Roaring Boys (18 page)

So who, as well as our man, is in the audience? For women who can persuade their husbands to let them go to the theatre it is a splendid day out, ‘persuade’ being the operative word since playhouses are notorious as places of assignation and very often a husband or father will prefer to accompany his wife or daughter to make sure she behaves herself. But it is very unlikely that a woman of any substance will even have thought of going to a playhouse unaccompanied; at best she would be easy game for pickpockets, at worst taken for a whore. At the very least therefore she will be accompanied by her maid, unless she is one of a party of friends who have arranged to meet up and go together. If she does have an ulterior motive for visiting the playhouse then no doubt she has made it worth her maid’s while beforehand to hold her tongue. But even then she is taking a considerable risk as she can never be sure whether there is someone who knows her and her father or husband among the crowds in the theatre who will be only too eager to tell tales.

There are also other hazards. A widely circulated story is a case in point.
²
As Henry Peacham tells it:

A tradesman’s wife of the Exchange, one day when her husband was following some business in the City desired him he would give her leave to go and see a play, which she had not done for seven years. He bade her take his apprentice along with her, and go; but especially to have a care of her purse which she warranted she would.

Sitting in a box, among some gallants and gallants’ wenches, and returning when the play was done, she went home to her husband and told him that she had lost her purse. ‘Wife,’ quoth he, ‘did I not give you warning of it? How much money was there in it?’ Quoth she, ‘Truly, four pieces, six shillings and a silver tooth-picker.’ Quoth her husband, ‘Where did you put it?’ ‘Under my petticoats, between them and my smock.’ ‘What!’, quoth he, ‘did you feel nobody’s hand there?’ ‘Yes’, quoth she, ‘I felt one’s hand there but did not think he had come for that. . .’

Gosson describes a scene where just such an incident could take place and be misunderstood:

You shall see such heaving and shoving, such itching and shouldering, to sit by women; such care for their garments that they be not trod on; such eyes to their laps, that no chips light in them; such pillows to their backs, that they take no hurt; such masking in their ears, I know not what; such giving them pippins to pass the time; such playing at the foot saunt without cards; such tickling, such toying, such smiling, such winking, such manning them home when the sports are ended, that it is a right comedy.
³

As to the reaction of the audience to what they saw, there is no doubt that patriotic wars went down well, not just the obvious
Henry V
and other ‘King Harry’ plays, but also
Henry VI
when it dealt with the wars in France (in particular the role played by the heroic Talbot), and the anonymous play of
Edward III
that appears in collections of Shakespeare apocrypha, that is, plays which might be attributed to Shakespeare but in this instance is more likely to have been a collaborative effort. As Heywood put it: ‘What English blood seeing the person of any bold English presented and doth not hug his fame and honour his valour, pursuing him in his enterprise with his best wishes and as being wrapt in contemplation, offers to him in his heart all prosperous performance, as if the performer were himself the man personated? So bewitching a thing is lively and well spirited action, that it hath power to new mould the heart of the spectator.’

Gosson, reporting the reaction of the audience to a play in which Bacchus wooed Ariadne, describes the audience as being in a transport of delight by the end of the performance. ‘The beholders rose up, every man stood on tiptoe and seemed to hover over the prey, when they swore, the company swore, when they departed to bed, the company presently were set on fire, they that were married posted home to their wives; they that were single vowed, very solemnly, to be wedded.’

