Roaring Boys (5 page)

Professor Stanley Wells has referred to those young men in the London of the day as the ‘roaring boys’, describing them as the element of the ‘anarchic and subversive’ in the life of the period.
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There are a number of references to roaring boys or ‘roarers’ in contemporary sources, an epithet used loosely to describe those given to noisy, showy and anti-social behaviour. ‘I am Roughman’, brags the character of that name in Thomas Heywood’s
Fair Maid of the West
as he swaggers into a Cornish inn, catches sight of the pretty new barmaid and heroine of the tale and promptly clamps her to his chest, ‘the only approved gallant of these parts and a man of whom the
roarers
stand in awe’.
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Bess’s spirited response to this is a slap on the face, followed a few days later by challenging him to a duel in the guise of a young man, a contest which she wins and to which she has invited an audience of locals who are hiding behind a convenient hedge to see the roarer get his come-uppance.

But ‘roaring boys’ as the element of the anarchic and subversive might equally well apply to the new breed of professional writers and their work, some of whom can only be described as arrant self-publicists, who would dominate the London theatre scene for the next forty years, drawn to the playhouses by the prospect of fame, fortune and, above all, opportunity. So who were they, where had they come from and how had they reached the point at which we meet them?

Apart from Nashe, they had all been born within the 10-year period from 1554 to 1564 and, given their widely differing circumstances, would have been unlikely ever to have known each other had it not been for the building of the playhouses. The eldest, John Lyly, ‘a deft and dapper companion’, cannot really be described as a roaring boy, for he was known for his courtesy and good behaviour. He was born in 1554 and we know very little about his origins except that he possibly went to the King’s School in Cambridge and from there to Magdalen College, Oxford. As early as 1580 he was noted as having written ‘light plays’ for children’s companies to be performed at Court. However, no one could describe George Peele, born in 1558, as being noted for good behaviour; in fact his name soon became a byword for riotous living and dissipation. His family had moved to London from Devonshire before his birth and his father was both a City Salter, a member of the Salters Guild, one of the great Livery Companies, and also Clerk to Christ’s Hospital, a post which brought with it a rather fine property in which the family lived. Peele, therefore, was born into a comfortable background and because of his father’s position and status was a ‘free scholar’ at Christ’s Hospital before going on to Broadgates Hall, Oxford (now Pembroke College), taking his BA in 1577 and his MA in 1578. He was already becoming known for his verse and early attempts at drama while still at university.

Of Robert Greene we know a great deal more since he wrote copiously of his own life and times. He was born in Norwich about 1560 into what must have been a good family for, although he does not tell us what his father’s trade or profession was, he writes that his parents ‘were respected for their gravity and honest life’.
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He went first to the grammar school in the city and from there to St John’s College, Cambridge, where he studied for his BA degree, before going on to Oxford to graduate as MA. He was extremely proud of having attended both universities. On leaving Oxford he set off on a tour of Europe which took him to Italy, Poland, Denmark and Spain, risky though this last sounds, given the running enmity between the two countries. However, on returning to England some time in 1580 he found it impossible to settle down, took lodgings in London and set about seriously devoting himself to wine, women and poetry. ‘At my return I ruffled out in my silks in the habit of a malcontent and seemed so discontent that no place would please me to abide in nor no vocation cause me to stay myself in.’ A couple of years later, having run through all his money, he returned to Norwich, spent some time in Cambridge, then courted and married ‘a gentleman’s daughter from Lincolnshire’, a pretty fair-haired young woman by the name of Dorothy, and made an attempt at settling down with her in Norwich. Within a year or so she had borne him a daughter and gone home to mother and he was back in London. ‘I deserted her’, he told his friends, ‘because she tried to reform me.’ It might be said here that however badly Peele and Greene might have behaved separately, when they came together as they frequently did, they were worse than the sum of their parts.

