Roaring Boys (7 page)

Tarleton, when his head was only seen,
The Tirehouse door and tapestry between,
Set all the multitude in such a laughter,
They could not hold for scarce an hour after.

He was particularly famous for the ‘jigs’ which he performed at the end of the show, song and dance acts which were often cheeky, satirical and risqué. He also played parts in various dramas, even writing one of his own,
The Seven Deadly Sins
, but it is likely that, ad libber that he was, he found sticking to a set script difficult and was likely to have been a loose cannon among the more serious actors who had carefully learned set lines and where to stand on the stage to say them.

Of William Kempe and Robert Armin we know considerably less. Kempe’s main claim to fame is that he left the theatre to dance a widely reported ‘jig’ from London to Norwich, that he wrote an entertainment called
Nine Days Wonder
and played the comic roles in Shakespeare’s early works, such as Peter in
Romeo and Juliet
and Dogberry in
Much Ado About Nothing
. He is also credited, perhaps wrongly, with being the original of the actor criticised by Hamlet for speaking far more than has been set down for him. Robert Armin, on the other hand, was not so much a clown as an actor capable of more than comedy since legend has it that he played both the Fool in
King Lear
and Feste in
Twelfth Night
, and to do so convincingly he must have had a more serious side to his talent. He also wrote plays of his own, one of which has the self-explanatory title
The Two Maids of More-Clacke
.

The common factor binding so many theatre people together in the early days, the dramatists, actors, costume and prop makers, and inventors of special effects, was, undoubtedly, that great entrepreneur Philip Henslowe. Anyone who saw the film
Shakespeare in Love
must have laughed heartily at the opening sequence in which Henslowe is seen with his booted feet being held over a fire by his creditors who are demanding money from him. In real life, however, he was a great deal more canny. It is little short of a miracle that so many of his papers dealing with the day-to-day running of the Rose Theatre and his association with writers and actors, along with notes and letters, survive to this day and are the single best contemporary source of how the Elizabethan theatre actually operated. The diaries and papers first came to light in the eighteenth century and were found lying among others of lesser interest in the library of Dulwich College. The various ‘books’ of the
Diary
had started out as a record of Henslowe’s brother’s interests in mining and smelting in the Ashdown Forest between the years 1576 to 1581, but they were then passed on to Philip, who used them initially to record the income and expenditure of his timber business and only later for details of his theatrical activities.

From 1582 onwards, therefore, he records which plays were in repertoire, how much was taken at the door, notes of advances made to dramatists commissioned to write plays on the basis of a synopsis or ‘plot which they had presented to him’ (a truly revolutionary notion), inventories of costumes, scenery and props, along with what he had paid out for the equipment necessary for special effects. There are also a fair number of critical comments, not least when he had to bail a writer or actor out of gaol, most often for being either drunk or disorderly or after they had been arrested for debt.

He also fancied himself as something of a physician and there are a number of notes of the remedies that took his fancy which he might well have inflicted on his actors, such as ‘take ants and stamp on them, then strain them through a cloth and mix with swine’s grease, then stamp on knot grass the same and take the juice and mix with strainings of eggs and put in the ear which will help cure deafness’. Another ‘cure’ consisted of frying earthworms ‘a dozen times at least’ and pounding up the mess to make an ointment, or mixing a variety of herbs and flowers before boiling them all up ‘with the urine of a boy’. Therefore it comes as no little surprise to discover that when it came to his own health Henslowe was not averse to consulting his local doctor, Simon Forman, for more professional advice, and his various complaints, and Forman’s remedies for them, are duly recorded in the latter’s
Casebooks
. He was also deeply superstitious and there is a section on useful spells to ward off everything from the evil eye and the plague to ‘making a fowl fall dead’. Would that such a record had come down to us from the Burbages.
²

Even without having his boots set on fire, the real Henslowe appears in the
Diaries
as a somewhat comic figure with an eye to the main chance, as is shown by his absolute determination to become the Queen’s own bear-keeper, an ambition which seems to have been far more important to him than any desire to go down in history as the person who first brought together so much talent and put it on the stage. For it is a simple fact that just about every playwright of any note wrote first for Henslowe, many having their plays performed by the Lord Admiral’s Men, the company with which he was most closely associated. Among these was the young William Shakespeare with the
Henry VI
trilogy, in the writing of which it is thought he was assisted by others including Marlowe; also
Titus Andronicus
which is entirely his own work. Both were written before he moved on rapidly to become Burbage’s house playwright, a position he was to hold for over twenty years, making him a unique figure in the dramatic world of his day.

