Roaring Boys (10 page)

This sort of behaviour should immensely impress the diners:

who will greatly admire you and think themselves in paradise but to be in your acquaintance. . . . After further such discourse and, possibly, a game or two of dice (which you must take care to win), and the time comes to leave, give your hostess a hearty kiss, down a last flagon, dowse your face with sweet water and when the terrible reckoning [bill] makes you hold up your hand and you must answer it at the bar, you must not abate one penny in any particular, no though they reckon beef to you when you have neither eaten, nor could ever abide it, rare or toasted. [Never argue over the bill for it makes you look] as if you were acquainted with the rates of the market.

After which, with one last flourish, you sweep off into the night leaving those you have entertained all evening to pay the bill.

Eventually it really is time to go home to bed. The street can be a dangerous place late at night, the haunt of thieves and cut-throats, so if you should run into some doubtful character then shout loudly, as if to your man, to hurry along or you’ll ‘pull his cap about his ears’ in the morning. But there is, of course, the possibility that you might be taken for some kind of rogue or desperado yourself and should you therefore have the misfortune to run into the Watch, if you have with a friend with you:

address him loudly as ‘Sir Giles’ or ‘Sir Abram’. . . . It matters not that there is no dubbed knight in your company, the Watch will wink at you for the love they bear to arms and knighthood. If you have no sweet mistress to whom you may retire, then continue speaking loudly how you and your shoal of gallants have swum through an ocean of wine, that you have danced out the heels of your shoes and how happy you are to have paid all the reckoning . . . that this may be published; the only danger in this is that if you owe money, your creditors might get it by the ears which, if they do, you will look to have a peal of ordnance thundering at your chamber door in the morning demanding what you owe. [Should such a misfortune occur, then] you should appear to them in your nightshirt, clutching a glass in your hand and saying that only today have you been purged of your terrible sickness . . . this should drive them quickly back into their holes.

With that Dekker bids his protégé and the reader ‘good night’, promising a whole lot more advice on the morrow ‘but enough is enough, at least for one night. Yet if, as I perceive you relish this first lesson well, the rest I will prepare for you.’

Obviously Dekker was writing tongue-in-cheek – ‘I sing like a cuckoo in June to be laughed at’ – but there is a good deal of truth in it. Regarding the fashion for sitting at the side of the stage very obviously smoking a pipe, we can return to Guilpin at the beginning of this chapter:

See you him yonder who sits o’er the stage,
With the Tobacco pipe now at his mouth?
It is Cornelius that brave gallant youth,
Who is new printed to this fangled age,
He wears a Jerkin cudgelled with gold lace,
A profound slop, a hat scarce pipkin high.

As to bad behaviour in general, according to M.C. Bradbrook, in 1590 Richard Burbage, driven beyond endurance, grabbed a man who made trouble in The Theatre, disrupting the performance, ‘and playing scornfully with this deponent’s nose uttered threats of bodily violence’.
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Nor is it unlikely that playwrights such as Greene and Dekker, who were always short of ready cash, were quite prepared either to pretend to be other than they were or to play on their known talent in exchange for a free meal.

Defer not with me to this last point of extremity, for little knowest thou how, in the end, thou shalt be visited.

Greene’s
Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of
Repentance
(1592)

T
he shadows were now deepening in Gloriana’s England although the climate of the times had been changing since the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, followed by the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. For the threat from Spain did not end with the vanquishing of the Armada. From then until his death two years later, Sir Francis Walsingham’s intelligencers were continually telling him of negotiations going on between factions in Ireland and the Spanish government to land a Spanish force there, a matter of great concern and one proved all too real during the later 1590s when two attempts were made to do just that. No longer were Catholics allowed to get on with their lives so long as they put in an appearance at church or paid their fines for not doing so and anti-Catholicism in general was on the rise. Nor did the Queen’s refusal to name King James VI of Scotland as her heir help, and throughout the decade of the 1590s and up until her death in 1603 there were undercover communications with Edinburgh both on a semiofficial basis and by those who sought to ingratiate themselves with the man who would one day be their King. To add to the general feeling of unease the plague, Nashe’s ‘King Pest’, returned in 1592; the epidemic was to last for well over a year but when the theatres were open audiences flocked in to escape the reality of what was going on around them.

During the early 1590s they had a rich field of drama from which to choose. The dating of plays has academics at each others’ throats not least because the date on which a play was registered at Stationer’s Hall is no real guide, as often the registration did not take place until several years after its first performance even though it was one of the few ways a writer could attempt to protect his work. While there has never been copyright on ideas, unscrupulous dramatists were more than capable of sitting in on a public performance and making notes on the text. But in view of what was to come we know for certain that all Marlowe’s plays had been written by May 1593 even if, apart from the two parts of
Tamburlaine
, there is disagreement as to the order in which this happened. Several sources however do suggest that his next play was
The Jew of Malta
, followed by
Edward II
, then
A Massacre at Paris
(of which only fragments remain) and finally
Dr. Faustus
.

The Jew of Malta
proved extremely popular even if it was not as exciting as
Tamburlaine
with its great processions, magnificent court scenes and battles, not to mention the pampered jades of Asia. However the average Elizabethan was deeply suspicious of Jews, associating them with money-lending and worse, and considering them to be devious, cunning and untrustworthy. Therefore Barabas, the Jew of Malta, was bound to be a scoundrel. But Marlowe’s play is not as simple as that. First he brings on to the stage an actor playing the part of a real historical person, Niccolo Machiavelli, considered wrongly by those who had heard of him as the epitome of evil rather than as the devious political pragmatist he actually was. But few in the audiences or beyond were likely to have read
The Prince
and both Barabas, and Shakespeare’s Richard III, have been described ever since as ‘machiavellian’ villains.

