Roaring Boys (25 page)

Given the financially hard times those dramatists were fortunate that had other ways of earning an income. It seems that few of them by then were also actors, as had sometimes been the case in the past. We do not know when Shakespeare gave up acting or how good he was, although he was obviously sufficiently competent to remain a member of the acting company for a number of years. Apart from the role of Master Knowell in Jonson’s
Every Man In His Humour
, there is only hearsay evidence as to parts he played. His brother Gilbert, now established as a haberdasher, did visit London to see his brother’s plays and watch him act (possibly Edmund too), and is said to have told a neighbour on his return to Stratford that he had seen Will play Adam in
As You Like It
and that he was ‘brought on to the stage on another man’s back’, presumably that of the actor playing Orlando.
³
Theatre tradition also gives him the ghost in
Hamlet
and the far more showy, and unlikely roles of Mercutio in
Romeo and Juliet
and Berowne in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, though the actor Ian Richardson, who played Berowne for the Royal Shakespeare Company, became convinced that he was playing ‘the man himself. I know that there is some scholarly dispute about that but I think Dr. Rowse would agree. Here is Shakespeare talking, here he is with all his verbal quips . . . it is the only Shakespeare role I have played where, on the last performance, I wept.’
⁴
If he did continue well into the early 1600s then it must have been by choice.

George Chapman who, as we know, had financial problems right from the start, supplemented his income with translation, tackling first Homer’s
Iliad
and then the
Odyssey
, under the patronage of the King’s eldest son, Prince Henry, on the understanding that once he had completed the first part of the task he would have a pension for life. The
Iliad
was finally published in 1611 and he must have sighed with relief as he saw security finally within his grasp, but unfortunately Prince Henry died that same year and the King reneged on the arrangement, leaving Chapman to face his most serious financial crisis yet and a great deal of debt.

The profession widely regarded as having a licence to print money is that of the law, and three of the Jacobean dramatists, John Marston, John Ford and John Webster all trained as lawyers, when it might well be that they also developed a taste for theatre since plays were a popular form of entertainment at the Middle Temple, where they all studied. Marston’s father, a Shropshire lawyer, was the Recorder of Coventry when Marston was born and became Lent Reader at the Middle Temple in 1592. On 2 August of that year the sixteen-year-old Marston was ‘especially’ admitted to the Middle Temple by his father. He was a very privileged student and a bright future had beckoned him, as two years later he achieved his first degree. But he had started writing for publication almost as soon as he began to study.

‘Eroticism and satire’, writes M.C. Bradbrook in her biography of John Webster, ‘both fashionable, were Marston’s scandalous choice for poetry of an ambivalent, yet pointed, wit.’ He soon involved himself in the world of the playhouses, although records suggest that from time to time he returned to the Middle Temple and undertook some legal work, probably sharing his father’s chambers there until, in 1599, his father died, leaving his own law books ‘to him whom I hoped would have profited by them in the study of the law, but man proposeth and God disposeth’.
⁵

Thereafter for some years it seems God disposed that Marston would devote his time to his theatrical interests, rather than his official profession. At least his father did not live to see the part played by his son in the well-publicised Poets’ War or the trouble he was in over
Eastward Ho
! Marston had his greatest success in 1604 with his play
The Malcontent
, but after that he started to lose his taste for it and some time in 1607 began to study seriously for the ministry. The next time we hear of him, on 8 June 1608, he has been committed to Newgate gaol on an unspecified charge, although it is thought that this was a formality to do with some kind of a legal infringement connected with the breaking up of the Queen’s Revels Company in which he then had a share, not anything political or serious. On 24 September 1609 he was made a Deacon in the Parish Church of Stanton Harcourt, went from there to St Mary’s Hall, Oxford, to study further and on 18 June 1610 was ordained priest before finally, some years later, being given the lucrative living of Christchurch in Hampshire. He had come a long way from the precocious law student who first made his name with
Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image
, described by Bradbrook as ‘frankly pornographic’.

Of the second of the trio of lawyers, John Ford, we know very little except that he spent his entire adult life hard up and casting round for funds. Born in 1586 into a family of Devon gentry, he was related to the then Lord Chief Justice Popham. After possibly studying at Exeter College, Oxford, he was admitted to the Middle Temple where his behaviour was sufficiently bad for him to be sent down for two years. His misdemeanours included taking part in a protest against ‘wearing caps in hall’ and not paying his bills. His first published work appeared in 1606 but his early plays are among those lost by Warburton’s cook and he remains best known for his extraordinary
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
, which is actually about incest not prostitution, and various collaborations with Dekker.

His father died in 1610, presumably having given up on him, his will having been drawn up by John’s brother, Henry, wherein it was willed: ‘To John Ford, gent, my brother twenty pounds a year for the term of his life . . . upon condition he surrender the estate he hath of two tenements called Glandfields grounds in Bilver park and willow meade, lying in Ipplepen and Torbryam, to the use of my children.’ This at least gave him a small but regular income and it does seem that from time to time he returned to the law to earn a meagre income. An odd description of him survives in two lines of anonymous verse:

Deep in a dump John Ford was got
With folded arms and melancholy hat.

