The Elizabethans

by Wilson, A. N.

  In any society that was changing as rapidly as the early-modern period in England, however, there were bound to be dissidents of all kinds: those who did not conform to the norm decreed by the all-powerful, all-centralising Council, dominated by the inner ring of Burghley, Walsingham and the Protestant junta, who both accepted the capricious absolutism of the Queen and judiciously manipulated it. That caprice could take off the head of a Duke of Norfolk. Burghley himself had come close to being sent to the Tower. If she had positively insisted upon a dynastic marriage with a European prince who disliked them, the position of the junta would have been precarious indeed. But, for the most part, the coalition between the Queen and the inner ring was mutually beneficial and this fed and strengthened the arm of Walsingham’s spy-network. Anyone who threatened the state, anyone who threatened the prevailing orthodoxies, was in danger of losing ear or hand or tongue or life. Yet – and here was one of the great differences between Elizabethan England and the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century – there was a palpable sense in the country at large of rebirth, of creative energy, of newness and expansion. There was a new religion; or at any rate, a National Church which ratified the Reformation. Perhaps many disliked it, for not being the old Latin rite, or for not following the new Reformed paths. But it was itself new. There were new schools. Ships – English ships – sailed to new lands, and brought back not merely undreamed-of treasure, but the sense of an expanded world. In churches, halls, palaces and country houses, new music delighted the ear. You could not be alive in Elizabethan England and not feel that it was a young country, full of the capacity to reinvent itself.

  And central to its stupendous flowering, its intense magnification and its Herculean self-discovery was the vastly expanding capital of London. In this teeming womb of new life, new disease, new squalor and new glory, we should expect strange things to emerge. Patrons, such as the Sidneys, or as the young Earls of Oxford or Southampton, might bring on poets and musicians, courtly writers who could embroider new verses as finely wrought as their tapestries. But the masque, the madrigal or the privately circulated sonnet-sequence would not be enough to contain all the loud, sharp, all-but-unutterable matters that this changing world was bringing to birth. Novels, pamphlets and, above all, plays began to emerge as fascinating expressions of their times, and as subversions of them.

  Sidney’s Arcadia, in its developed and unfinished revision, was by far the most interesting work of prose-fiction of the times, but it was never intended by its author for publication, as far as we know: his sister saw it through the presses in 1590 in a somewhat mangled form.

  John Lyly (c. 1554–1606), who was probably roughly of Sidney’s age, was one of the so-called University Wits to emerge onto the literary scene, a figure of interest not merely for what he wrote, but for what he represented: namely, that first generation who emerged from what we should call higher education into an entirely Protestant world; where, if you were not lucky or clever enough to become a don, or to enter one of the professions, you needed a combination of a patron’s help and your own wits to keep afloat. From figures in such circumstances was to emerge much of the most interesting literature of the time. The explorer among the Elizabethan bookshelves encounters Lyly in several modes – as proto-novelist, as playwright, as government lickspittle and as a Member of Parliament.

  Lyly, like Sidney, was an Oxford man (Magdalen College), but from a far less-exalted family background. He was born in the Weald of Kent, and when he matriculated his university described him, with a no doubt accurate lack of mercy, as ‘plebeii filius’, a son of a pleb. This would not have meant that he was the son of the lowest rank. It meant he was not a gentleman. Edmund Spenser, George Peele, Thomas Lodge, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe – they all came from the middle rank, from the class who made or sold things rather than living, as their sons would do, by their wits. Lyly was of slightly higher stock than this: the grandson of an Eton master and the nephew of two masters at St Paul’s. This is the class that in later generations and other countries would produce the French revolutionaries, the Russian communist-anarchists. It is the class from which dissent and discontent and change comes, but it is also the class that in a creatively successful society wishes to ‘better itself’. One of the measures of a society’s health is what this class does to the greater group. In Weimar Germany, the discontented shopkeeper, the clever weaver or glover or tanner would help the ‘extremes’ of Right or Left to devour the Common Good like cancers. In Victorian England, the clever aspirant classes actually became the new order. Lord Salisbury, Burghley’s Cecil descendant, could sneer at the Daily Mail as being written by and for office boys, but he ended his career wooing the political votes of office boys. In the pre-industrial world of Elizabethan England, those who were too clever to belong to the class in which they were born did not create a petty bourgeoisie, as in Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham. But they were emerging all over the place, entering the professions, entering the universities, and when successful – as was the glover’s son from Stratford-upon-Avon – wanting to make themselves into gentlefolk. To be able to write the letters MA (Master of Arts) after your name made you, in this world, ‘generosus’, a gentleman.

