The Elizabethans (49 page)

That was Lyly’s hope and aspiration, too; though it was not the path trodden by other ‘University Wits’. He hoped for advancement. There was evidently some family connection that enabled him to approach Burghley for patronage. He tried to get a Fellowship at one of the universities, but it did not happen. He wrote a novel whose title was destined to become an epithet in literary history:
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit
. It is a crib of a translation – North’s rendering of Antonio de Guevara’s
El Reloj de Principes
(
Diall of Princes
). It is not so much for the boring story that
Euphues
is remembered, as for its style – an excessive use of alliteration and antithesis, and constant allusion to classical literature and mythology. This alone, even if it were not for the crashing tedium of Euphues and his chum Philautus pursuing their romantic attachment to (in the first book) Greek and (in
Euphues and His England
) English girls. Yet the book, which almost no one outside English Literature courses in universities would today find so much as readable, was highly regarded. There was no such thing as mass literacy, but when we see that
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit
went through four editions between 1578 and 1580, we could rank it as the equivalent of a best-seller. Lyly was able to attract the patronage of Lord Oxford, and the kindly notice of Oxford’s father-in-law, Burghley. In 1584 Lyly’s ambition to have a place at court advanced one stage when he was offered a prestigious writing job: plays to be performed by the child actors’ companies of the Chapel Royal and St Paul’s Cathedral.

The choristers of St Paul’s had been performing plays since the Middle Ages, even before Colet founded the school in the reign of Henry VII. Plays, particularly at Christmas time, were a part of life in many schools – either the Latin comedies of Terence or Plautus, or morality plays, or plays based on the Bible – ‘so always’, as a cautious Henrician statute of 1543 made clear, ‘the said songes playes or enterludes medle not with the interpretacions of scripture’.
¹⁰

The huge population growth in London changed the place of theatre. Among the floating population who came into London to beg or to steal there were players. The Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds, of 1571/2, stipulated that ‘all Comon Players in Enterludes Mynstrels Juglers . . . [who] wander abroade . . . [without] Lycense of two Justices of the Peace . . . shall bee taken adjudged and deemed Roges Vacaboundes and Sturdy Beggers’.

In the short term, the panic felt by the authorities when crowds gathered together necessitated a strict licensing code for theatres. And this had the effect of making the boys’ theatres, one of the few sources of licensed entertainment in a populous capital city, increasingly popular. By 1584 Lyly had written a couple of well-wrought comedies for the joint boys’ company of St Paul’s and the Chapel Royal, and they had been performed at court. But although the City fathers by their draconian laws had hoped to exclude the vagabond players from London, the fluting-voiced company of boys from St Paul’s had demonstrated to would-be professional grown-up actors the full extent of theatrical possibilities in London: not simply in summer, when ‘enterludes’, dances and other theatricals could be performed on open-air stages, but in purpose-built theatres.

It was the triumph of a joiner-cum-actor, James Burbage, to persuade the City to license the first purpose-built theatre in London. Burbage took a lease of land in Shoreditch, just outside the City walls, in 1576. The plays he staged were so popular that an imitation, known as the Curtain, was built nearby in the same year. This was the beginning for a new mirror on the world. A new literature could be born to supply the structures that Burbage built. Nine years after Burbage’s ‘The Theatre’, the Rose was built on Bankside, just opposite St Paul’s on the south side of the river, on the edge of some of the seediest brothels and taverns in London. In 1595 Francis Langley would build the Swan, also on Bankside. In 1598 came perhaps the most famous theatre ever built, the Globe, and in 1600, in Cripplegate, Henslowe and Alleyn built the Fortune.

The children who had in some senses precipitated the theatre-mania of adult Elizabethans were to remain part of its success story. No woman was permitted to appear on the Elizabethan stage. It was an all-male affair, which meant that female parts, as well as parts suitable for children such as fairies, angels and imps, were always played by boys.

