Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  A high, battlemented prison with a portcullis and an opening for traffic, Newgate was one of seven gates on the Roman and medieval walls -- thick, crumbling, running for more than two miles -- that hemmed in London on three sides. Outside the walls were 'liberties', or districts within county boundaries but in some instances free of their jurisdiction and subject to the municipal one. Wagons and carts of all descriptions, drawn by oxen, horses, or mules, or pushed or pulled by men, went through the great gates. On the river side the gate had vanished, but Bishopsgate, Moorgate, Cripplegate, and Aldersgate separated citizens from a crowded jumble of liberties and suburbs to the north; Newgate and Ludgate looked west to Charing Cross and royal Westminster, and Aldgate faced east. The inner city and the suburbs alike were unsanitary: as animal corpses rotted in the open, so offal, urine, and faeces were dumped in London's streets. In mean alleys, the rickety hovels beat back fresh air and light, and conditions were worse

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  in poor areas beyond the walls. The stench of the metropolis was appalling, its overcrowding severe -- and yet some city wards were beautiful, with ornate façades, spacious gardens, and numerous wild flowers.

  The city's pride, wealth, and self-confidence were evident on the Thames, with its hundreds of high masts, wherries, and barges, and on London Bridge with its three-storey structures, twelve-foot-wide passage -- dangerous when sheep or cattle were driven over -- and a garish, barbarous warning of sometimes as many as two or three dozen traitors' heads stuck up on poles. There was an unbroken sweep of public and private buildings on the curving river from the royal city in the west to the Tower of London in the east. The Tudor chronicler John Stow shows that the Tower under its turnip-like turrets had a number of functions. It was a citadel of defence and a royal venue for assemblies and 'treaties', a prison for the most dangerous, an armoury, a place of coinage, a treasury, even an archive; Stratford's council, anxious for the town, sent citizens to the Tower to ferret into its legal records. A recent writer adds helpfully that couples could be married at the Tower and that it had a menagerie. ( Paul Hentzner noted in 1598 that this included lions, a tiger and a lynx, an old wolf, an eagle and porcupine.) 5 But just why Shakespeare alludes more often to the Tower than to any other building is another matter.

  A visitor -- at first sight -- might view the Tower romantically. Though William the Conqueror built it, Shakespeare refers in Richard II to ' Julius Caesar's ill-erected Tower'; the myth of Caesar as its builder linked it with grammar-school days (every boy in Lower School met Caesar in Lily's first grammar). Royal Westminster pointed to the classical past, too, in the popular myth that British monarchs were all descended from a Prince Brutus, who fought at Troy. Yet Shakespeare hardly let myths keep him from studying an authentic city. His mind was romantic enough to surfeit of its excesses, so that he looked for the reason of things; he brought analytical intelligence to London's past in his early history plays. Penetrating the Tower's romance, he would see it as a gateway to England's real history -- and as one enticing, blood-ridden and tragic locale of events.

  Passing through Newgate, he would have entered a world of tall, leaning houses and shops, filled streets, mercantile energy. Though

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  quiet by modern standards, the city with its sellers' cries and a myriad bells would have seemed a riot of noise. It was filled with young people -- apprentices made up a tenth of its populace -- and vagabonds, prostitutes, unwed mothers, 'masterless men' and part-time workers swelled the number. 6 There were over a hundred bordellos in and outside the walls: streets were erotic, with a grotesque bawdiness or a sleazy prettiness in the air. The Bankside 'Stewes' were closed (and prostitutes were licensed), but girls solicited even inside St Paul's Cathedral. The city, in many ways, would feed his talent as a playwright of love, bawdry, and tragic sensuality while appealing to his image-making interests.

  Much of its working life was disciplined by guilds or livery companies which controlled trades, as well as by masters of shops -- who had to support their apprentices' illegitimate children -- and by preachers, local officials, and watchful neighbours. One in ten householders, directly or indirectly, was involved in the government in some way; this figure rose to about one in three in a wealthy inner-city ward such `as Cornhill. Despite brawls, cut-purse gangs, and major civic unrest, by far the worst threat in London was the recurrence of bubonic plague and other epidemics.

