Roaring Boys (21 page)

‘The lowering of standards in the court was immediate’, writes Una Ellis-Fermor in
The Jacobean Drama
; ‘slackness, loss of dignity and increase of expense combined to produce at once dissatisfaction and a feeling of unsteadiness. Plots to depose him (King James) broke out again almost at once, the first as early as 1603 to be followed by the Gunpowder Plot in 1605.’ Whether or not it is true that Robert Cecil, who had been instrumental in securing James’s succession to the English throne, had an
agent provocateur
among the Gunpowder Plotters is still a matter of dispute but certainly from then on ‘Papists’ were hunted with fanatical zeal. Aware that he owed Cecil a great deal, James created him first Viscount Cranborne in 1604 then, in 1605, Earl of Salisbury. The Gunpowder Plot had confirmed his worst fears and given his suspicion of anything remotely Catholic, his belief in spells and witchcraft, and his ability to take offence at anything he considered to be remotely critical of himself or his entourage, it would seem that the professional life of a dramatist was likely to be every bit as hazardous as it had been during Elizabeth’s last years.

His Court was rotten with graft and corruption. It seemed that everything was now for sale. It was no longer just the King’s favourites on whom honours were lavished, and soon James and his advisers had thought up a truly splendid way of filling the country’s coffers: selling titles. Much of today’s nobility who have (or until recently had) seats in the House of Lords owe their status and rank to the fact that an early seventeenth-century ancestor had plenty of ready cash. At the bottom end of the scale for a mere £30 you could buy yourself a knighthood, and so many young men were eager to take advantage of this that the country soon boasted no less than 838 new knights. If you were more ambitious and had more money to spare, then £1,905 would buy you the new rank of knight baronet. Within a comparatively short time the King had created three new dukes, a marquess, no less than
thirty
earls, nineteen viscounts and fifty-six barons, all strictly for cash in hand, the final total of which is estimated to have been in the region of £120,000. If you could get away with it, it is obvious that such a situation was ripe for exploitation on the stage.

Disillusion became general. The anonymous commentator quoted at the beginning of the chapter continues: ‘for in London their brother shall die in the streets for cold, he shall lie sick at the door between stock and stock . . . and perish there for hunger. . . . When any (rich) man died, they would bequeath great sums of money to the poor, but now I hear no good report, and yet inquire of it, and hearken for it; but now charity is waxen cold, non helpeth the scholar, nor yet the poor.’
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However one of the immediate beneficiaries of the new reign was the company of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. James enjoyed plays and masques and almost straight away became their personal patron, the seal of royal approval giving them the title of the King’s Men, Henslowe’s company and those of the Earls of Oxford and Worcester later coming under the patronage of the Queen and Prince. We know that the King’s Men were asked to perform at Court as part of King James’s very first Christmas festivities and that the company performed
Measure for Measure
on Boxing Day and
Love’s Labour’s Lost
and ‘the play of Errors’ over the following days. If that seems quite a heavy schedule, director Gregory Doran, in his foreword to a new edition of the play
Eastward Ho
! points out that, according to
Henslowe’s Diary
during the 1594/5 season at the Rose Theatre, the Lord Admiral’s Men performed thirty-eight plays, twenty-one of which were new. There was no such thing as a long run of a popular play; audiences expected a different play to be performed every day.

Apart from George Chapman, Shakespeare was now by far the most senior and established survivor of the handful of playwrights who had come to prominence in the late 1580s and early 1590s, for the turn of the century had seen the death of two of the remaining University Wits, George Peele and Thomas Nashe. In neither case is the date of their demise certain. Peele probably died some time around 1598–9 although he was credited with
Merry Conceited Jests of George Peele, Gentleman
as late as 1605. Francis Meres wrote in his
Wit’s Treasury
that Peele died of ‘a loathsome disease’, which might well have been true since he drank heavily and slept around. Nashe almost certainly died in 1601 and various suggestions have been put forward as to the cause, since he was only thirty-four years old, including plague or a stroke. An anonymous tribute to him says:

Let all his faults sleep with his mournful chest,
And there for ever with his ashes rest.
His style was witty, though it had some gall,
Some things he might have mended, so may all.
Yet this I say, that for a mother wit,
Few men have ever seen the like of it.

