Roaring Boys (8 page)

The original for Tamburlaine was Timur, the fourteenth-century son of a Mongol chief who fought his way west, laying waste everything as he went. When the citizens of Baghdad stood in his way, he razed the city to the ground and massacred all the inhabitants. Timur was reputedly both ugly and lame, but Marlowe’s character is whole and handsome, sweeping him across the known world bringing war, murder, torture and slavery until he finally meets the only enemy he is unable to conquer: death. He is the first of Marlowe’s great overreachers. ‘Is it not passing brave to be a king, And ride in triumph through Persopolis?’ he asks, to which the king in whom he is confiding replies: ‘To be a king is half to be a god’. ‘A god’, responds Tamburlaine, ‘is not so glorious as a king’.

Tamburlaine
also produced what must be one of the first great catchphrases in popular use. There are a number of scenes in which Tamburlaine is brought on in triumph, the most famous being that in which he is dragged across the stage in a chariot hauled by four kings, bridled like horses, whipping them on and shouting ‘Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia!’ For some reason the phrase really tickled the fancy of audiences who found the notion of royalty being used as horses and described as ‘pampered jades’ highly amusing, given the casual violence of the day. So popular was it that it also crops up years later in different contexts in plays by Marlowe’s contemporaries. Tamburlaine was one of Edward Alleyn’s greatest roles and we know he played the part wearing a magnificent suit of clothes, with red velvet breeches, for it is listed in Henslowe’s inventories of costumes; also that there was a splendid saddle for Tamburlaine’s use. Nor was any effort spared with the special effects for during one of the earliest performances real bullets were used, with the result that during the scene in which the Governor of Babylon is executed, one went astray and killed a member of the audience.

Part of a sixteenth-century map of London, showing the theatres on the South Bank.

But while popular audiences continued to increase, there were still those who criticised either the content or, more often, theatre in general. Sir Philip Sidney, who considered himself a cut above the fare being presented to the populace (although he had actually stood godfather to Tarlton’s son), was a stern critic of popular drama. The new playwrights, he complained, no longer always observe ‘the rules of honest civility nor skilful poetry’ as set down by Aristotle, where all the action must take place within ‘the compass of a single day and in one place’:

Now [he grumbles] one side of the stage may be Asia, the other Africa, along with so many underkingdoms that the Player, when he comes in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived [understood]. Then there shall be, say, three ladies who walk to gather flowers, and then we believe the stage to be a garden. By and by we hear news of a shipwreck in the same place, and then we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock upon the back of which comes out a hideous monster with fire and smoke . . . meanwhile two armies fly in, represented with but four swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched battle? Next comes the love interest in which a gallant young prince marries, is then lost leaving his wife to bear him a son who, in turn, grows up and falls in love and so on and so on and all this in two hours space.
⁴

The real loathing shown by those who hated the whole idea of professional theatre is well summed up in a pamphlet published by the Bristol cleric, John Northbrooke, in 1577, which was still being reprinted and circulated in London as late as 1592. For Northbrooke the stage was ‘a spectacle and a school for all wickedness’ for those who went to the playhouse:

if you will learn how to be false, and deceive your husbands, or husbands their wives, how to play the harlot to obtain anyone’s love, how to ravish, how to beguile, how to betray, flatter, lie, swear, foreswear, how to allure to whoredom, how to murder, how to poison, how to disobey and to rebel against Princes, to consume treasures prodigally, to move to lusts, to ransack and spoil cities and towns, to be idle and blaspheme, to sing filthy songs of love and speak filthy.
⁵

Few, however, were listening.

Many of the dramatists and actors were still living north of the Thames in the late 1580s and early 1590s, although gradually they would move over the river with the building of the Hope and Globe theatres and the demise of The Theatre. A mid-sixteenth-century map of the city of London and its environs, with the streets in which they lived, shows a wide variety of green spaces open to those living north of the river, of which the most prominent is Finsbury Fields with its windmills, beside which are little figures carrying bags of grain. It was also a popular place for women to hang out the laundry not, as today, on washing lines but over bushes. ‘The white sheet bleaching on the hedge’, the rogue and petty thief Autolycus sings in
The Winter’s Tale
as he stuffs one into his bag, prompting Simon Forman, on returning from a performance of the play, to note that he must ‘beware all such thieving fellows’. It was a good place too for the exchange of gossip for there is a drawing of women sitting on the grass chatting while behind them two young men struggle along under the weight of a full basket of garments which is slung on poles between their shoulders, the sort of laundry basket later used by Shakespeare in the
Merry Wives of Windsor
. To the east are the Spital Fields where young men went to practise sword fighting and archery or even fought duels.

Few of the dramatists were making large sums of money from their trade but their flamboyance, increasing reputation and high profiles, with their names posted on playbills, ensured that they were noticed. Both playwrights and actors acquired followings, not least among the wives of respectable artisans and merchants, some of whom were prepared to pursue the objects of their admiration. Both Greene and Peele, in spite of their appalling lifestyles, were sufficiently attractive to women to marry money, even if Greene’s marriage proved short-lived after he moved in with Emma Ball, the sister of ‘Cutting Ball Jack’, the notorious highwayman. His nickname derives from what he threatened to do to those gentlemen who would not pay up. As for Shakespeare, his earliest lodgings were just off Bishopsgate which we know because at some stage he went off to live elsewhere without paying the equivalent of his rates and was pursued by the authorities for its recovery. It was during this time, depending on which academic’s view you accept, that he was taken up with his passionate affair with the Dark Lady of the Sonnets.