  Shakespeare was later to live among French Huguenots. Aliens, or 'strangers', mostly from France and the Netherlands, were resented, though the Elizabethan apprentices -- who broke skulls -- never did riot against them. Poets and actors came to know 'Petty France' in Bishopsgate ward, 'Petty Almaine' and 'Petty Flanders' in Thames Street; they learned of Italy in the city, and met Jews. So-called Marranos, or Portuguese and Spanish Jews in the east and north-west wards, added to overseas trading contacts, worked in retailing, the crafts, or medicine, and supplied intelligence to the Crown before and after the war with Spain began in 1585. A second small community of London's Jews, of sixty or a hundred, had originated in musicians recruited in Venice by Henry VIII; some descendants included royal musicians, a few of whom were likely to be known later to the author of The Merchant of Venice. 7 Cosmopolitan London broadened Shakespeare's outlook, and foreign stories and the talk of Europe were to give him dramatic material.

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  London's Jews -- some of them observant -- relied on the Privy Council's tacit approval. But though no more likely to tolerate Jews than theatres, London's preachers saw the players as the chief, glaring, abomination: 'The cause of plagues is sinne, if you look to it well', as Thomas White had preached at Paul's Cross in the shadow of St Paul's Cathedral in November 1577, 'and the cause of sinne are playes: therefore the cause of plagues are playes'. 8 Even before that syllogism, theatres had been built out beyond the city within the more lax jurisdiction of county authorities.

  Yet the players' situation was complex. Sometimes the Queen's Council, in fear of riot or disease, saw eye to eye with the irate city fathers and forbade playing in the suburbs. At other times the city fathers -- or the Lord Mayor and his aldermen and common councilmen, who could raise money by regulating vigorous and profitable theatres -- issued such a weak, pro forma complaint as to encourage playing within the walls.

  When Shakespeare arrived a demand for theatre was growing. As play-goers for a penny, apprentices might escape for three hours from their fixed drudgery, rules, and roles. The privileged needed release, too. The city was becoming a social centre for the gentry, who thronged there partly to wage their law-cases: London's need for grain was about 11.5 per cent higher during the law terms. 9 Merchants and their wives, courtiers and litigants, sojourners and students in the Inns of Court and Chancery -- taking afternoons off from dancing, fencing-school, or even their law-books -- made up elements of a sophisticated, trainable audience, and the 'termers' or law students were, in effect, to help train the playwrights. Art responds to the wit of its receivers, and London audiences helped a new, paradoxical, immensely powerful drama into being. Even the Puritan opposition helped. Puritans saved the age from a brittle rationalism by insisting on the necessity of divine revelation, and spoke for intense, inward operations of conscience -- upon which high tragedy depends -- as well as for literacy and the value of the word.

  Since the beginning of the reign, plays had been put on in London's streets, inns, private houses, schools, and colleges. Biographers have said that the first purpose-built theatre, in use when Shakespeare was

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  a schoolboy, dates from 1576. But we know of a free-standing theatre of earlier date: it was built in 1567 by John Brayne, a Bucklersbury grocer, with helpers at Whitechapel outside Aldgate. The site was near the garden of the Red Lion, which was not, so far as we know, an inn, but a 'messuage or farme house called and knowen by the Sygne of the Redd Lyon'. 10 A five-foot-high stage, a thirty-foot turret, and tiers of galleries were 'framed' (or prefabricated) by 1 July 1567, when a
dispute between Brayne and his chief builder, William Sylvester, stopped work. An appeal to the Company of Carpenters dragged on, and though plays were put on here, the venture never prospered. Yet the Red Lion's structure was influential, whether or not it resembled Henry VIII's hall at Calais, or that of the banqueting house, partly of canvas, where Othello was to be performed in 1604. 11

  Brayne, a plucky investor, must have recalled the design when he collaborated in 1576 with his brother-in-law James Burbagc. Failing to thrive as a joiner, or craftsman-carpenter, Burbage became a player with the Earl of Leicester's troupe and possibly its head (or at least its payee). He sought in the theatre a 'great profitt', 12 and his financial anxiety matched his ardour for the playing profession; he was to be a close associate of Shakespeare's. Lacking funds, he borrowed from Brayne, so that a new amphitheatre rose north of the city -- the Theater.

