Roaring Boys (22 page)

The first decade of the seventeenth century also saw a new and major development on the theatre scene. As early as 1595 when the Burbages and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were still based at the original Theatre on the north side of the Thames, James Burbage had felt the need to expand. At that stage he had no plans to move his main enterprise south to the Bankside but he was already having trouble with the freeholder and must have considered the possibility that at some stage he might well have to do so. What he had in mind now, however, was something quite different, a theatre building which was not dependent on the weather and offered its audiences more comfort. Since these two factors alone meant that he would be able to charge more for admittance, such a venue would surely be very profitable. He decided therefore, when he was offered the opportunity, to buy a large and imposing building in the fashionable district of Blackfriars and convert it into a ‘private’, i.e. covered, theatre. It was, as Gurr says, to be ‘an emphatic shift upmarket’.

The building had been part of the old monastery of the Black Friars which Henry VIII, on the Dissolution of the Monasteries, had handed over to his then Master of Revels. It had a continuing theatrical connection, for in the 1570s it was used by the Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal for storage, possibly, rehearsals and also for a certain number of performances, but by the 1590s it was mostly let out for lodgings. It seemed to the Burbages to be the ideal venue, fashionably situated with a wealthy audience within convenient strolling distance, yet easily reached from the south side of the river.

But apparently the wealthy citizens of Blackfriars did not relish the idea of a new centre of culture in their midst and petitioned the Privy Council to forbid its use on the grounds that:

It will be a great annoyance and trouble, not only to all the noblemen and gentlemen here inhabiting but also a general inconvenience to all the inhabitants of the same precinct, both by reason of the great resort and gathering together of all manner of vagrant and lewd persons that, under colour of resorting to the players, will come thither and work all manner of mischief, and also to the great pestering and filling up of the same precinct . . . and besides, that the same playhouse is so near the Church that the noise of the drums and trumpets will greatly disturb and hinder both the ministers and parishioners in time of divine service and sermons.

This sounds like nothing so much as an objection to an application today to open a nightclub. James Burbage had hoped that, as the Lord Chamberlain himself lived nearby, he would have pressed their case, but he was to be disappointed for, as the Privy Councillor responsible for the playhouses, Henry Carey signed the order preventing the change of use for the building to go ahead. It was necessary therefore to shelve the whole plan and anyway by 1599 the Burbages and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were fully occupied rebuilding and reopening the remains of the old Theatre on the Bankside as the new Globe.

On the death of James, Richard inherited the building on which they had tried to recoup some of their expenditure by letting out sections of it. Yet it would seem that parts of the building were used after that by the Blackfriars Boys, one of the popular ‘boy companies’ who gained a reputation in the early 1600s for performing satirical comedies, and that the local people had no objection to that. Whether it was because there was no precedent or their neighbours had changed their minds, in 1608 Burbage was finally granted permission to go ahead. The opening of a second venue meant that he now had far more flexibility. Soon the Blackfriars was joined by other new theatres. North of the river, the Boar’s Head in Whitechapel was added to the Curtain (still in use after all these years) while Henslowe had built a second theatre, the Hope (which also doubled as a bear pit), on the site of the old Bear Garden close to the Globe and the Swan.

With their establishment in the Blackfriars Theatre Burbage’s company, as Gurr points out, ‘with their kingly title and unique repertoire of Shakespeare’s plays became the outstanding company in every way, whether they were performing at the Blackfriars or the Globe’. Their pre-eminence as the King’s Men no doubt encouraged the company to undertake the ‘extravagance’ of maintaining two playhouses. It gave the company real flexibility. They could play in the Globe in the summer, where it was possible to pack in an audience of three thousand and thus maximise their profits, and in the winter, or if the weather was bad, in the new theatre where both players and audience were protected from the elements, which meant there was far less chance in future of having to cancel performances. From now on the company, if it wished, could play six afternoons a week.

. . . it pleased our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, without the assistance of man . . . from the time of his conception to be begotten of a woman, born of a woman, nourished by a woman . . . he healed women, pardoned women, comforted women . . .

Emilia Lanier,
The Virtuous Reader
(1611)

W
omen are noticeably absent from the theatrical world of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans in no small part because, unlike the situation in Catholic Spain or the Italian states where it was considered a perfectly respectable profession, in England it was still against the law for a woman to appear on stage. Presumably their only professional contact with the players’ companies was as seamstresses making, repairing or cleaning costumes and laundering what was washable. That they were not allowed to perform is somewhat ironic as, throughout the period when the prohibition was in force, wealthy ladies could regularly disport themselves in court masques, often in a daring range of costumes, without in any way damaging their reputations. When, after the Restoration, women were finally allowed into the acting profession, the term ‘actress’ was virtually synonymous with that of ‘whore’.

So, as we know, women’s roles were played by the boys until their voices broke and it must have added to the comedy of situations such as that of Viola in
Twelfth Night
and Rosalind in
As You Like It
to see a boy playing a girl masquerading as a boy. But it is often asked how such young lads could possibly have coped with roles such as those of Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra or, indeed, Beatrice-Joanna in
The Changeling
. But having seen Mark Rylance’s all male productions at today’s Globe, one wonders if that might not also have been a possibility in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Not to mention the possibility that a character like the nurse in
Romeo and Juliet
might have been played by a middle-aged actor as a kind of pantomime dame as in the film
Shakespeare in Love
. What we do know is that on the other hand, apart from rare exceptions such as Nathan Field, the boy actors did not successfully make the transition to male roles.