We first meet Barabas checking out his great wealth in his counting house congratulating himself on the amount he has amassed. Almost immediately, however, he is attacked by Christian soldiers who seize his wealth and make off with it simply because he is a Jew. Not surprisingly he is determined to be revenged and we follow his progress to this end, and his playing off of Christians against Muslims, until he meets his death by being boiled in a cauldron. This was obviously the high spot of the afternoon’s entertainment and ‘a Cauldron for the Jew’ appears prominently on one of Henslowe’s lists of current props. There is a good deal of black humour in the play, not least the competitive exchange between Barabas and the Turk, Ithamore, as to who has carried out the most evil deeds and in which Barabas brags that he has sometimes ‘gone about and poisoned wells’, the device suggested to students at Douai. The Jew might be the obvious villain and the Christians supposedly the ‘heroes’, cheering to the echo as he boils away in his cauldron – but Marlowe, in a final twist, reveals that the only honourable men in the play are the Muslims, betrayed then murdered by those very Christians to whom they have offered the hand of friendship.

But it was
Edward II
that would raise the danger stakes for Marlowe. The source for his subject was Holinshed’s
Chronicles
, his perspective on it his own. Plays about kings were now extremely popular but
Edward II
was quite unlike any previous play about a king or, for a very long time, any succeeding one, dealing as it does with the obsessive love of the King for two male favourites, especially the first, Piers Gaveston. Of recent years it has been generally accepted that Edward was homosexual (though it would seem from two new biographies that this is now open to question) but the extravagant affection and language used between Edward and Gaveston in Marlowe’s play leaves one in little doubt as to what he thought, and the relationship between them is entirely believable. Marlowe’s real difficulty is with Queen Isabella. He was simply unable to create credible female characters and she is no exception. In the first part of the play she is one of his usual lifeless women. In the second, by which time she has taken Mortimer as a lover and both are set to rebel against the King, she has turned without explanation into a two-dimensional harpy. Isabella is a thankless part for an actress. At the end of the play Edward meets his death in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle in the manner popularly accepted, and no doubt considered apposite by the average playgoer of the day – at the end of a red hot poker.

Although Alleyn doubtless gave a splendid performance in the title role, it never achieved the popularity of either
Tamburlaine, The Jew
or
Dr. Faustus
. Even today it remains a difficult role for an actor, who is faced with having to present Edward as deeply unsympathetic in the first half of the play, yet somehow has to gain our sympathy in the second, again without showing how he progresses from one to the other. Also, even today, some audiences seem to find it hard to take the overt exchanges of passion between Edward and Gaveston.

Dr. Faustus
, however, was a different matter altogether. The legend of Faust was an old one but a new translation of
The Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. Faustus
was published in 1592 and it immediately grabbed Marlowe’s imagination. Marlowe, amoral, intellectually brilliant, fascinated by the ‘new learning’, driven by demons of his own and loving to shock, had found the perfect theme. The boast he gives to Faustus that ‘this word damnation terrifies not me’ might have applied just as well to the character’s creator. The concept that man will do literally anything, including selling his own soul for power and forbidden knowledge, remains as potent as ever even in an age when there is no longer any widespread belief in Heaven and Hell. People who have never seen or read the play still know the meaning of the term ‘Faustian bargain’.

Audiences were thrilled to the core. Here was the overreacher to end them all, a man prepared to sell his soul to Satan through his messenger, Mephistopheles, and sign the bargain in his own blood. Already they knew how it would end, of course – the excitement was in the anticipation. ‘How comes it then that thou art out of hell?’, enquires Faustus, to which his tempter responds, ‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it’. It was obvious where Faustus was bound. So as well as following Faustus’s progress to damnation and seeing him try out his supernatural powers, not least ordering up Helen of Troy as a tasty dish, the drama enabled the theatre to show off its most spectacular special effects. Turning to Henslowe once again, we know that the Rose Theatre boasted a huge ‘Hell Mouth’, and that at the end of the play Faustus was dragged down to Hell by a host of howling demons, most likely in a cloud of red smoke and to the rattle of thunder sheets.

Because of its subject matter, not to mention what soon befell its author,
Dr. Faustus
acquired something of the reputation that still attaches to
Macbeth
today. So awful was the scale of Faustus’s sin that we are told that when Alleyn played the role he always wore a cross around his neck and a surplice under his costume, just in case. There are also tales of performances during which audiences were convinced that they had seen ‘the visible appearance of the Devil on the stage’. A widely recorded account from Exeter states that:

certain players acting upon the stage the tragical story of Dr. Faustus the Conjuror, as a certain number of devils kept everyone his circle there, and as Faustus was busy in his magical invocations, on a sudden they were all dashed, everyone harkening the other in the ear, for they were all persuaded that there was one devil too many among them. And so after a little pause desired the people to pardon them, they could go no further in this matter: the people also understanding the thing as it was, every man hastened to be first out of the doors. The players, as I heard it, contrary to their custom of spending the night in reading and in prayer, got them out of town the next morning.
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Meanwhile Shakespeare was rapidly becoming established as a popular dramatist. Here too there is tremendous disagreement among the experts as to what was written when but almost certainly
Titus Andronicus, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew
and
Richard III
were written and performed between the years 1589 and 1594. Indeed opinion is divided into two camps over
Comedy of Errors
, one putting its first performance some time in 1589, the other in 1594. There is no doubt that the play was in Burbage’s repertoire by 1594 because of a somewhat unfortunate incident or series of incidents leading to the arrest of the cast. Burbage and his actors had been hired to provide an entertainment for the law students at the Inns of Court. There are no details as to what actually took place after the performance, only that it resulted in a court case ‘due to the great disorders and abuses done and committed during the evening by a company of base common fellows under the leadership of a sorcerer or conjuror’.
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