The youngest of the Wits, born in 1567, was Thomas Nashe, born in Lowestoft in Suffolk. He was the son of a parson, William Nashe, who at that time was in straitened circumstances (presumably Lowestoft was a poor parish), and his second wife, Margaret. When he was six the family moved to the rectory at West Harling, which appears to have brought with it a better stipend. It is possible that he was educated at home by his father, but whether at home or at a local school, when he went up to St John’s College, Cambridge, money was still tight, so much so that he was of necessity a ‘sizar’ student. Sizar students were those too poor to pay fees or who had no scholarship and undertook menial tasks as servants to pay their way, in Nashe’s case cleaning and serving in the college itself. A graphic and bitter account of what being such a student entailed is given by the Elizabethan doctor and astrologer, Simon Forman, in his own biography.
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The only way he and a friend could go up to Oxford was as servants to two wealthy young layabouts. They were forced to fit their studying around running errands, keeping their masters in food and drink, waiting on them hand and foot and assisting them in their assignations with young women. The two young men in question later took Holy Orders, one becoming a bishop, while Forman, with insufficient time to study, had to drop out. Nashe, however, stuck with it. It might be that it was in Cambridge that he first met Greene, who was spending time there between returning from his travels and his marriage. He would almost certainly have known Christopher Marlowe, who was three years ahead of him. In 1588, having taken his degree, Nashe too made his way to London.

So to two of those outside the circle of the Wits. George Chapman was born in Hitchen, Hertfordshire, about 1560. He was the son of Thomas and Joan Chapman and grandson to ‘George Nodes, Sergeant to the Buckhounds to Henry VIII’. He too had been up to Oxford and gained his degree but unlike Peele, Greene or Nashe he did not make his way straight to London but entered the service of Sir Robert Sadler and served him as a soldier in the Low Countries. Such close contact with real life and the horrors of war might well account for his more sober outlook on life. Thomas Kyd, born in 1558, had no distance to travel to reach his final destination for he was born in the City and baptised on 6 November, just eleven days before Queen Elizabeth came to the throne. His father, Francis Kyd, was also a scrivener, writer of the Court letter of London and a Freeman of the Company of Scriveners, his mother Joan the legatee of a publisher. At the age of seven he was sent to the Merchant Taylors’ School where the headmaster, Dr Richard Mulcaster, was a formidable scholar with a real interest in drama, so the young Thomas learned French, Italian and Spanish as well as the more usual Greek and Latin and must have been introduced to a variety of plays; but although Merchant Taylors had forty-three scholarship places reserved for bright boys at St John’s College, Oxford, Kyd never went up to university. As a result of this he was unfairly looked down on by his more snobbish contemporaries, even though the profession of a scrivener and copyist at a time when most of the populace was illiterate was not only essential but highly respected. Both Greene and Nashe made snide comments about Kyd, although it could just be that jealousy also entered into it for Kyd’s
The Spanish Tragedy
was the single most popular and successful play of its day, remaining in repertoire for thirty years after his death.

But soon it was clear that there were two dramatists who stood out well above the rest. In 1564, within a few weeks of each other, the young wives of two craftsmen each gave birth to a healthy son. Although one lived in Kent and the other in Warwickshire the two families had much in common. In both cases the father had been apprenticed in leatherwork, one then specialising in shoemaking, the other in glove-making and tanning. Both men, at the time of the birth of their eldest sons, were in comfortable circumstances although each would later run into debt, due in no small part to their predilection for litigation.

Katherine Marlowe’s child was born at the very beginning of February but, as is usually the case, there is no exact birth date as it was not until the nineteenth century that births had to be officially registered. The only record of the birth of a child was when it was baptised and its baptism recorded in the Parish Register, known popularly as ‘the Church Book’. As baptism was considered essential for eternal life and infant mortality was extremely high, the ceremony usually took place as soon as was practicable, generally about three days after birth. Indeed the Book of Common Prayer bade parents not to postpone christening their child beyond the first Sunday or Holy Day after its birth. Katherine’s son, given the name of Christopher after his paternal grandfather, was duly baptised at the Church of St George the Martyr on 6 February. That the baby was safely delivered must have been a considerable relief as her first child, Mary, had died almost immediately after birth.

