Roaring Boys Read online

  Chapter emblem: the ghost of Robert Greene,

  woodcut, 1598

  First published in 2004 by Sutton Publishing Limited

  Paperback edition first published in 2006

  This edition first published in 2007

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  All rights reserved

  © The Estate of Judith Cook, 2004, 2013

  The right of Judith Cook to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9509 5

  Original typesetting by The History Press

  Contents

  Foreword by Gregory Doran

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Introduction: Dangerous Times – the New World of Theatre

  1

  The New Professionals

  2

  The University Wits

  3

  A Theatre for the People

  4

  Men About Town

  5

  Performances, Plays and Politics

  6

  The Reckoning

  7

  Deaths and Entrances

  8

  A Visit to the Playhouse

  9

  Curtain Fall on the Elizabethans

  10

  Jacobean Players and Patrons

  11

  Roaring Girls

  12

  Shakespeare and the King’s Men

  13

  An Insult to Spain

  14

  Exit Ben Jonson

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Foreword

  I’m in the middle of putting together a season of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries to celebrate the twentieth season of the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. The Swan was built to stage the plays that had inspired Shakespeare and that he inspired: a huge canon of little-known works. So when Trevor Nunn was preparing to open the Swan, he and Judith Cook thought up the notion of producing an introduction to these neglected playwrights, which appeared as At the Sign of the Swan in 1986. Imagine my delight, then, when I received a letter from Judith asking me to write a foreword to her latest book on the subject.

  Royal Shakespeare Company audiences are now more familiar with the plays that were performed alongside the works of Shakespeare at the Rose, the Globe and Blackfriars. In 2002 I produced a season of rare Jacobean plays, which went on to enjoy an unprecedented run in London’s West End, testifying to a vigorously healthy renewed appetite for this repertoire.

  Since the Swan opened, we have done most of the major comedies of Ben Jonson, virtually all the plays of Christopher Marlowe, the famous Websters, alongside Marston, Massinger, Middleton, with Ford and Fletcher, and even Shirley and Shadwell. But there are huge gaps – some of the Roaring Boys in this book have hardly had a look-in: very little Dekker, no George Peele yet, and no Robert Greene.

  We may know the plays a little more. Judith Cook introduces us to the characters who wrote them. And now I feel responsible. For having read Judith’s excellent survey of the period, and having been introduced to the likes of Robert Greene, in his doublet of goose-turd green, with his wild hair, pointed red beard, and his punk, Emma, sister to Cutting Ball Jack, I feel I ought to honour the acquaintance and put on his plays immediately.

  Roaring Boys chronicles those dangerous decades at the end of the sixteenth and start of the seventeenth centuries when British Theatre exploded into being. Judith Cook presents its dramatis personae – Henslowe’s madcap stable of writers. She paints a vivid picture of the theatres for which they were writing, of the audience to whom they performed, and of the police state that controlled them. Her meticulous attention to detail is delightful, and her insights into the role of women, for example, the impact of asylum seekers and regime change in that society, are both revealing and resonant.

  I was away on tour in Japan when Judith’s letter arrived. When I got back I accepted her invitation, only to receive an e-mail by return from her son Nick, telling me the sad news of her sudden death. I am sorry I never met her. But her book testifies to her enthusiasm for her subject, her encyclopedic knowledge of the period, and her rare gift for storytelling.

  Gregory Doran

  Stratford-upon-Avon, 2004

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the helpful staff of the British Library, Bodleian Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, the Courtauld Institute, Dulwich College, Dulwich Picture Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Library for their assistance, and Walter Hodges for allowing me to use his drawing of the Rose Theatre. Also Jaqueline Mitchell for her help and encouragement.

  Judith Cook

  Newlyn, Cornwall, 2003

  Prologue

  The scene: a busy early afternoon sometime in October 1591. The place: the Bankside, its gambling dens, brothels, ordinaries (the Elizabethan equivalent of fast food cafés), taverns, the Clink prison (one of five gaols in Southwark), the Bear Pit and the Rose Theatre, built by the businessman and entrepreneur Philip Henslowe four years earlier and now, after several months of closure, reopened, enlarged and improved.

  The cast: the people of London, the merchants, cheapjacks, cutpurses and whores (the latter known as ‘Winchester Geese’), the young bloods on the make, the merry wives (some seeking assignations), the bands of apprentice boys out looking for trouble, the hundreds of ordinary folk who have come to see a performance at the Rose of the most popular play of the day, The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. Both before and after they cross the Thames they are at risk, as they battle through the capital’s congested streets, of being run down by the increasingly heavy traffic. As John Stow grumbles: ‘The world now runs on wheels with many whose parents were glad to go on foot.’

