “aliens,” among them Dutch and Fleming. The topography of the neighbourhood is perhaps then predictable. There were larger houses and gardens for the more notable residents, such as Henslowe and Alleyn (and perhaps Shakespeare himself), but for the rest it was an area of packed tenements and swarming streets, of stables and alleys. What were known as the “stink-trades” were also congregated here, brewing and tanning among them. There was a busy ferry-crossing at Paris Garden Stairs, transporting passengers over to Blackfriars on the opposite bank. But even here the generally rough reputation of the neighbourhood intervened. A civic edict of the sixteenth century ordered wherrymen to moor their boats on the northern bank at night to ensure that “thieves and other misdoers shall not be carried”
³
to the brothels and taverns of Southwark. There were indeed many brothels, some of them owned by the ubiquitous business partners Alleyn and Henslowe. Henslowe’s playhouse, the Rose, was named after a
well-known house of assignation in the vicinity. They were, you might say, all-round entertainers. And Shakespeare knew them well.

It may seem odd that Alleyn and Henslowe were also vestrymen of the church of St. Saviour’s, and that Henslowe became churchwarden. Yet in a more youthful and enterprising society, established upon the active pursuit of profit, such dual allegiances were not unusual. Prostitutes had been known as “Winchester Geese,” after the Bishop of Winchester’s manor in which they operated. One inn and brothel was called the Cardinal’s Hat, not necessarily because of any ecclesiastical connection but because red was deemed to be the proper colour for the tip of the penis. The sacred and the secular were still thoroughly mingled. Only after the parliamentary wars was the effort made to separate them.

It is of course easy to exaggerate the stench and horrors of the south bank. There were fields and woods within easy reach of the busy streets, and the herbalist John Gerard was agreeably surprised by the number of flowers he observed in the water ditches of the neighbourhood. In Paris Garden Lane, for example, he found the “water yarrow” and “plentie” of “water gilloflower.”
⁴
So it was not an altogether disagreeable area. Demographic surveys also suggest that its inhabitants did not move away from it in any significant numbers; like Londoners elsewhere, they were happy to remain in the familiar neighbourhood. So life in Southwark was not necessarily insupportable, only colourful and occasionally inconvenient. It was always a lively and active area. Why else should Shakespeare choose to remain there for so long? In twenty-first century London, people do not choose to move out of Soho. Southwark, then, was the centre of genuine and teeming life.

A
nd so the new Globe
arose. It was considered at the time to be the most splendid of all the London theatres. Its name implies that it was the theatre of the world itself and, as the arena in which
Othello
and
King Lear, Macbeth
and
Julius Caesar
, were first performed, it can lay some claim to that title. It has been suggested that Peter Streete, carpenter and builder, followed the precepts of Vitruvius in designing this space. The book of Vitruvius known as
Architectura
was available in England at the time, but it is highly unlikely that Streete ever consulted it. His immediate model is more likely to have been that of the animal-baiting ring, with which he and his contemporaries were intensely familiar. Nevertheless its design has been interpreted as a copy of the amphitheatre of the antique world, or of the holier circles of primeval Britain. That circular shape has also been supposed to suggest the womb or the embrace of encircling maternal arms. It even bears a passing resemblance to the magician’s circle, in which bright visions might appear. But no wooden building in the sixteenth century could be entirely circular. It was in fact polygonal in shape, accommodating some fourteen sides, with three galleries surrounding the stage and the open yard or “pit.”

The Globe’s structure was of timber, made up of prefabricated oak posts (some of them over 30 feet long) infilled with wattle-and-daub and with a finished exterior of white plaster; its roof was thatched. It is possible that the
plaster was designed to resemble stone, so that the building of the theatre was itself theatrical. The playhouse was 100 feet in diameter, and is supposed to have held some 3,300 people. Each of the two lower galleries could hold one thousand people. It was in other words very tightly packed with Elizabethan bodies, accommodating audiences two or three times the size of those in a modern London theatre. Indeed the atmosphere would have been more like that of a football stadium than a playhouse. It also had some elements of the funfair.

It has been supposed that the Globe had a “sign” for ready identification above the stage or perhaps above the principal entrance. That would be quite usual in Elizabethan London and, if it existed at all, stray references suggest that it was an image of Hercules holding a globe upon his shoulders. The Shakespearian scholar, Edmond Malone, has stated that the playhouse also displayed a motto above its entrance or within its interior—”
Totus mundus agit hlurionem,”
which may be translated as “The whole world plays the actor.” The interior would have been colourful if not gaudy, with classical motifs and statuary prominent among the paintings and decorations. We know well enough from other interiors, with their satyrs and herms, their paintings of gods and goddesses, that the Elizabethans loved bright patterning and intricate carving. Nothing was too extravagant or too elaborate. At the Globe the wood was painted to resemble marble or jasper, and there were various hangings or tapestries to add to the impression of pseudo-classical luxury. The colours were vivid, with much gilt and gold, and the general effect was one of elaborate splendour. The theatre, after all, was a world of artifice in what was already a highly scenic and ritualistic culture. It vied with the court as the central point of ritual and display. It was the very fulcrum of art as demonstration.

The stage itself was just under 50 feet in width. It was so placed that it stayed out of direct sunlight, and remained in shadow for the duration of the afternoon’s performances. When an actor stepped forward to the front of the stage, however, his face would have been significantly lightened. It had two exits/entrances, one on either side; between them was the curtained “discovery” space in which characters might be found asleep, dead, or privately employed; it could be used, for example, as a tomb or a study. Jutting out upon the stage itself was a canopy held up by two wooden pillars. This was also known as the “heavens,” and was decorated with stars and planets against a celestial blue background; the pillars are also supposed to have defined “front stage” and “rear stage.” It was an exceedingly simple arrangement, taken
from classical stagecraft, and was designed to emphasise the bodily presence of the actor. On the level above the stage was a balcony employed by the musicians, and hired sometimes by the most privileged of the audience; but it could also be used as part of the theatrical stage. When a general appeared on the ramparts of a city, or when a lover climbed up to his mistress’s bedchamber, this was the space that was used. Beneath the stage was the area known as “hell.” A trap-door allowed personages magically to ascend or descend, but it was also the area where the “props” were kept. There does not seem to have been any machinery in the Globe, however, for tricks of “flying” or descending upon the stage. This would not become available to Shakespeare, and the players, until they began to use an indoors playhouse at Blackfriars.

On the stage of the Globe an actor would enter at one door and exit at another. When a character or characters left the stage, they would not be the first to appear in the subsequent scene. These were important principles, designed to lend the impression of a dramatic world in process; theatrical life continued, as it were, “behind the scene.” There was an illusion of a flowing imaginative world, of which the actors on the stage were the visible token. It is also an indication of the formal fluency of Elizabethan drama, depending as it does upon contrast and symmetry, balance and opposition, of finely poised forces. The wide space allowed for speed and flexibility of plot. It is possible that the words were spoken much more quickly than in any modern performance. There were no acts, only scenes signalled by the various exits and entrances of the actors themselves. Act breaks were not introduced until approximately 1607. After a general exit, for example, a stage-property might be carried on by stagehands (wearing their blue livery) before other characters entered. The Elizabethan stage was not self-conscious about its procedures, the mechanics of stage “business,” and of course neither were the plays themselves. There was no appetite for realism, or naturalism, in any of its current senses.