  Located in the liberty of Halliwell (or Holywell) where a Benedictine priory had stood in the Middlesex parish of St Leonard's, Shoreditch, the Theater, too, was safe from city fathers. Its name, from the Latin theatrum, taunted people alert to pagan vices; a few spelled it as the 'Theatre', which was closer to the root-word theatrum, in order to link the enterprise with the supposed riots and depravity of the ancient Roman theatre; but the two different spellings, in an era of unsettled spelling, were also used interchangeably by the literate (and, in retrospect, both are correct enough). Puritans hoped for the playhouse's ruin, and there is evidence that Brayne had built it in such a way that it could be dismantled in a crisis.

  As a business enterprise it was wildly risky, with costs estimated at 1,000 marks (£666). Burbage hungered after profit, and the costs agonized him. 'The Theater he built with many hundred pounds

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  taken up at interest', his son Cuthbert later claimed in a very filial tribute to Burbage's merits. But while Brayne and his wife Margaret had worked on the building site without pay, Burbage took a cut from assets during construction; when the structure yielded profits of about £190-£235 per annum he was caught, it seems, with a hand in the till. Using a secret key for two years, Burbage, it was alleged, filched from a 'commen box where the money gathered at the said playes was putt in', and thrust coins 'in his bosome or other where about his bodye'. In due course, there was violence. Feeling out-swindled by his partner, Burbage hit Brayne with his fist 'so they went together by the eares', and later reviled Margaret Brayne, calling her 'whore', while his sonRichard (who was to play Shakespeare's tragic roles) beat one of Brayne's men with a broom-staff. Depending on his dutiful sons, Burbage shouted that if he saw Brayne's allies again, his boys would take pistols and shoot them in the legs with powder and hempseed.

  Burbage, a 'stubborne fellow', apparently never denied that he had filched from Brayne and the players. Witnesses supported allegations against him. 13 At this distance, his conduct is hard to judge -- but his warfare with Brayne and Margaret illustrates not only rivalries, suspicions, a knockabout atmosphere, but also a nerve-racking pressure in the 'business' which Shakespeare, as a player, was trying to enter.

  The Theater or Theatre cost its entrepreneurs more than they had planned, and while expenses soared, rival venues multiplied. Two hundred yards to the south, the Curtain opened at Moorfields in 1577. Its builder Henry Lanman, or Laneman, a Londoner who rented land at Curtain Close, had financial worries himself, until the Curtain became an 'easer' to the Theater with profits at the two houses pooled. Late in the 1590s, it would serve as a venue for Shakespeare's company, the Chamberlain's men, who were then winning what Marston calls 'Curtain plaudities' for Romeo and Juliet. 14

  Within two years of Burbage's opening, plays were regularly performed at eight or more London venues. Troupes were using converted inns, such as the Bell and Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street, the Bull in Bishopsgate Street, the Boar's Head near the Red Lion in Whitechapel, and the Bel Savage on Ludgate Hill. With stands for

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  spectators and changing-rooms for actors, innyard theatres were not then a novelty -- nor were they obsolete. The boy companies, made up of children from élite schools, had also found a good year-round market for stage spectacles. By going to school for a few hours a day, the boys kept up the fiction they were performing not for money, but to show off their educational skills. Intermittently for a decade and a half after 1575 (and later from 1600 to 1606) the choristers of Paul's School drew people to a small, indoor hall-theatre near their Chapter House. Their little rivals of the Royal Chapel held indoor shows at their own hall -- in Blackfriars -- until 1583-4.

  But somewhat nearer the time when Shakespeare was starting in London, much fiercer competition for Burbage (and for all northern theatres) began south of the river on Bankside. Watermen, for decades, had ferried people over to watch bull- and bear-baiting; the animal arenas were in Paris Garden and the Clink, south-west of London Bridge, and so beyond the city's jurisdiction at St Saviour's parish, Southwark. That parish was oddly split into three administrative areas: its eastern district of the Boroughside was in Bridge Ward Without (one of London's twenty-six wards) but its two liberties of the Clink and Paris Garden were subject to Surrey authorities. 15 Famous for its prison, the Clink was on low, marshy land within the river's flood plain, and protected by earthwork embankments. Fiftyeight acres were taken up by Winchester Park with its chestnut trees, and there were ponds for pike and carp, some orchards and bowling greens, a bear garden, and bordellos (despite attempts to close them).