However out of the three lawyers it is John Webster, whom we first came across in 1602 writing for Henslowe, who managed successfully to combine working in the theatre with both law and the family business. T.S. Eliot’s verse about him is well known:

Webster was much possessed by death,
And saw the skull beneath the skin
And breastless creatures underground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

An unkind description of him, penned by a Henry Fitzjeffrey, claims:

But h’st! with him Crabbed Websterio,
The playwright, cartwright: whether? either? ho?
No further, look as ye’d be looked into:
Sit as he would read: Lord, who knows of him?
Was ever man so mangled with a poem?
See how he draws his mouth awry of late,
How he scrubs; wrings his wrists; scratches his pate.
A midwife! Help! By his Brain’s coitus,
Some centaur strange: some huge Bucephalus,
Or Pallas (sure) engendered in his brain,
Strike Vulcan with thy hammer once again.
⁶

It is particularly insulting and snobbish as it describes him as ‘a cartwright’ much in the way the University Wits, and Henslowe when angry, referred to Ben Jonson as a ‘a bricklayer’. Although, as a writer Webster is associated with dark deeds and violent death because of his two great plays,
The Duchess of Malfi
and
The White Devil
, there is nothing to suggest that he was a particularly depressed or gloomy person. He had been born into a comfortable household, his father being a successful coachbuilder (hence ‘cartwright’) and probably went to the Merchant Taylors School before being admitted to the Middle Temple to study law. The small body of work that has come down to us does suggest that he might well have had a reputation for writing slowly and with some difficulty, and it is unlikely that he could ever have made a good living only from plays, but then he did not need to for once he had qualified it seems he took over the legal and administrative side of the family firm, leaving his father and brother to see to its practical side.

The White Devil
, the first of the two famous tragedies both based on real events, was first performed during the winter of 1611–12 at the Red Bull theatre, Webster choosing that particular playhouse because he rated the company’s young leading actor, Richard Perkins, very highly indeed. He actually mentions him in the published postcript to the play: ‘In particular I must remember the well-approved industry of my friend, Master Perkins, and confess the worth of his action from beginning to end.’ This was the first time any actor had been so honoured, including Alleyn or Burbage. But, Perkins apart, it was not a particularly good choice of venue for the Red Bull has been described as ‘a rowdy house with a vulgar audience’, although in fact it was more what we would describe today as a neighbourhood theatre, providing popular fare for local people. It also presented all kinds of spectacles, such as firework displays and pageants, supplementing its income by hiring out costumes and properties.

Unsurprisingly therefore, given the play’s complexities, it was not a success. ‘Ignorant asses’ is how Webster described his audience at its first performance. M.C. Bradbrook suggests that at least he could console himself with the thought that in the previous year Ben Jonson’s second attempt at Senecan tragedy,
Catiline
, had fallen just as flat as his
Sejanus
had some years earlier. Possibly it was
The White Devil
that prompted Fitzjeffrey’s catty poem for he finished it:

But what care I, it [the play] will be so obscure
That none shall understand him I am sure.

The reception he received for
The Duchess of Malfi
, however, a year or so later was very different, not least because this time his play was performed by the King’s Men in the Blackfriars Theatre and to a far more sophisticated audience. It was chosen for production by John Hemings, and when Webster published the script he named the leading actors along with the parts that they played. John Lowin, now recognised as a leading actor, played Bosola; Burbage, the Duchess’s murderous brother, Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria; Henry Condell, the evil Cardinal of Aragon, and young Richard Sharpe, the Duchess. The part of Antonio, the Duchess’s steward who becomes her second husband, was played by William Osler, who died not long after its first production. The play proved popular right from the start, not only because it was put on in the right place to the right people, but because the story is a great deal less complicated and more accessible than that of the
White Devil
and its tragic heroine is so sympathetic. Crowds flocked to see it and as late as 1635 it was chosen for a command performance before King Charles and his Court.

During the winter of 1614–15 Webster’s father died, leaving his two sons a considerable estate. Edward Webster renewed the lease on the family property in February 1615 and John took out his ‘freedom by patrimony’ of the Merchant Taylors as he was now sufficiently well off to be able to afford his ‘Freedom of the City’, which enabled him to vote in the Common Council and enjoy coveted trading privileges. He wrote little for the theatre after this but did become involved in writing and putting on city pageants.

The decade from 1603 to 1613 was to see some of the very finest Jacobean plays. From Shakespeare, after
Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale
and
The Tempest
were still to come along with the lesser
Timon of Athens, Pericles
and
Cymbeline
, and it is now generally agreed that he collaborated with John Fletcher on
Henry VIII
and
The Two Noble Kinsmen
. Ben Jonson’s great
Volpone
also had its first production in 1606 and was followed later by
The Alchemist
, not to mention the work of Middleton, Dekker, Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher and the rest. But over and above it all, especially towards the end of that period, there is a sense of fragmentation, that the theatrical world as it had been known was beginning to break up.

On 3 July 1613 Sir Henry Wotton sat down and wrote a letter to his nephew, Sir Edmund Bacon, informing him of a dramatic event which had taken place four days earlier on 29 June:

Now to let matters of State sleep, I will entertain you at present with what hath happened this week at the Bank’s side. The King’s Players had a new play called
All is True
, representing the principle [
sic
] pieces of the reign of Henry VIII which was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the stage; the Knights of the Order with their Georges and Garters, the Guards with their embroidered coats, and the like: sufficient in truth, within a while, to make greatness very familiar if not ridiculous.

Now King Henry, making a masque at Cardinal Wolsey’s house, and certain chambers [cannon] being shot off at his entry, some of the paper, or other stuff wherewith one of them was stuffed, did light on the thatch, where being thought at first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train [of gunpowder], consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric, wherein nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him if he had not by the benefit of provident wit, put it out with bottle ale.
⁷

Burbage must have thanked Providence that he had acquired the Blackfriars since he was now able to transfer his entire operation over the river. The sharers immediately made plans for a new theatre. The new and improved Globe rose from the ashes of the old within a year, at a cost of £1,400, and was described by John Chamberlain in a letter dated 30 June 1614 as ‘the fairest that ever was in England’.