  That was Lyly’s hope and aspiration, too; though it was not the path trodden by other ‘University Wits’. He hoped for advancement. There was evidently some family connection that enabled him to approach Burghley for patronage. He tried to get a Fellowship at one of the universities, but it did not happen. He wrote a novel whose title was destined to become an epithet in literary history: Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit. It is a crib of a translation – North’s rendering of Antonio de Guevara’s El Reloj de Principes (Diall of Princes). It is not so much for the boring story that Euphues is remembered, as for its style – an excessive use of alliteration and antithesis, and constant allusion to classical literature and mythology. This alone, even if it were not for the crashing tedium of Euphues and his chum Philautus pursuing their romantic attachment to (in the first book) Greek and (in Euphues and His England) English girls. Yet the book, which almost no one outside English Literature courses in universities would today find so much as readable, was highly regarded. There was no such thing as mass literacy, but when we see that Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit went through four editions between 1578 and 1580, we could rank it as the equivalent of a best-seller. Lyly was able to attract the patronage of Lord Oxford, and the kindly notice of Oxford’s father-in-law, Burghley. In 1584 Lyly’s ambition to have a place at court advanced one stage when he was offered a prestigious writing job: plays to be performed by the child actors’ companies of the Chapel Royal and St Paul’s Cathedral.

  The choristers of St Paul’s had been performing plays since the Middle Ages, even before Colet founded the school in the reign of Henry VII. Plays, particularly at Christmas time, were a part of life in many schools – either the Latin comedies of Terence or Plautus, or morality plays, or plays based on the Bible – ‘so always’, as a cautious Henrician statute of 1543 made clear, ‘the said songes playes or enterludes medle not with the interpretacions of scripture’.10

  The huge population growth in London changed the place of theatre. Among the floating population who came into London to beg or to steal there were players. The Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds, of 1571/2, stipulated that ‘all Comon Players in Enterludes Mynstrels Juglers . . . [who] wander abroade . . . [without] Lycense of two Justices of the Peace . . . shall bee taken adjudged and deemed Roges Vacaboundes and Sturdy Beggers’.

  In the short term, the panic felt by the authorities when crowds gathered together necessitated a strict licensing code for theatres. And this had the effect of making the boys’ theatres, one of the few sources of licensed entertainment in a populous capital city, increasingly popular. By 1584 Lyly had written a couple of well-wrought comedies for the joint boys’ company of St Paul’s and the Chapel Royal, and they had been performed at court. But although the City fathers by th
eir draconian laws had hoped to exclude the vagabond players from London, the fluting-voiced company of boys from St Paul’s had demonstrated to would-be professional grown-up actors the full extent of theatrical possibilities in London: not simply in summer, when ‘enterludes’, dances and other theatricals could be performed on open-air stages, but in purpose-built theatres.

  It was the triumph of a joiner-cum-actor, James Burbage, to persuade the City to license the first purpose-built theatre in London. Burbage took a lease of land in Shoreditch, just outside the City walls, in 1576. The plays he staged were so popular that an imitation, known as the Curtain, was built nearby in the same year. This was the beginning for a new mirror on the world. A new literature could be born to supply the structures that Burbage built. Nine years after Burbage’s ‘The Theatre’, the Rose was built on Bankside, just opposite St Paul’s on the south side of the river, on the edge of some of the seediest brothels and taverns in London. In 1595 Francis Langley would build the Swan, also on Bankside. In 1598 came perhaps the most famous theatre ever built, the Globe, and in 1600, in Cripplegate, Henslowe and Alleyn built the Fortune.