  Further along the Bankside and going in the opposite direction, his feet squeezed into fashionable boots, is one of the theatrical world’s prime self-publicists, the poet and playwright Robert Greene. His wine-stained doublet is in his favourite colour, ‘goose turd’, a virulent yellowy-green. His red hair is greased into a cone shape behind his head while his beard, according to fellow-poet and wit, Thomas Nashe, ‘is long and red like a steeple, which he cherished continually without cutting, whereat he might hang a jewel, it is so sharp and pendant’. Behind him trudges his mistress, Emma Ball, who has recently discovered that she is pregnant. Her brother is the notorious highwayman Cutting Ball Jack. Several people stop Greene to ask whether he is intending to see The Spanish Tragedy that afternoon, but Greene tells them in an offhand way that he has better things to do with his time.

  The real reason is that he dare not show his face at the Rose after having palmed off on to Henslowe and the company of the Lord Admiral’s Men his play Orlando Furioso, assuring them it was a completely new work, for which Henslowe had paid him the substantial sum of twenty nobles – only to discover, after it had been rehearsed and given a public performance, that he had already sold the same script to the Lord Pembroke’s Men who were now touring it around the country. />
  Meanwhile in the lodgings he shares with Kyd when he is in town, Christopher Marlowe is working on his own new play, Edward II. Currently there is a vogue for historical epics following the success of Henry VI (in which he had had a hand), and Richard III, the tale of Crookbacked Dick written by the newcomer from Stratford-upon-Avon and a play which is rapidly catching up with The Spanish Tragedy in terms of popularity. Not that Marlowe need worry; his very first offering, Tamburlaine, was a smash hit – making him an instant celebrity. However, hardly anyone who will sit, or more likely stand, to see the first performance of Edward II will have any idea what they will be in for. They will soon learn. Marlowe reads over the lines he has given Edward when he tells his favourite and lover, Piers Gaveston, the nature of the entertainment he is proposing for him:

  Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape,

  With hair that gilds the water as it glides,

  Crownets of pearl about his naked arms,

  And in his sportful hands an olive-tree,

  To hide those parts which men delight to see . . .

  Kit Marlowe, the first of the gay Cambridge spies, is giving the world his own take on the subject of kingship.

  The later years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I ushered in what can only be described as the explosion of a new art form: that of professional drama – and professional drama required professional writers. What follows are the stories of some of those hopeful young men, often from very ordinary backgrounds, who were to find themselves caught up in the excitement, fame and dangers of the London theatre scene.

  INTRODUCTION

  Dangerous Times – the New World of Theatre

  Six days after these were burned to death

  God sent us our Elizabeth.

  Note in The Register (11 November 1558)

  If your ambition was to become a celebrated and popular dramatist or a famous and acclaimed actor, then you could not have chosen a better time to be born than the middle or late sixteenth century. No need for Arts Councils, subsidies or writers-in-residence; the theatrical world, desperate to service the new and growing entertainment scene and its huge audiences, was crying out for you and your work. As with Hollywood in the 1930s, the London theatre scene, run by the early entrepreneurs such as Philip Henslowe, sucked in talented writers not only from within the capital (which might be expected), but also from the provinces. A few of the new writers were born into comparative wealth, but far more, including Shakespeare, belonged to the first generation of the sons of artisans to have acquired a secondary education in the new grammar schools.

  What might be called the golden age of English theatre lasted roughly from the building of the first proper playhouse in 1576 to about 1620, and there is no doubt that the Queen’s accession in 1558 ushered in an extraordinary era in which the arts could flourish. But before opening a door into the world of the theatre, it might be useful first to have a brief look at what was happening outside in the real world, for there was a dichotomy running through almost every aspect of life and society. Great creativity burgeoned alongside almost routine brutality, awesome magnificence next to appalling squalor, a thirst for new knowledge set against shocking ignorance. Beneath the surface of the Merry England of myth there lurked always the dark, dangerous world of political intrigue, treason, danger and death.

  Professional theatre came into being at a time when men were still getting to grips with the idea that the world was round and that it circled round the sun, not the sun round the earth. There was the excitement of the new sciences, of astronomy and mathematics. Secretly and behind closed doors, people were actually questioning the truth of the stories told in the Old Testament, even such matters as how long it really was between the Creation and the present day. We know that such discussions went on because Marlowe attended one such group, often known as the ‘School of the Night’, where questions were asked such as how it could possibly have taken so long for the Jews to reach the promised land, though Marlowe took his criticism of the scriptures further, much further.1 But even while the more sophisticated citizenry were considering such matters, conventional religious belief was still virtually universal. Almost everyone believed that there really was a heaven and a hell, that at the end of your life you had to account directly to God for your misdeeds, and that there would be a Judgement Day when the graves gave up their dead. Most people also believed in witches and witchcraft, not to mention fairies.