Of the women who were actually involved with our playwrights and actors we know hardly anything, which is scarcely surprising as the dramatists themselves merit little in the way of contemporary biographical information unless, like Marlowe, they ended up spectacularly dead. The exception is Ben Jonson, who was a great self-publicist but had little or nothing to say about the women in his life. We know that Shakespeare’s mother was considered sufficiently capable by her father to be left the family estate but Anne Hathaway will remain forever a shadowy figure, and it seems unlikely that there will ever be agreement as to the identity of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Of his daughters we know that Susannah was literate, respectable and married a doctor and that Judith was probably illiterate, not at all respectable, and married Quiney’s son, a marriage which proved anything but happy. Then there is poor Emma Ball (and her ironically named lovechild, Fortunatus), mistress first to Tarlton, then to Robert Greene who lived off her, then treated her so badly, as indeed he did the flaxen-haired wife he had married for money, while Jonson dismissed his wife, the mother of his children, as an honest shrew. Middleton had a strong-minded mother, older sisters and an educated wife from a good family but we know nothing more about her than that.

As for the actors, a ‘Mistress Burbage’ who might well have been Richard’s wife (although it cannot be proved) consulted Forman on both health and astrological matters in the 1590s, and we know something of Edward Alleyn’s wife Joan through their surviving correspondence. They were obviously fond of each other but the marriage was childless and when she died he swiftly took another, much younger wife, the daughter of the poet and divine, John Donne. We also know, apart from the anecdote featuring William the Conqueror and Richard III, that much like today good-looking and charismatic actors had no shortage of offers even from ‘respectable’ women. But apart from the Dark Lady, it is impossible to know how much any of their relationships influenced the writers concerned.

From various official records and lists of trades we know that there were extremely efficient women who, if their husbands were away for a considerable time or had left them widowed, were quite capable of running the family business. Also, from the Forman diaries it is clear that, at least throughout the 1590s, women from the merchant class or those married to successful artisans had a considerable amount of freedom and relative independence. But to be recorded in the histories of the late Elizabethan or early Jacobean age, unless you committed a really serious crime or were tried for witchcraft, you needed to be aristocratic, eccentric, notorious or all three for history to remember you. For instance Mary Herbert, a noted wit, was the Earl of Pembroke’s second wife (his first had been Catherine Grey, the sister of Lady Jane Grey) and Sir Philip Sidney’s sister. She and her brother were very close (he dedicated his
Arcadia
to her) and had been pupils of Dr Dee, inspiring in Mary a lasting interest in mathematics and the new sciences, so much so that she later had her own laboratory. Then there is the stunningly beautiful courtesan Venetia Stanley, who drove men mad and who expected any lover to lavish a fortune on her in the way of clothes and jewels, while for both high status and notoriety there is Frances Howard, Countess of Essex, best known for wrecking her marriage to the Earl by falling in love with King James’s favourite, James Carr, alongside whom she later stood trial for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury.

Parents of girls born into comfortably off families had always been seen as marriage bargains, but from the commentators of the time it does seem that the position of such girls and women after James came to the throne worsened. They became, like the knighthoods and baronetcies, saleable commodities. Ambitious fathers rushed to take their pretty daughters to Court, wealthy businessmen sought out the newly ennobled, offering cash in exchange for status, all of which provided the dramatists with material for the new ‘city comedies’ and ‘satires’ which were proving so popular. Women with any position at Court easily acquired doubtful reputations. Commentators thundered against the morals of both sexes but most especially the women since, as is ever the case, double standards applied. Of the Queen’s own ladies the Earl of Worcester wrote: ‘the plotting and malice amongst them is such that I think envy hath tied an invisible snake about most of their necks to sting one another to death’. It was a place full of ‘persons betraying and betrayed’. They, too, provided role models for a new wave of writing.

However, for those at the bottom of the heap, life was hard indeed. At the turn of the century the average wage was about seven pence a day in old money, even less for agricultural labourers and the unskilled. Wage rates were set by the justices, and employers who paid more could actually be sent to prison; thus a significant proportion of the population lived below the poverty line and, as always in such circumstances, some women turned to prostitution, especially those who through no fault of their own found themselves unemployed and penniless; the Jacobean Court attracted pimps and procuresses in droves, only too eager to run professional operations in this new and merciless commercial world. Marston in his play
The Dutch Courtesan
presents just such a character in the Mistress of the Brothel. During a discussion on various types of city trade and who is presently making the most money, she points out that in strictly financial terms hers is the most soundly based trade of all as there is always a demand for ‘such divine virtues as virginity, modesty and such rare gems’, which she now sells ‘not like a petty chapman, by retail, but like a great merchant, by wholesale’. Outside the orbit of such professionals, there were the hundreds of freelancers who operated like Dr Forman’s ‘Julia in Seething Lane’, possibly taking clients home, more often accommodating them up against a wall in an alley. Child prostitution too was rife and there was little attempt at concealment. The young rake, Sir Pexall Brockas, is said to have ‘owned a young mignon . . . whom he had entertained and abused since she was twelve years old’.

Women before or since have rarely had a worse press. Misogynists and moralists had a field day, among them the King himself, whose general distaste for the female sex led him to order the clergy ‘to inveigh vehemently against the insolency of our women’. Joseph Swetnam in his cumbersomely entitled
The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Forward and Unconstant Women: Or the Vanity of Them: Choose you Whether
writes: ‘Moses describeth a woman thus: “At the first beginning a woman was made to be a helper unto man”, and so they are indeed: for she helpeth to spend and consume that which man painfully getteth.’ Later, after stating that most women are only after money, he continues: ‘. . . but if thy pockets grow empty, and thy revenues will not hold out longer to maintain her pomp and bravery, then she presently leaves to make much of thy person, and will not stick to say unto thee that she could have bestowed her love on such a one as would have maintained her like a woman.’