Glimpses of productions appear in the Simon Forman papers. He loved the theatre and, on occasion, would rush home and write an account of what he had just seen. There is an interesting insight into a performance of
Macbeth
at the Globe in which he describes the first appearance of the three witches, all too often played today as ugly women about ninety years old. In this production Macbeth and Banquo are riding through Scotland when, he reports, ‘there stood before them three women fairies or nymphs. And saluted Macbeth saying three times unto him “Hail, Macbeth, king of Cawdor; for thou shalt be a king but shal beget no kings, etc.” Sometimes he adds a little homily to what he had learned that afternoon. Following a play on the subject of Richard II (not Shakespeare’s), he notes: ‘I say it was a villain’s part and a Judas kiss to hang a man for telling the truth. Beware this example of noblemen and of their fair words, and say little to them, lest they do the like by thee for thy goodwill.’ He enjoyed
The Winter’s Tale
(also at the Globe) and was highly amused by the rogue, Autolycus, and his trickery and how easily he cozened people into believing him. Therefore, he tells himself, one should ‘beware of trusting feigned beggars or fawning fellows’. Presumably some of the performances he saw had the same effect on him as that described by Gosson, as afterwards he would race out of the playhouse either to hurl himself into the arms of ‘Julia in Seething Lane’, into bed with his wife, or possibly both.
⁴

There was far more reaction from an Elizabethan audience than we would expect today. As with Victorian melodramas, villains were hissed and booed, heroes cheered. The groundlings in particular might well chime in with words of their own. For example when Henry V announced he was going to fight in France he was quite likely to have been greeted with the Elizabethan equivalent of ‘go for it, Hal!’ Even much later, Dickens wrote of a performance of
Hamlet
in which the audience took sides during the great soliloquy ‘to be or not to be’, some suggesting Hamlet should go ahead, kill himself and get it over with, the rest telling him to pull himself together and sort out the situation. Since the plot lines of many of the plays, most particularly those of Shakespeare, are widely known today even by those who are not regular theatregoers, we need to remember that most of the people attending an Elizabethan or early seventeenth-century production would have no idea how the story would resolve itself. Possibly Romeo and Juliet
would
marry and live happily ever after, Hamlet kill his stepfather and become King of Denmark. With regard to
Hamlet
possibly the nearest we could come to this nowadays was described by the actor Derek Jacobi who, some years ago, took part in a tour of China organised by the British Council and found it an extraordinary experience to play to audiences who did not know how it ended.

If a play was well received, then at the end of it there would be plenty of noisy applause and shouts of approval. Michael Drayton wrote of how good it was to sit in the Rose and listen to the reaction of an audience which had enjoyed the show. At the:

Shouts and Claps at every little pause,
When the proud Round with on every side hath rung.
⁵

If it was not, then there would be no shortage of insults shouted out for all to hear or, in the worst-case scenario, various kinds of missiles thrown on stage. An extreme example of what could happen, even if his woes were self-inflicted, is recorded by John Taylor, known as ‘the Water Poet’. Taylor had become so fascinated by the poets, dramatists and actors he regularly ferried across the Thames that he eventually decided he could emulate them himself. The result was reams of awful verse which he paid to have published. In l613 he hired one of the newer theatres, the Hope, and challenged a William Fennor, who described himself as ‘the King’s Rhyming Poet’, to a competition not only to decide who was the best poet but who could come up with the worst insults about the other’s work. Fennor agreed and Taylor, after hiring the theatre, duly paid for a thousand handbills to be printed advertising the event which he then assiduously distributed throughout the City and the Bankside.

‘I divulged my name in some 1000 ways and more, giving my Friends and diverse of my acquaintance notice of this Beargarden of dainty conceits.’ To ensure the appearance of Fennor, he gave him ten shillings ‘in earnest of his coming to meet me’. His aim had been to attract a really big crowd and he certainly succeeded for when the big day came the theatre was packed. Taylor, in his best suit, looked out from backstage therefore on to a vast and noisy audience, the groundlings in the pit already impatient for the show to begin. He and they waited . . . and waited . . . until the awful realisation dawned on Taylor that Fennor was not going to show up and the whole audience was becoming increasingly restive. It was then that he made his big mistake. He went out on to the stage and told the audience that the contest would not be taking place and that he now proposed to read them a selection of his own works. Even had he been a better poet or a fine actor it is highly unlikely, in the circumstances, that he would have been able to hold the house. Grimly he details what happened next:

some laughed, some swore,
some stared and stamped and cursed,
And in confused humours all out burst.
I (as I could) did stand the desperate shock,
And bid the brunt of many a dangerous knock.
For now the stinkards in their ireful wrath,
Bepelted me with loam, with stones and laths,
One madly sits like bottle-ale and hisses,
Another throws a stone and ’cause he misses,
He yawns and bawls and cries Away, away . . .
Some run to the door to get again their coin,
And some do shift and some again purloin,
One valiantly stept [sic] up upon the stage,
And would tear down the hangings in his rage
(God grant, he may have hanging at his end),
That with me for the hangings did contend.
Such clapping, hissing, swearing, stamping, smiling,
Applauding, scorning, liking and rewriting
Did more torment me than a Purgatory.
⁶

The players at the Hope, who had turned up to see the fun, finally took matters into their own hands and offered to perform a play for the audience and, this being greeted with approval, started the show. But in spite of this Taylor refused to leave the stage and for some time attempted to continue reading his poems while the action of the play took place around him, until he finally admitted defeat and gave up.

It was partly as a way of preventing any possible trouble at the end of a play that the ‘Jig’ was performed although it was often noted that this made those who stayed to watch it even rowdier and also gave further opportunities to the cutpurses. Thomas Dekker notes:

I have often seen after the finishing of some worthy Tragedy or Catastrophe in the open theatres, that the scene after the epilogue hath been more black (about a nasty bawdy jig) than the most horrid scene in the play was; the stinkards speaking all things, yet no man understanding anything; a mutiny among them, yet none in danger; no tumult, yet no quietness; no mischief begotten and yet mischief borne; the swiftness of such a torrent, the more it overwhelms, breeding the more pleasure.

So, let us hope our original playgoer has enjoyed the performance whether it was of
Tamburlaine, Henry V
or
The Two Angry Women of Abingdon
. His problem now is to get out of the theatre through the crowds making for the door or doors; as there is no need to collect money, another gate or door might well have been opened up to let people out. Just as now, there are those who block the stairs chatting to each other, and he has to push through them. Once on the ground floor, he finds himself propelled willy-nilly towards the exits by the ‘stinkards’ pushing and shoving from behind, desperate to get outside and into the taverns or ordinaries. Women, aware of having spent a long time away from home, are now anxious to return to their families and force their way through as best they can. Sir John Davies, writing in l595, described the feelings of a young man as he attempts to leave the playhouse and the real world impinges on that of the fantasy land in which he has spent the last few hours:

For as we see it all the play house doors,
When ended is the play, the dance and song;
A thousand townsmen, gentlemen and whores,
Porters and serving-men together throng,
So thoughts of drinking, thriving, wenching, war
And borrowing money, raging in his mind,
To issue all at once so forward are,
As none at all can perfect passage find.
⁷

Finally our man stumbles out into the street. His backside is sore with sitting on the edge of the bench and someone behind him has spilt bottle ale down his new doublet. But all in all it has been a good afternoon. He hears a shout from across the street and sees a friend. He goes over to him and together they go off to the Anchor tavern for a quart of ale.

For within the hollow crown
That rounds the temple of a king
Keeps death his court . . .

Richard II
, III, ii

T
he sheer number of plays written between 1594 and 1604 is truly staggering. According to Professor Gurr, 145 plays are recorded in each of the two five-year periods 1594–99 and 1599–1604, more than at any other time in theatrical history. Looking at the various repertoires, he suggests that until the end of the century the two most famous and dominating companies, the Lord Admiral’s Men and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, offered very similar repertoires, but that afterwards they developed in markedly different directions. On the grand scale Henslowe’s company, based at the Rose, had always favoured epics such as
Tamburlaine
, while Burbage’s preference was for histories of English kings, but having said that, both had in their repertoires plays about Henry V, Owen Tudor, Jack Straw’s rebellion, King John, Richard III and Troilus and Cressida. As for comedies, one of Henslowe’s most popular productions was Dekker’s
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
while Burbage’s comedy offerings included
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and (although the dating is still a matter of contention)
Love’s Labour’s Lost
.