  The children who had in some senses precipitated the theatre-mania of adult Elizabethans were to remain part of its success story. No woman was permitted to appear on the Elizabethan stage. It was an all-male affair, which meant that female parts, as well as parts suitable for children such as fairies, angels and imps, were always played by boys.

  In his elegy for Salathiel Pavy, a famous child actor who appeared with the St Paul’s company, Ben Jonson gives us an exact account of the ages of these theatre-children:

  Yeeres he numbred scarse thirteen

  When Fates turn’d cruell,

  Yet three fill’d Zodiackes had he beene

  The stages jewell:

  And did act (what now we mone)

  Old men so duely

  As, sooth, the Parcae thought him one . . .

  So we know that boys were engaged into theatrical companies aged ten. Nathan Field, another famous boy actor, was thirteen when he was ‘pressed’ into service in a theatrical company. He continued to be an actor as a grown-up.

  As with other trades, boys served an apprenticeship if they wanted to work in the theatre. The length of the apprenticeship would vary. Some court cases show that boys were apprenticed for as long as twelve years; for others, the apprenticeship was as little as three years. In an agreement between one Martin Slater and the Whitefriars Theatre in 1609, it was agreed that all children would be bound to Slater for three years. In his diary, Philip Henslowe, who died c.1610, the builder of the Rose theatre and a theatrical impresario, mentions two boy players who were apprenticed to Thomas Dowton: ‘Delivered unto Thomas Dowton’s boy Thomas Parsons to buy divers things for the play of the Spencers the 16 of April 1599 the sum of £5’. The next year Dowton himself borrowed £2 to enable him to buy the costume for his boy in a play about Cupid and Psyche.11

  The apprentice boy actors would not have received wages, but they would have been clothed and fed, perhaps better than if at home with their families. They would have lived with their masters, and they would learn by taking part in plays from the start – first, as extras in a crowd, then in smaller roles as pages, fairies or children, and finally as women. Although there were no theatre schools, the training for actors would have been formal. They would have studied gesture, for example, from books such as Bulwer’s Chirologia or the Naturall Language of the Hand. Although this was a seventeenth-century book, which described in precise detail the meaning of individual hand-gestures – and was prompted chiefly by medical interest, partly by social observation, for the purposes of teaching etiquette – we know that it was studied in the theatre, and that Elizabethan actors would have made similar studies.12 Boys who were to grow up to play members of the nobility would have to learn to move like noblemen and women. They would learn swordsmanship, to make the fight scenes convincing. They would perfect their dancing:

  They bid us to the English dancing-schools

  And teach lavoltas high and swift corantoes

  as Bourbon says of the English in Henry V. And they would have sung – hence the great importance of the boys’ theatre companies attached to the cathedrals. Choir boys in England, then as now, were trained in a way that differed markedly from continental operatic styles. In the windows of the Beauchamp Chapel of St Mary’s, Warwick may be seen angels opening their mouths laterally, with the natural jaw position adopted by sixteenth-century (and modern English) choir boys. The tongue is in contact with the lower teeth, and the jaw is brought forward, enabling a pure, high sound; a lightly flexible voice of the kind needed to sing sixteenth-century polyphonic music. A well-trained boy can produce a three-octave range from B-flat or D below middle C to the G above top C. These English traditions dated back to pre-Reformation times in England. The Venetian Ambassador, hearing the choir boys sing for Henry VIII, said they were ‘more divine than human’, and when we consider what William Cornish (who died in 1523) required of the boys in his Eton Choirbook – an astounding vocal agility by the trebles in his Magnificat, for example – you realise what a very distinctive level of prodigy could be found among boy voices. This talent was taken into the theatres, where song was so frequently used, and where trained verse-speaking was developed to a superbly high standard.