The Marlowes were established Canterbury craftsmen and Katherine’s husband, John, was the third generation to go into the family business, while the grandfather, Christopher, was considered a ‘warm man’, with a substantial town house in the city and a further property in the Kent countryside consisting of a meadow and twenty acres of grazing rights. John had married Katherine Urry, a Dover girl, on 22 May 1560 at the church where her children would later be baptised. Their home was a fine one in the main street, renowned in its day for carved panelling of such beauty that it attracted a great deal of local envy. It stood on the corner of St George’s Street and Little George’s Lane but both it and the church, apart from its tower, were destroyed in wartime bombing.

Mary Shakespeare’s son was born in April in the family home in Henley Street in the little market town of Stratford-upon-Avon. She had married her husband, also a John, in 1557. John Shakespeare was born in the village of Snitterfield, his father being a tenant farmer on the Asby estate which belonged to the Arden family. John, the first of his family to be apprenticed into leatherwork, had been sent to Stratford to serve his apprenticeship and, once eligible to call himself a master craftsman, he set up in his own right as a glover and tanner and later also as a trader in wool. We know he acquired his first Henley Street house some time in 1552 at an annual ground rent of sixpence, for he is recorded as being fined that year for making a dunghill in the street outside his door instead of under the trees at the end of it like everyone else. John Shakespeare did so well that a few years later he acquired the house next door and knocked the two together to make one substantial property. The second house also had the benefit of a garden at a ground rent of thirteen pence a year.

Mary Shakespeare (née Arden) of Asby was an excellent match for any craftsman, and was very definitely well above John’s station in life. She was the daughter of his father’s landlord and came from a family who were said to have been great lords in Warwickshire before the Conquest. She was the eighth child and her father’s favourite, so much so that, almost unbelievably, when he died he left her not only money but the entire Asby estate and the home farm, now known as ‘Mary Arden’s House’. This she brought with her into her marriage, along with a hefty dowry. She too must have awaited the birth of her son with no little anxiety for her first baby, a daughter called Joan, had also died shortly after her birth just like little Mary Marlowe. Tradition has it that William Shakespeare was born on 23 April, St George’s Day (also the date of his death), and that might well be the case for his baptism is duly recorded in the parish Register of Holy Trinity Church on the 26th.

Both boys proved to be strong and healthy; had they not been, then the history of English literature in general and the theatre in particular would have been very different. When they reached the age of seven both left the dame schools where they had learned the alphabet, numbers and other basics from their horn books and went on to their respective local grammar schools. Both the King’s School in Canterbury and the Edward VI Grammar School in Stratford would have offered virtually the same curriculum in which the entire syllabus was based on Latin. In the Lower School they would have come into contact too with the Roman plays of Terence and Plautus. In the Upper School they were introduced to Ovid, alongside more Latin, some Greek, and Rhetoric. Although Holinshed’s
Chronicles
, so rich a source for Shakespeare, were published while he was still at school it is unlikely they were part of the syllabus, history generally being taught from the works of Plutarch or the earlier Hall’s
Chronicle
.

It was at the age of thirteen that the boys’ lives diverged dramatically. Marlowe remained where he was at the King’s School in Canterbury until he was fifteen; then, after winning a scholarship designed for those destined to take Holy Orders, he went up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. It is difficult to imagine a less appropriate profession than that of the priesthood. Marlowe’s subsequent immediate career is relatively well known, in no small part due to the number of books which appeared on the four hundredth centenary of his death in 1993. His questing and adventurous mind soon ensured that he stood out among his contemporaries and quite early on he became the friend, possibly the lover, of Thomas Walsingham. Thomas, who would remain Marlowe’s patron until the latter’s death, was nephew to Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s spymaster. Sir Francis was on the lookout for bright young professionals to act as secret agents, rather than the ragtag of informers and intelligencers who made up most of the secret service of the day, and it is assumed that Thomas introduced his friend to his uncle. It is easy to see why espionage would appeal to Marlowe, who had supreme confidence in his own intellect and ability to outmatch anyone that might be set against him. Thus he was drawn into Walsingham’s net and into that shadowy world, both exciting and enticing, from which those who enter can never properly escape.