In his elegy for Salathiel Pavy, a famous child actor who appeared with the St Paul’s company, Ben Jonson gives us an exact account of the ages of these theatre-children:

Yeeres he numbred scarse thirteen

When Fates turn’d cruell,

Yet three fill’d
Zodiackes
had he beene

The stages jewell:

And did act (what now we mone)

Old men so duely

As, sooth, the
Parcae
thought him one . . .

So we know that boys were engaged into theatrical companies aged ten. Nathan Field, another famous boy actor, was thirteen when he was ‘pressed’ into service in a theatrical company. He continued to be an actor as a grown-up.

As with other trades, boys served an apprenticeship if they wanted to work in the theatre. The length of the apprenticeship would vary. Some court cases show that boys were apprenticed for as long as twelve years; for others, the apprenticeship was as little as three years. In an agreement between one Martin Slater and the Whitefriars Theatre in 1609, it was agreed that all children would be bound to Slater for three years. In his diary, Philip Henslowe, who died
c
.1610, the builder of the Rose theatre and a theatrical impresario, mentions two boy players who were apprenticed to Thomas Dowton: ‘Delivered unto Thomas Dowton’s boy Thomas Parsons to buy divers things for the play of the Spencers the 16 of April 1599 the sum of £5’. The next year Dowton himself borrowed £2 to enable him to buy the costume for his boy in a play about Cupid and Psyche.
¹¹

The apprentice boy actors would not have received wages, but they would have been clothed and fed, perhaps better than if at home with their families. They would have lived with their masters, and they would learn by taking part in plays from the start – first, as extras in a crowd, then in smaller roles as pages, fairies or children, and finally as women. Although there were no theatre schools, the training for actors would have been formal. They would have studied gesture, for example, from books such as Bulwer’s
Chirologia or the Naturall Language of the Hand
. Although this was a seventeenth-century book, which described in precise detail the meaning of individual hand-gestures – and was prompted chiefly by medical interest, partly by social observation, for the purposes of teaching etiquette – we know that it was studied in the theatre, and that Elizabethan actors would have made similar studies.
¹²
Boys who were to grow up to play members of the nobility would have to learn to move like noblemen and women. They would learn swordsmanship, to make the fight scenes convincing. They would perfect their dancing:

They bid us to the English dancing-schools

And teach lavoltas high and swift corantoes

as Bourbon says of the English in
Henry V
. And they would have sung – hence the great importance of the boys’ theatre companies attached to the cathedrals. Choir boys in England, then as now, were trained in a way that differed markedly from continental operatic styles. In the windows of the Beauchamp Chapel of St Mary’s, Warwick may be seen angels opening their mouths laterally, with the natural jaw position adopted by sixteenth-century (and modern English) choir boys. The tongue is in contact with the lower teeth, and the jaw is brought forward, enabling a pure, high sound; a lightly flexible voice of the kind needed to sing sixteenth-century polyphonic music. A well-trained boy can produce a three-octave range from B-flat or D below middle C to the G above top C. These English traditions dated back to pre-Reformation times in England. The Venetian Ambassador, hearing the choir boys sing for Henry VIII, said they were ‘more divine than human’, and when we consider what William Cornish (who died in 1523) required of the boys in his
Eton Choirbook
– an astounding vocal agility by the trebles in his
Magnificat
, for example – you realise what a very distinctive level of prodigy could be found among boy voices. This talent was taken into the theatres, where song was so frequently used, and where trained verse-speaking was developed to a superbly high standard.

Nothing happens by accident. The theatre in London was made by a group of immensely talented boys and young men, fired up by theatrically minded entrepreneurs. At first they displayed their skills on the comedies of Lyly, but almost literally waiting in the wings were Marlowe and Shakespeare. They could not have existed, however, had not the likes James Burbage built the first public theatre, and had not the acting companies been of a superlative quality.

The boys, many of them, were choir boys or ex-choir boys. And many of the men of the Elizabethan theatre might easily, in a pre-Protestant age, have exercised their talents in the Church. Christopher Marley (baptised in Canterbury in 1564), whom we know as Marlowe, the son of a shoe-maker, went to King’s School, Canterbury, and then on to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on a Parker Scholarship – money given by Archbishop Parker for a scholar at the King’s School and intended for candidates for Holy Orders.
¹³
Lyly would surely, too, have taken orders if he had managed to obtain a Fellowship at Oxford or Cambridge.