  Nothing happens by accident. The theatre in London was made by a group of immensely talented boys and young men, fired up by theatrically minded entrepreneurs. At first they displayed their skills on the comedies of Lyly, but almost literally waiting in the wings were Marlowe and Shakespeare. They could not have existed, however, had not the likes James Burbage built the first public theatre, and had not the acting companies been of a superlative quality.

  The boys, many of them, were choir boys or ex-choir boys. And many of the men of the Elizabethan theatre might easily, in a pre-Protestant age, have exercised their talents in the Church. Christopher Marley (baptised in Canterbury in 1564), whom we know as Marlowe, the son of a shoe-maker, went to King’s School, Canterbury, and then on to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on a Parker Scholarship – money given by Archbishop Parker for a scholar at the King’s School and intended for candidates for Holy Orders.13 Lyly would surely, too, have taken orders if he had managed to obtain a Fellowship at Oxford or Cambridge.

  Robert Greene, a sizar (a scholar who did the work of a servant to pay his way) of St John’s College, Cambridge (1575), who died in wretched poverty in his very early thirties in 1592, was aptly described as ‘in some sort the hero and spokesman of all the commercial writers’.14 Greene, like other University Wits, considered himself ‘too good’ for the theatre. He published from fifteen to twenty works of fiction, and pamphlets, before he turned to the theatre because it was so profitable. Burbage and Henslowe and the other entrepreneurs could pack in, perhaps, 2,000 spectators to one performance. If they charged a penny a time, there was huge money to be made.15 Henslowe paid his poets £6 for the completion of a play.16 It was a lot of money. No wonder a figure like Greene, an impoverished intellectual who had failed to secure an academic post, was drawn to it. Yet, as his self-dramatising autobiographies show, he despised the coarse, stupid actors, and half-loathed himself for the dissipation into which theatrical life drew him. In Francesco’s Fortune his self-image, Francesco, ‘fell in amongst a company of players, who persuaded him to try his wit in writing of comedies, tragedies or pastorals, and if he could perform anything worthy of the stage, then they would largely reward him for his pains’. As so often in Greene’s autobiographical fantasies, the work is stupendously successful. (Greene was a popular writer, but perhaps never as popular as his exaggerated stories suggest.) In Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, the Greene-figure, Roberto, has been swindled by a prostitute. He sits disconsolately beside a hedge, reciting Latin and English verses, and happens to meet a player who is a gentleman-scholar fallen on hard times. ‘I was a country author passing at a moral, for it was I that penned the mo
ral of man’s wit, the Dialogue of Dives, and for seven years apace was absolute interpreter of the puppets. But now my almanac is out of date.’ Roberto (Greene) is lured into the tempting world of the theatre and then, eaten up with self-hatred for the waste of talent that the life of the jobbing playwright entails, needs to drown his sorrows among criminals and debauchees. With luridly grovelling repentance, he warns those ‘gentlemen his quondam acquaintance that spent their wit in making plays’: obviously, he is thinking of such figures as Marlowe, Peele, Lodge and Thomas Nashe – the most ingenious of Elizabethan ‘novelists’ and an incomparably better writer than Greene.

  But Greene’s writings paint an indelible picture of the world into which the University Wits were lured. Theatre-history at this period exemplifies something comparable to the pop-culture of the 1960s. It began by attracting young people from the fringes of society, and it became mainstream. By modern standards, the restrictions upon the drama were adamantine. But there was more room in the theatre for the subversive than there was in pamphlet literature. The actors were alive, the plays brought to life an alternative world and an alternative set of values, or, in the most colourful case – that of Marlowe – of non-values.

  Marlowe (1564–93), Greene’s Cambridge contemporary, had a lurid, short life – he was twenty-nine when he was murdered. Hazlitt saw that there ‘was a lust of power in his writings, a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness, a glow of the imagination, unhallowed by anything but its own energies’.17 In his brittle abnegation of conventional morality, and in his swaggering espousal of violence, blasphemy and sexual deviancy, he seems to anticipate twentieth-century figures such as Jean Genet and Michel Foucault. We certainly feel in Marlowe’s life that the London theatre was an outlet for his genius, which no other medium could conceivably have supplied.