A Journey Through Tudor England (24 page)
Read A Journey Through Tudor England Online
Authors: Suzannah Lipscomb
The couple returned to Henley Street to live with William’s parents and, in 1585, Anne gave birth to twins, Hamnet and Judith, named after old Catholic friends of the family. Twins, of course, frequently feature in Shakespeare’s plays. But no more children were born to the Shakespeares, which might suggest that William had already left for London, for apart from his children’s baptisms and a court case in 1587, Shakespeare disappears from the records for a decade after his marriage, only re-emerging in a pamphlet in 1592 that indicates he had achieved some fame (or infamy) as a writer in London.
How Shakespeare moved from glover’s son to acclaimed London playwright we may never know, and this fuels much of the speculation concerning his authorship. All we know is that by April 1592, his
Henry VI Part 1
was being performed at the Rose Theatre in London, and attracting crowds of 2,000 to 3,000 people a performance, for fifteen shows.
Many of his early plays, such as
Titus Andronicus, The Two Gentleman of Verona
and
The Taming of the Shrew
, adapted existing plots, and it was for this that Robert Greene attacked Shakespeare in his 1592 pamphlet, which plays on a line from
Henry VI Part 3:
There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with
his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide
supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute
Johannes Factotum
(Jack of all trades), is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.
Despite this criticism, it was Shakespeare’s verse that won him not only acclaim, but patronage. In 1593, he dedicated his erotic poem ‘Venus and Adonis’ to his new patron Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton. Another epic poem, ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, followed the next year. In theatrical terms, too, he had found a patron: in May 1594, Shakespeare and Richard Burbage joined with the newly formed Lord Chamberlain’s Men, under the patronage of Lord Hunsdon. What followed was an extraordinary outpouring of creativity as Shakespeare produced a series of plays including
Romeo and Juliet
and
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.
His family continued to live at the Henley Street house, with William returning perhaps only annually. In August 1597, William received some devastating news from Stratford: his only son, Hamnet, had died at the age of eleven. Psychoanalysts may find some link between this tragedy and Shakespeare’s apparent crisis, seen in the sonnets he produced around this time. After being married for fifteen years and living mostly apart from his wife, William wrote a string of sonnets to a beautiful young aristocrat, and then a number of impassioned love poems to a married woman, his dark mistress [see G
AWSWORTH
H
ALL
]. ‘Shall I Compare Thee To a Summer’s Day’ was written to a man, tentatively identified as William Herbert, later Earl of Pembroke, and described in the lines:
A woman’s face, with nature’s own hand painted, Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion.
In 1597, Shakespeare decided to invest in some property. He returned to Stratford to buy New Place, the second biggest house in town. It no longer stands, having been demolished in the eighteenth century (something that to modern sensibilities would seem unconscionable), but has recently been excavated, and was
described by antiquary John Leland as a ‘pretty house of brick and timber’. You can visit the site, next to Nash’s House, later owned by Shakespeare’s grandchild, Elizabeth, and her husband, Thomas Nash. As you walk around Stratford with its many wonderful Tudor houses, you’ll find it isn’t difficult to imagine what sort of house New Place was.
Over the next year, Shakespeare wrote
The Merchant of Venice
and created his beloved character, Falstaff, in
Henry IV Part 2
. These were followed by four famed plays examining the inner life:
Henry V, As You Like It, Julius Caesar
and
Hamlet
, his first tragedy, with its character whose name was so reminiscent of his son’s.
Julius-Caesar
was probably the first play to be performed in the Chamberlain’s Men’s new theatre on the south of the Thames, the Globe, which could hold an astonishing 3,300 people.