Of the two sober dramatists outside the circle of Wits, Chapman and Kyd, Chapman did not begin to write seriously for the theatre until the mid-1590s, partly because he needed to earn money elsewhere since, careful and industrious as he was, he had somehow ended up in the clutches of a notorious money-lender, John Wolfall, and was to spend the next twenty years desperately trying to pay off the debt. It was left, ironically, to the hard-working, self-effacing, mocked ‘little scrivener’, Thomas Kyd, to invent a whole, new and exciting genre. His
Spanish Tragedy
, first performed in 1591 and one of Henslowe’s biggest hits, ushered in the popular genre now known as the Revenge Plays, establishing a formula which most follow, beginning with either the ghost of a victim, or a relation or lover associated with him, explaining to the audience the events, which have resulted in his becoming a ‘revenger’. The scene is set therefore, as in a Greek tragedy, for a predictable set of events at the end of which the villain or villains pay the price for their crime. En route to the denouement the audience is treated to more murders and sudden deaths, often devised in highly ingenious ways.

The Spanish Tragedy
opens with the ghost of Andrea, recently killed in Spain’s war with Portugal, complaining to the Spirit of Revenge that it has so far done nothing to bring to book those who have murdered his son. After further discussion, the chosen revenger is Hieronimo (or Jeronimo), Marshal of Spain, thus setting him on a course of bloodshed and mayhem which ends with the popular device of a play within a play revealing all. Hieronimo bites off his tongue in order to keep silent as to his motive, although he kindly explains to the audience before doing so. Grand Guignol it might be, but it was wildly popular with audiences and the character of Hieronimo made sufficient impact for the character to be referred to in subsequent plays well after Kyd’s death. He is also generally given the credit for writing an early version of
Hamlet
, known as the
Urr-Hamlet
. Nashe, writing of Kyd in his usual disparaging manner, notes: ‘Yet the English Seneca, read by candlelight, yields many good sentences, as “blood is a beggar”, and so forth: and if you entreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches . . .’.
³
Other commentators describe the play opening with a ghost, robed in a white sheet and clanking with chains, calling out ‘revenge, revenge!’ However, since the text is long since lost there is no way of knowing how much Shakespeare took from it.

The point should be made that virtually none of the early professional playwrights would have arrived at the Rose or The Theatre clutching the synopsis, or ‘plot’, of a truly original play in their hands. The vast majority of the drama of the day was taken from a wide variety of sources, many of them well known at least to those who were literate. From their grammar schools they would have been familiar with the comic works of Plautus, the tragedies of Seneca, with Ovid and Greek drama, all read in the original. They could also draw on the historian Raphael Holinshed’s
Chronicles
, the source for so many history plays, which was first published in 1575 and added to in 1586, not to mention Chaucer, Boccaccio and Italian literature, and the popular stories, fairy tales and legends of heroes and romantic love told around many a winter hearth.

Lyly offered his audiences dramatic presentations of the latter, the earliest of which was
The Woman in the Moon
, and the most popular
Mother Bombie
. Peele’s first known play,
The Arraignment of Paris
, based on the Greek myth, was first performed in 1581, three years after The Theatre had been built. It is highly likely that he also took a role in it since for the previous two years he had needed to support himself following a court case on 19 September 1579 when his father was bound over to discharge from his house before Michaelmas ‘his son, George Peele, and all other of his household which have been chargeable to him’; in other words Peele’s rowdy lifestyle, and the kind of friends he brought home with him, did not go down at all well with Christ’s Hospital’s governing body. He went on to join the company of the Lord Admiral’s Men, remaining with them as a player until 1589 when his circumstances improved after he married a lady who brought him a dowry of both land and property. Yet in spite of his dissolute reputation the only play of his that has come down to us more or less intact is his charming and amusing
Old Wives’ Tale
, in which two young men lost in a forest are taken in by an old woman who regales them with a series of popular tales which are duly acted out for the audience, including allusions to Celtic mythology where disembodied heads in wells converse and offer advice to various characters. We know from Henslowe’s
Diaries
that it was very popular, along with his patriotic piece,
The Battle of Alcazar
, and a biblical play on the subject of David and Bathsheba, which have not survived.