Marlowe, whose proclivities were somewhat different, was either sharing lodgings with his friend, the poet Thomas Watson, in Norton Folgate, or was his close neighbour, although he was exceptionally fortunate not only to be able to bask in success but also because Thomas Walsingham’s fine mansion out at Scadbury was always available to him, along with financial assistance should he need it. It also gave him something really precious: privacy and quietness in which to write. The others had to make do as best they could, the worst off having to share bedrooms and even beds. It is hard to imagine what it must have been like to try and write a five-act drama by hand, using only ink and a quill pen, on any flat surface available and most likely surrounded by constant noise and interruption, not to mention having to rewrite and change whole scenes backstage at the theatre during rehearsal when Burbage or Alleyn felt something had not worked properly or whole pages to fit in with a particular production.

But for all of them the theatrical world had provided more than any could have imagined as schoolboys. From being just another anonymous boy growing up in the City or the son of an artisan craftsman in a small town or rural village, known only to immediate friends and neighbours, they were caught up in the excitement of creative activity, working with actors on a drama and finally seeing their work in production, able to stand inside and watch the reaction of a live audience to their latest play. It must have been heady stuff. Not to mention strolling into the nearest tavern or ordinary afterwards to accept the praise or criticism of those who had spent the afternoon in the playhouse, while looking across at the young women whose eyes were full of promise. Actors and writers had finally come together at the right time and in the right place, not only in the playhouses, but also in the society in which they moved, providing them with the opportunity to spark ideas off each other as they met up in the ordinaries, inns and taverns of Shoreditch and the Bankside.

See you him yonder who sits o’er the stage.
With the Tobacco pipe now at his mouth?

Everard Guilpin,
Skialetheia
(1598)

I
t is left to two popular playwrights to tell us something of what it was like to live in their London, the London of the theatre, the underworld (with the denizens of which they freely mixed), and how to get around and cut a dash even if hard up: Robert Greene and Thomas Dekker – Greene for his streetwise advice to an innocent abroad on the perils awaiting him, Dekker for his wonderfully funny description of a day in the life of an indigent writer about town. Both Greene’s supposedly cautionary pamphlet and Dekker’s hilarious advice to his protégé offer a picture of the capital during the last decade of the sixteenth century that no amount of academic research or learned surmise can possibly surpass. Greene’s
A Notable Discovery of Cosenage, Conie-catchers and Crossbiters
¹
was published in 1592, shortly before his death, and Dekker’s
A Gull’s Horn Book
²
was first published about ten years later but little, if anything, had changed in the intervening period.

Greene needs no further introduction. Thomas Dekker, about whose origins we know very little until he started writing professionally, was born in London sometime in 1570. As well as delightful comedies such as
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
and collaborations with other dramatists on a wide variety of work, like a number of his contemporaries he wrote popular pamphlets which would sell for a few pence. His is a name which fairly regularly appears in
Henslowe’s Diary
when he runs into money problems.

To begin with Greene and the Elizabethan underworld, those to whom his pamphlet is addressed need look no further for practical advice on the perils awaiting the unwary on the streets, inns and taverns of even the better parts of London, let alone the brothels and gaming houses of the Bankside:

The cony-catchers, apparelled like honest civil gentlemen or good fellows, with smooth face, as if butter would not melt in their mouths, after dinner when the clients are come from Westminster Hall and are at leisure to walk up and down Paul’s, Fleet Street, Holborn, the Strand, and such common-haunted places, where these cozening companions attend only to spy out a prey; who, as soon as they see a plain country fellow, well and clean apparelled, either in a coat of homespun russet or of frieze, as the time requires, and a side-pouch at his side – ‘There is a cony’, saith one. [The most obvious hazard is the pickpocket or cutpurse]

In St. Paul’s between ten and eleven is their hour and there they walk, and perhaps if there be a great press, strike a stroke in the middle walk, that is upon some plain man that stands gazing about, having never seen the church before; but their chiefest time is at divine service, when men devoutly go up to hear either a sermon, or else the harmony of the choir and organs. There the nip and foist [cutpurse and pickpocket], as devoutly as if he were some zealous person, standeth soberly with his eyes elevated to heaven, when his hand is either on the purse or in the pocket, surveying every corner of it for coin.

Then, of course, there are the whores, known on the Bankside as the ‘Winchester Geese’ since they operated on the substantial area of church-owned land within the borough of Southwark which was under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Winchester. Greene was an expert on whores, which is not surprising as for several years he lived and was kept by one. ‘A shameless hussy has honey in her lips’, he warns, ‘and her mouth is as sweet as honey, her throat as soft as oil; but the end of her is more bitter than aloes and her tongue is more sharp than a two-edged sword.’ ‘End’ has a double meaning in this context. It might well be understood to mean that such a woman would come to a bad end, but it could also be taken as a warning that while her mouth might be sweet as honey, her ‘end’ was more likely to give you at best ‘the clap’ (gonorrhoea) or at worse ‘the pox’ (syphilis). Very aware that sex always sells popular journalism, he pontificates against lust while going into its variations in detail. There is no end to the tricks played by whores, he counsels, from the straightforward stealing of a purse as a client sleeps, to a variation in which the client is set on and robbed by the whore’s pimp while she is busy servicing him.