In 1601, Shakespeare again returned to Stratford, this time to bury his father, in Holy Trinity Church. Back in London, he lodged with a French Huguenot family in Silver Street (a few streets away from Nicholas Hilliard in Gutter Lane) and wrote his great
Othello
. On 2 February 1603, Shakespeare’s company performed before Elizabeth I for the last time. After forty-five years of rule, she died a month later and, on James I’s command, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were reborn as the King’s Men. Over the next four years, with this royal patronage, Shakespeare was again productive, writing
Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra
and his great plays,
King Lear
and
Macbeth
. In total, between 1599 and 1606 he completed fourteen plays, including some of the most celebrated works in English literature.
During 1608—10, plague closed the London theatres, and Shakespeare probably returned to Stratford, where he buried his mother and, at New Place, possibly wrote
The Winter’s Tale, Pericles
and
The Tempest
. As his last solo play,
The Tempest
, with its talk of ‘heavenly music’, is often seen as a valediction.
The original Globe Theatre only lasted fourteen years. It burnt down in June 1613 during a performance
of Henry the Eighth, or, All is True
after a stray cannon ball set fire to the thatched roof. It was rebuilt a year later and this second iteration lasted until the Civil War. In 1997, a modern reconstruction was completed, 750 feet from the original theatre. Although not an exact reproduction of the Elizabethan venue, it is as faithful to the original as modern ideas of safety and comfort allow — it holds only half the original audience — and has already outlived the theatre that Shakespeare knew.
Three years later, on almost exactly his fifty-second birthday, William Shakespeare passed away. To his long-suffering Stratford wife he left ‘his second best bed’. At Holy Trinity Church in Stratford you can visit his grave, which was left unscathed during a 2008 restoration of the church, thereby respecting the lines on his gravestone which read:
‘Blessed be the man that spares these stones, and cursed be he who moves my bones.’
ELIZABETHAN THEATRE
The theatre was a boom industry in Elizabethan London.
Before the 1570s, theatrical performances had been the preserve of bands of travelling players, acting in whatever spaces they could find. The rising population of England had, however, provoked the authorities into clamping down on vagrancy and wandering beggars (a statute from 1572 required all vagabonds to be ‘grievously whipped and burned through
the gristle of the right ear with a hot iron’ an inch in diameter). Touring companies of actors needed a new, fixed home.
At first, they started to perform in the courtyards of inns, such as the Bull in Bishopsgate, the Bell and the Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street and the Bel Savage outside Ludgate. But in 1576, under the patronage of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, carpenter-turned-actor James Burbage built ‘The Theatre’, the country’s first purpose-built professional theatre. It seems to have been wooden and polygonal, with three storeys of galleried seating, and a central pit open to the sky. The following year ‘The Curtain’ was built 200 yards away. Shoreditch, a mile north of the walls of the City of London, had become London’s first theatre district.
One of the earliest plays to be a popular success with the new mass audience was Thomas Kyd’s revenge tragedy
The Spanish Tragedy
or
Hieronimo is Mad Again
. It was quickly followed in 1587 by another hit, Christopher Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine
, the story of an oriental emperor, told in the new form of blank verse (unrhymed verse). Before Marlowe was murdered in a lodging in Deptford in 1593, he had produced several other successes, including
Dr Faustus, Edward II
and
The Jew of Malta
. William Shakespeare’s first play, meanwhile, was staged in 1592.
One of the reasons that Shakespeare would go on to produce so many plays was commercial pressure. The Elizabethan theatre had a quick turnover. Theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe kept a diary that reveals that his players, the Admiral’s Men, performed as many as fifteen different plays in a month. New scripts were urgently demanded to satisfy returning spectators.
Theatre attendance became a mass phenomenon. When, in 1599, Shakespeare’s troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, headed south of the river to build their new theatre, the Globe, they constructed an amphitheatre that could house an audience of 3,000. Other grand theatres, including the Swan and the Rose, soon joined them in Southwark. The Fortune was built in the north of the city.
Designed for audiences used to the cruelty of bearbaiting, theatrical performances were full of gore, ribald humour and slapstick comedy. There was no scenery or stage painting, but the actors used a great variety of props. Performances were always during daylight, as there was no possibility of lighting an outdoor theatre sufficiently at night. Although women had always acted in court masques, no women performed in public plays until after 1660, and instead, their parts were played by boys.