  The extraordinary renaissance had come about in no small part because of the circumstances surrounding the Queen’s accession. She came to the throne to the acclaim of a fearful and demoralised population which had been exposed for the previous six years to the fires of Smithfield and elsewhere, death at the stake being the punishment meted out to heretics on the authority of a woman totally convinced of the rightness of her actions, a woman who had compounded her unpopularity by taking as her husband King Philip II of Spain. Now Mary Tudor, ‘Bloody Mary’, was dead and the country breathed again. The two lines of verse by an anonymous writer at the beginning of the chapter express the overwhelming feeling of relief.

  One of the statements made by Elizabeth at the start of her reign was that she had no desire to seek ‘windows into men’s souls’. Although the church had reverted again to Protestantism and she, like her father, was its defender, she did not want to rule over a country riven by religious tensions. Therefore Catholics who behaved themselves and were loyal to the crown were left alone, so long as they paid their fines for missing church of a Sunday. It was a fine aspiration to which, in the early days, the government on the orders of the Queen did its best to adhere, though as time went by dangers, both internally and from Europe, would combine to prevent its continuance.

  Elizabeth’s Court was splendid. From the first she dressed magnificently, decked with jewels, her face framed in the finest of lace ruffs, gowned in enormous farthingales covered in beadwork, seed pearls and embroidery. She employed tried and trusted advisers such as William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, who had stood by her throughout some of the worst times of her life, and Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State to the Privy Council. She surrounded herself with the most handsome courtiers, the prettiest young women and the best artists, musicians and poets of the day. When she went on one of her great progresses around the country, people turned out in their hundreds simply to watch her pass. She was, indeed, Gloriana. Her Court again offers two sides of the coin. Among the favoured poets of the era were Edmund Spenser and Walter Ralegh. Spenser might well laud Elizabeth in The Faerie Queen and Ralegh turn a pretty sonnet when he was not throwing his cloak down for the Queen to tread on, but both were involved in the most appalling acts of violence in Ireland, Ralegh joining in a massacre at which not only unarmed men were put to the sword but where women and children were also slaughtered. Renaissance Man indeed had many facets, but unthinking violence is rarely mentioned among them.

  Outside the Court in the City, the hub of commerce, visitors from overseas marvelled at the wealth of the merchants in their great mansions, the shopkeepers and tradesmen of every kind, the thriving markets. England’s great merchant venturers sailed their argosies to every corner of the known world bringing back with them, to City harbours like Billingsgate, exotic cargoes of silks, spices and ivory along with tales of strange people in stranger lands. Outside, in the country, the nobles and the wealthy built themselves grandiose stately homes which they decked with tapestries and furnished with fine furniture. To complete the picture, common land was enclosed to make their parks and great, formal gardens. Yet around the walls of the City of London itself huddled the shanty towns of the poor and those who had trudged up from the provinces to seek their fortune, clusters of dwellings in what we might describe now as ‘no-go areas’, looked on by honest citizens as nothing more than cauldrons of disease and crime. The picture Elizabeth offered to the people of England, and indeed to the world outside, was one of immense confidence, conspicuous consumption, success at home and abroad and the fe
eling that the English were indeed living in a golden age. But underneath it all that dark, disturbing and dangerous world remained, only a hair’s breadth away.

  From the first the Queen had been well aware of the dangers besetting her. All those endless negotiations over marriages which she never had any intention of going through with, the delicate and secret embassies to Europe, the stately dances of diplomacy, were designed with only one end in mind: to keep the Queen on the throne and the country safe from foreign invaders. The obvious threats were from Spain and France but there was also danger much nearer home. In 1560, two years after Elizabeth’s accession to the English throne, King Francis II of France died and the following year his widow, the young Mary, Queen of Scots, returned home. Unsurprisingly, given her charm, looks, position and lack of judgement, she soon became a honeypot for ambitious men wanting to marry her and get their hands on the levers of power. She chose disastrously, marrying her cousin, Lord Darnley, in 1565. Within three years she had given birth to the heir to the Scottish throne, had very possibly been complicit in the murder of her husband, had scandalised her government by involving herself with the Earl of Bothwell and, after arrest and imprisonment, had escaped to England seeking sanctuary.

  Despite the long history of enmity with Scotland, Elizabeth reluctantly agreed to her plea with the result that from that day until her death over twenty years later, Mary was the ready-made figurehead with a claim to the English throne around which malcontents and Catholic plotters could gather. Indeed, within a year of her arrival the Catholic Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland were planning rebellion, while the Catholic Earl of Norfolk, Thomas Percy, was making overtures of marriage to her, which she was encouraging for all she was worth. Popular romance has Mary as a martyred heroine, taking little or no part in the activities undertaken in her name, but she was soon sending messages to the Spanish Duke of Alva asking for help for the Earls. ‘Tell your master’, she wrote to him, ‘that if he will help me, I shall be Queen of England in three months.’ No doubt about that then.