  Here Philip Henslowe, a former dyer's apprentice who had married his master's rich widow, took a lease on the Little Rose estate, near Rose Alley and Maiden Lane. Once the site of a rose garden, the lot had been charitably bequeathed to the parish of St Mildred, Bread Street, and Henslowe saw money in it. With John Cholmley, a grocer, he planned a theatre, and his deed, of 10 January 1587, refers to 'a playe howse now in framinge and shortly to be ereckted'. 16 (This seems to mean that the Rose playhouse, like the Red Lion, was prefabricated before it was set up.) Possibly Cholmley died or opted out of the project. But the Rose flourished. So did Henslowe, who became the age's greatest theatrical landlord, not above lending money to impecunious

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  players and poets who did not always thank him. He jotted wryly in a famous account book, or Diary:

  when I lent I wasse A frend & when I asked I wasse unkind. 17

  Henslowe, too, had miseries. A theatre may have seemed to him (as to Burbage) a costly sink, with the Rose empty for months while playing companies favoured other sites, disbanded, or fled by road because of civic riots or plague. We lack lists of performances at the Rose until 1592, when Shakespeare 1 Henry VI (if it is 'harey the vj') reached its boards, by which time Shakespeare had possibly acted there. Arguably it was one birthplace of Elizabethan tragedy, since Kyd The Spanish Tragedy and all of Marlowe's plays must have been staged there. It was a training ground for Shakespeare as a poet (its landlord notes a showing of 'titus & ondronicus' 18 ). And the Rose is important in another way. The discovery and unearthing of its foundations near Southwark Bridge, in 1989, has given us more exact, reliable data about the design of Shakespearean playhouses than we had had from all other sources in three centuries.

  Henslowe's builder, John Griggs, used a beautiful design. Under its thatched roof, the Rose had a polygonal shape. Its stage was a small, neat trapezoid, only fifteen feet six inches deep, with a curving back wall or frons scenae. That was unlike the big, rectangular, jutting stages which are sometimes said to be the only kind Shakespeare knew. Critics, before 1989, often based ideas about his theatres on a vague, unreliable copy of a sketch of the Swan playhouse. The Rose's sheltered stage, with its actors' changing-room or tiring-house, was wide at the back, but it tapered to a width of less than twenty-five feet at the front. Actors overlooked the 'groundlings', or standing spectators, who cracked hazel nuts and drank bottled ale in a firmly mortared yard, sloped or raked to the front. There was room for 600 people in the yard, another 1,404 in the gallerie
s (three tiers or storeys of them with benches), so the Rose could accommodate audiences of 2,000. 19

  Yet Shakespeare was to find that this theatre afforded intimacy. It was so designed that, in roofed galleries, which began thirty to thirtysix feet from the stage, people were close enough to catch the actors' nuances of tone and facial expression. The Rose's properties included

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  screens, painted objects, and backcloths such as 'Hell Mouth' or 'the City of Rome', and audiences were close enough to savour the gorgeous costumes of performers in their velvet, satin, or taffeta. The theatre was lavishly, stunningly painted -- as was every London amphitheatre -- but here, close to the stage, audiences were all the more likely to react to the assault of colour and to dazzling and cunning visual effects. Indeed, Shakespeare's extraordinary use of visual stagecraft was to be influenced by the Rose, where audiences were trained to see and to remember what they saw.

  Acting was not always skilful or restrained, but at its best it had become highly sophisticated, and it was the more brilliant at the Rose because of the sensible proportions of the theatre. Lifelike realism combined with the utmost stylization; players could make use of stock reactions or stock attitudes, as Alan C. Dessen has shown, inasmuch as stage directions can ask the actor to enter 'as robbed', 'as from bed', 'as from dinner', or 'as newly come from play', and the psychology of impersonation was not yet well developed. In his own early plays Shakespeare could rely on audiences' reactions to very standard types of characters. But even so, at the Rose at least, effects on stage did not need to be exaggerated or crude. An actor hardly needed to roar, declaim, or 'tear a passion to tatters'; Hamlet's advice to the Players is proof enough that Shakespeare had known a theatre where naturalness was possible. 20