The theatre still retained associations with theft (pickpockets were rife), riot and licentiousness, were accused of staging ‘lewd jigs, songs and dances’ and were thought to attract ‘lewd and ill-disposed persons’. However, one person who attended some of Shakespeare’s plays was Queen Elizabeth I herself.
‘He was so skiful both to devise and frame the [hides] in the best manner … that I verily think no man can be said to have done more good of all those that laboured in the English vineyard.’
Father John Gerard, Catholic priest, describing Nicholas Owen
T
here is more than meets the eye to the red-brick Elizabethan mansion of Harvington Hall, located a mile outside the quaint village of Chaddesley Corbett on a moated island. At its core is a fourteenth-century timber-framed building, but the majority of the house is Tudor, built from 1578 onwards by Humphrey Packington. It was uninhabited and stripped of some of its original furnishings in the nineteenth century, but this benign neglect ensured Harvington’s survival until the early twentieth century, when it was restored. It features some beautiful and unique decorative remains, but its chief distinction is that concealed in its walls is the finest surviving set of priest holes in the country.
There are many fascinating details of architecture and design to spot at Harvington Hall. The medieval house is now the restaurant, with a beamed ceiling from 1500. The Great Kitchen retains its two huge fireplaces and a separate bread oven. The best bedchamber,
now Lady Yate’s Room, has Elizabethan panelling from floor to ceiling, with an ornate overmantle and ensuite garderobe, dropping to the moat. The simple sixteenth-century panelling continues onto the fourteenth-century walls of the Withdrawing Room, but it is the Great Chamber that would have had the most striking panelling, richly painted in red, black and yellow to imitate inlay. Fragments survive in two corners, and the ornately decorated door into Mermaid’s Passage gives some sense of the overall effect.
If you were suddenly transported back in time, you’d probably find the house surprisingly garish, but wealthy Tudor houses were distinguished by their use of bold, extravagant colour and elaborate ornamentation. You can see this in the rare examples of Elizabethan wall painting at Harvington. Mermaid’s Passage features exquisite arabesque paintings of scrolls, shells, flowers, birds, animals and the eponymous mermaids, in an Italianate style reminiscent of the panels from Nonsuch Palace [see L
OSELEY
P
ARK
]. The Nine Worthies Passage is adorned with almost life-size images of the Nine Worthies (legendary and biblical heroes) and the Great Staircase features shadow painting from 1600. The small chapel also has walls emblazoned with rather lurid rows of red and white drops to represent the blood and water that flowed from Christ’s side. Also, don’t miss the glorious carved Elizabethan four-poster bed, from 1590, in the Priest’s Room, and a more recent example of craftsmanship: the chimneypiece in the Great Chamber, which was made in Elizabethan style in 1996 following descriptions from 1600.
As attractive as it is, Harvington also throws light on a less becoming feature of Elizabethan society. Elizabeth I has gained an anachronistic reputation as a religiously tolerant monarch who, famously, did not seek ‘to make windows into men’s souls’. It is true that in the first twenty years of her reign, the regime realised the limits of its power to enforce the Anglican faith and
was, in comparison to governments on the Continent, relatively lenient towards members of the dissident faith, insisting only on outward conformity through attendance at church every Sunday and holy day (with fines to punish recusants). However, in 1570, the zealous new Pope Pius V issued a papal bull entitled
Regnans in Excelsis
, excommunicating ‘Elizabeth, pretended queen of England’; releasing English Catholics from their duty of allegiance; and encouraging them to overthrow their Queen. From 1574, a Catholic seminary in Douai in northern France started training English Catholics as priests and sending them home to reconvert England and provoke Catholics into open rebellion. After 1580, their numbers were bolstered by Jesuit missionaries, and the Elizabethan state had to react.