But whatever their faults, Jacobean Londoners were keen playgoers, writers remained in great demand and there was plenty of work to choose from. Records show that a mixture of familiar and new works were produced in 1604 including Shakespeare’s
Measure for Measure
and
Othello. Macbeth
, widely considered to be a compliment to James’s ancestry and his expertise on the subject of witchcraft, is generally dated a little later. There was also Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois
(a rather dull historical piece), and his
All Fools; The Honest Whore
by Dekker and the emergent John Webster, who possibly also wrote
The Play of Sir Thomas Wyatt; Westward Ho
!, another Dekker collaboration; Heywood’s
If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody
and Marston’s
The Wise Woman of Hogsden, The Malcontent
and the intriguing
The Dutch Courtesan
; and Cyril Tourneur’s
The Atheist’s Tragedy
. Tourneur is a somewhat shadowy figure whose father spent his life in the service of the Cecil family and there is a strong suggestion that he, like Marlowe, was recruited into the secret service. He is best known for the splendid
Revenger’s Tragedy
, although some academics now want to credit Middleton with its authorship.
²

One reason for the doubts over its provenance is that Tourneur’s manuscripts, along with many others from the same period, were later destroyed by ‘Warburton’s cook’ some time in the eighteenth century. Sir John Warburton, who lived from 1682 to 1759, was an avid collector of almost anything, including old manuscripts, and over the years had managed to obtain the original ‘books’ of a number of Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, including some of those of Jonson and Middleton which are now recorded only as ‘lost plays’. He lived hard, drank heavily and unfortunately failed to look after his acquisitions properly. In 1729, to keep himself in drink, he sold one batch of manuscripts to the Earl of Oxford but later most of his collection of rare plays was, through the ignorance of his servant and cook, Betty Baker, ‘unluckily burned or put under pie bottoms . . .’ and a list of some fifty-five ‘lost plays’ exists in his own handwriting.

True to his promise Jonson had devoted himself to tragedy and written
Sejanus
, set in the period of Tiberius Caesar. Anne Barton in her biography of Jonson writes that it was a play he wrote very much to please himself but also to ‘demonstrate how a Roman tragedy ought to be composed’.
³
He actually presented his script to the King’s Men in 1603 but it does not seem to have been greeted with much enthusiasm and it was some time before it was put on. Anne Barton suggests that Shakespeare himself might well have insisted on cuts and rewriting – after all he was not only the house playwright and a shareholder but likely to be acting in it; if so, even he was unable to make a success of it when it was finally staged at the Globe. It did not go down well with audiences. Jonson was furious and blamed the King’s Men, going so far, when he later had
Sejanus
published, as to describe the script as played as ‘a ruin’ that had ‘suffered no less violence from our people here, then the subject of it did from the rage of the people of Rome’, pointing out that his tragedy had been torn limb from limb as had his protagonist. Nor, to add insult to injury, was that the end of the matter, for he was then hauled before the Privy Council to answer a charge of Popery in the acting text, although he seems to have been able to satisfy the authorities on that score and the matter was dropped, which is possibly why he thought it safer to return to comedy.

Eastward Ho
! was commissioned from Jonson’s old antagonist, John Marston, in 1605 for the company of the Children of her Majesty’s Revels, a company of boy actors of which he was a shareholder. Obviously the two had made up their differences for the subsequent script was the result of a collaboration between Marston, Jonson and the older and more experienced George Chapman.

Its underlying theme, one which was to prove very popular with Jacobean dramatists, is the gaining and acquisition of wealth and what people will do to obtain it. In this case it is ‘Sir Petronel Flash’ who is to marry Gertrude, the daughter of a wealthy goldsmith, solely for her money. Her father encourages the match, believing that he is buying not only into the nobility but into even more wealth. Both are to be disappointed. Towards the end of the play after a series of adventures, most of the main protagonists arrive at the Blue Anchor Tavern, presumably situated in a dockland area like Deptford, having decided to try their luck in the New World whither they are bound in a vessel captained by one Captain Seagull.