Robert Greene, a sizar (a scholar who did the work of a servant to pay his way) of St John’s College, Cambridge (1575), who died in wretched poverty in his very early thirties in 1592, was aptly described as ‘in some sort the hero and spokesman of all the commercial writers’.
¹⁴
Greene, like other University Wits, considered himself ‘too good’ for the theatre. He published from fifteen to twenty works of fiction, and pamphlets, before he turned to the theatre because it was so profitable. Burbage and Henslowe and the other entrepreneurs could pack in, perhaps, 2,000 spectators to one performance. If they charged a penny a time, there was huge money to be made.
¹⁵
Henslowe paid his poets £6 for the completion of a play.
¹⁶
It was a lot of money. No wonder a figure like Greene, an impoverished intellectual who had failed to secure an academic post, was drawn to it. Yet, as his self-dramatising autobiographies show, he despised the coarse, stupid actors, and half-loathed himself for the dissipation into which theatrical life drew him. In
Francesco’s Fortune
his self-image, Francesco, ‘fell in amongst a company of players, who persuaded him to try his wit in writing of comedies, tragedies or pastorals, and if he could perform anything worthy of the stage, then they would largely reward him for his pains’. As so often in Greene’s autobiographical fantasies, the work is stupendously successful. (Greene
was
a popular writer, but perhaps never as popular as his exaggerated stories suggest.) In
Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit
, the Greene-figure, Roberto, has been swindled by a prostitute. He sits disconsolately beside a hedge, reciting Latin and English verses, and happens to meet a player who is a gentleman-scholar fallen on hard times. ‘I was a country author passing at a moral, for it was I that penned the moral of man’s wit, the Dialogue of Dives, and for seven years apace was absolute interpreter of the puppets. But now my almanac is out of date.’ Roberto (Greene) is lured into the tempting world of the theatre and then, eaten up with self-hatred for the waste of talent that the life of the jobbing playwright entails, needs to drown his sorrows among criminals and debauchees. With luridly grovelling repentance, he warns those ‘gentlemen his quondam acquaintance that spent their wit in making plays’: obviously, he is thinking of such figures as Marlowe, Peele, Lodge and Thomas Nashe – the most ingenious of Elizabethan ‘novelists’ and an incomparably better writer than Greene.

But Greene’s writings paint an indelible picture of the world into which the University Wits were lured. Theatre-history at this period exemplifies something comparable to the pop-culture of the 1960s. It began by attracting young people from the fringes of society, and it became mainstream. By modern standards, the restrictions upon the drama were adamantine. But there was more room in the theatre for the subversive than there was in pamphlet literature. The actors were alive, the plays brought to life an alternative world and an alternative set of values, or, in the most colourful case – that of Marlowe – of non-values.

Marlowe (1564–93), Greene’s Cambridge contemporary, had a lurid, short life – he was twenty-nine when he was murdered. Hazlitt saw that there ‘was a lust of power in his writings, a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness, a glow of the imagination, unhallowed by anything but its own energies’.
¹⁷
In his brittle abnegation of conventional morality, and in his swaggering espousal of violence, blasphemy and sexual deviancy, he seems to anticipate twentieth-century figures such as Jean Genet and Michel Foucault. We certainly feel in Marlowe’s life that the London theatre was an outlet for his genius, which no other medium could conceivably have supplied.

Absolutely no biographical evidence exists that could furnish psychological explanations for the Marlowe phenomenon – and perhaps such explanations are always inadequate, even when they have data upon which to feed. The records in Canterbury supply abundant evidence of the father’s pugnacious, quarrelsome nature. Marlowe himself may, or may not, have been the precocious writer or pot-boy cited as a witness at a Canterbury ‘victualling house’ when one John Roydon committed a sexual assault on a serving girl, but this is the
sort
of boyhood we should expect for Marlowe, before his cleverness was trained at the King’s School and got him to Cambridge.