Greene too wrote lively and popular lightweight pieces based around popular tales, the best known being the comedies
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay
and
George a Green, the Pindar of Wakefield
. He took the Italian play
Orlando Furioso
, made it his own and sold the exclusive rights twice. He also supplemented his income, as did many others including Nashe and Thomas Dekker, writing pamphlets, the most popular of which,
A Notable Discovery of Cosenage
, dedicated to ‘Gentlemen Readers’, purports to warn readers of the dangers and immorality of the Elizabethan underworld, which he describes in vivid detail, thus ensuring its popularity under the pretence that he is merely exposing sin.

As well as borrowing ideas from past writers, there were also rewrites of plays already in the early repertoires such as
The Famous Victories of Henry V
(in which Tarlton took a role),
The True Tragedy of Richard III, King Leir and his Three Daughters
and
The Troublesome Reign of King John
, the last attributed to John Bale who died in 1563, who wrote a number of plays to be performed by children. All three were, of course, seized on later by Shakespeare. Elizabethan audiences enjoyed a good murder story just as much as the Victorian playgoers who flocked to melodramas like
Murder in the Red Barn
and
Sweeney Todd
or today’s addicts of ‘true crime’ series.

One such is the anonymous play
Arden of Faversham
, dating from about 1587, which was regularly in the repertoire of the Lord Admiral’s Men and much of which falls into the realm of black comedy, even if the reality was not so amusing. On St Valentine’s Day 1551 Thomas Arden of Faversham in Kent, Chief Controller of HM Customs, was found dead outside his house after his wife, Alice, had made several attempts to do away with him. She was considerably younger than him and was already involved in an affair with the family steward, Mosbie, before the marriage took place. The drama details her various attempts to get rid of Arden, starting with poisoning his gruel, and ending with her employing a couple of hit men to do the deed for a fee of £10. If the play is to be believed they were incredibly inept and every one of their increasingly desperate attempts failed. Finally Mosbie and Alice concealed them in the house and arranged for Arden to be home playing a game of backgammon, during which ‘Black Will’ would creep up behind him and do the deed. But Will bungles it again, leaving Mosbie to ‘stroke Arden on the head’ – with a 14lb weight! They then lug the body outside, not taking into account that it is snowing and that their bloodstained footprints will lead the authorities directly to the corpse. The play ends there but in reality the aftermath was grim; Alice was burned at the stake, the punishment for murderous wives, her maid suffering a similar fate. A chilling item in the Canterbury town record notes: ‘for the charges of burning Mistress Arden and the Execution of Geo. Bradshaw – thirteen shillings’. Mosbie was hanged and as for Black Will, he disappeared and was never seen again. A slightly later play, also anonymous and based on a real incident, is
A Yorkshire Tragedy
, in which a feckless, violent and jealous husband kills two of his children, attempts to murder his wife and baby, then turns his knife on himself.

It was Marlowe, though, who stood head and shoulders above his immediate contemporaries with his poetic ‘mighty line’. He brought about a sea change in writing for the theatre. Compared to Shakespeare and the second wave of dramatists that were to come, his plays have no complex plots or subplots but consist almost entirely of a sequence of events in which we follow the course set by the protagonist, Tamburlaine, Edward II, Barabas the Jew and Faustus. What is without question is that his plays had an enormous influence on what came after. It was the first part of
Tamburlaine
, written while he was still at Cambridge and put on by Henslowe, which first gave Marlowe his soaring reputation as a popular dramatist whose work audiences flocked to see.