After a heavy night on the drink the adventurers duly set off on their epic voyage but are shipwrecked almost straightaway. The first survivors are convinced that they have been stranded on the French coast. Cold, wet and having lost all their money and possessions they finally attract the attention of two passers-by who are addressed by their reluctant spokesman in an early version of Franglais, only to discover that the shore on which they stand is not the coast of France but that of the Isle of Dogs: their ship had never even left the shelter of the Thames. It is during the exchange when their situation is made clear to them that disparaging remarks are made about ‘the King’s thirty pound knights’ and dim Scotsmen. No doubt the audience thought it hilarious. But not everyone was laughing. Sir James Murray, one of the King’s favourites who had gone to see the play, was enraged at what he considered a gross insult to the King and his nobility, not to mention all Scotsmen, and immediately complained to James who promptly ordered the arrest of all three playwrights.

How fortunate it is then that Jonson was later able to give his own version of subsequent events to William Drummond, who duly recorded the story. He had much to record, for Jonson had invited himself to stay with Drummond in his Scottish home, where he spent night after night talking about himself. According to Drummond, Jonson told him that he was not arrested but ‘voluntarily’ imprisoned himself with Chapman and Marston, who had been thrust into gaol for ‘writing something against the Scots in a play,
Eastward Ho
!’, and that he had chosen to share their fate when he learned ‘the report was that they should have their ears cut and noses’. Further, that after the three were finally released from prison (without injury), at a subsequent feast to celebrate his homecoming, Jonson’s ‘old mother drank to him and showed . . . a paper which she had (if the sentence had taken execution) to have mixed in the prison among his drink, which was full of lusty poison, and that she was no churl, she told him, for she minded first to have drunk of it herself’.
⁴

This moving anecdote, that Jonson had ‘voluntarily’ gone to prison with his mates, and that his dear old mum was prepared to poison both herself and him rather than that he should suffer the disgrace of having his nose and ears slit, was believed right up to 1901 when letters from Chapman and Jonson, addressed to various members of the nobility during their time in prison, were discovered in a collection of seventeenth-century manuscripts owned by a Mr T.A. White of New York. From these it was discovered that the reality was, to say the least, somewhat different. For a start Marston never went to prison at all, nor is there any suggestion that Jonson ‘volunteered’ to go to gaol: he had no option. Once incarcerated, so far from playing the swaggering hero with the noble mother, he spent his entire time writing obsequious letters to various titled people pleading with them to get him out.

One of these was addressed to ‘The Most Noble Virtuous and Thrice-Honoured Earl of Salisbury’, Robert Cecil himself, in which Jonson informs him:

I am here, most honoured Lord, unexamined and unheard, committed to a vile prison, and with me a gentleman (whose name may perhaps have come to your Lordship), one, Mr. George Chapman, a learned and honest man. The cause (would I could name some worthier, though I wish we had known none worthy of imprisonment), is (the word irks me that our fortunes have necessitated us to so despised a course) a play, my Lord.

After much more in similar vein he concludes:

But lest I be too diligent for my excuse that I may incur the suspicion of being guilty, I become a most humble suitor to your Lordship that with the honourable Lord Chamberlain (to whom I have in like manner petitioned), you will be the grateful means of our coming answer; or if in your wisdom it shall be thought unnecessary, that your Lordship will be the most honoured cause of our liberty. Where freeing us from one prison you shall remove us to another; which is eternally to bind us and our muses, to the thankful honouring of you and yours to posterity; as your own virtues have by many descents of ancestors ennobled you to time. Your Honour’s most devoted in heart and words – Ben Jonson

Whether it was his sycophantic letters or Chapman’s more restrained correspondence that finally brought about their release is not known, but by the beginning of October 1605 they had both been freed. Nor is it recorded anywhere that Jonson threw the party at which his aged mother is alleged to have waved a paper of poison at the assembled throng. However, it is known that on 9 October he did attend one. It was a party given by Robert Catesby, one of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot, which was timed to take place just under four weeks later.
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