Roaring Boys (28 page)

No wonder it was popular, for it rode on the crest of the wave of anti-Spanish jingoism which was sweeping the country after some 6,000 troops had been sent to Flanders. The King and his Court were out of London for the summer but news of the smash hit, the enormous crowds, and the jammed streets, soon travelled. Towards the end of the first week in August, John Chamberlain wrote to a friend: ‘I doubt not but you have heard of our famous play of Gondomar by all sorts of people – young and old . . . Lady Smith would persuade me to take her to see it but I could not sit so long for we must have been there before one o’clock at farthest to find room.’ It must have seemed to the King’s Men that the show would run and run.

It was then that the Spanish Ambassador, Don Carlos Coloma, received wind of it and promptly went to see the show himself, emerging absolutely incandescent with rage. ‘There were more than three thousand persons there on the day the audience was
smallest
!’, he ranted, adding ‘that there was so much merriment, hub-bub and applause that had I been many leagues away it would not have been possible for me not to take notice of it’. It was, he continued, ‘a very scandalous comedy and acted publicly by the King’s own players’.
⁴
Worst of all his
amour propre
had been insulted, for he had actually been portrayed on stage in person and to ensure that no one was in any doubt as to who was being represented it is said that the players had managed to obtain one of his own cast-off suits for the actor playing the role.

Coloma formally complained to King James in person on behalf of the Spanish government, threatening drastic action. Faced with the possibility of a complete breakdown in relations between Spain and England, James was appalled and did his best to mollify the deeply insulted ambassador. On 12 August he wrote to the Privy Council demanding to know what on earth the Master of the Revels had thought he was doing to sanction the performance of such a piece and requiring them to summon the King’s Men and the writer before them immediately to demand an explanation. Therefore on the tenth day of what had been described as ‘the nine days’ wonder’, the Globe was closed, the King’s Men banned from acting and, a day later, a summons issued for the arrest of Middleton.

On 18 August the King’s Men, less Middleton, appeared before the Privy Council arraigned on the grounds that it was forbidden to represent any contemporary Christian king on stage, as they must have well known, and that it had been obvious who the White and Black chess kings were supposed to represent. They were fortunate that they were not gaoled but discharged with ‘a round and sharp reproof’, forbidden to act again until the King’s pleasure was known, and bound over to the tune of £300. In their defence the King’s Men, so the Privy Council informed the King on 21 August, ‘had produced a book, being an original and perfect copy thereof (or so they affirmed) as seen and allowed by Sir Henry Herbert, Knight, Master of the Revels, under his own hand and subscribed by him in the last page of the said book’. It had also been made clear to the unfortunate Sir Henry that he was scarcely fit to hold his office, though presumably the script had gone through on the nod among a number of others.

On first receiving the summons for his arrest ‘by Royal decree’, Middleton at first simply refused to obey it. The Council duly reported the situation to His Majesty, that ‘one Middleton, who, shifting out of the way and not attending the Board as was expected, we have given the warrant for the apprehending of him’. Finally on 27 August, after scouring London for him without success, a further warrant was issued, this time for the arrest of his son, Edward, in an attempt to ensure his father’s compliance. It did and three days later Middleton gave himself up. A tradition preserved in a contemporary hand-written note in a manuscript of the play, which belonged to a man called Dyson, records that ‘Middleton was committed to prison where he lay for some good time and at last got out upon a Petition to the King’.

Eventually the political crisis died down. After a while the actors were allowed to return to the Globe and perform again and Middleton was released from gaol to continue his joint employment as a freelance dramatist and as the official City Chronologer, to which position he had been appointed in 1620 at a salary of £6 13s 4d, increased a year later to £10. He certainly had to earn his money, for the holder of the office had to keep a journal of City events, write speeches for the Lord Mayor and senior Aldermen, and devise ‘entertainments’ when requested to do so. He appears to have carried out his tasks conscientiously – which is more than can be said for Ben Jonson who succeeded him in the position. He found the money came in handy but did as little to earn it as he possibly could.

When I a verse shall make,
Know I have prayed thee
For old religion’s sake,
Saint Ben to aid me.
Candles I’ll give to thee
And a new altar;
And thou Saint Ben, shalt be
Writ in my psalter.

Robert Herrick,
Jonson Verbius
(1638)

D
uring the winter of 1624–5 the King’s Men suffered a further blow with the death of their house dramatist, John Fletcher. Some sources say he was a victim of the plague since it was virulent once again during the winter of 1624–5, or possibly because of Aubrey’s reference to it:

John Fletcher, invited to go with a Knight of Norfolk or Suffolk in the Plague time of 1625, stayed to make himself a suit of clothes, and while it was making fell sick of the Plague and died. This I had from his tailor who is now a very old man, and the clerk of St. Mary Overy’s in Southwark. Mr. Fletcher had an issue on his arm. The clerk (who was wont to bring him leaves to dress it), when he came found the spots upon him. Death stopped his journey and laid him low here.
¹

What militates against the supposition is that Fletcher received separate burial in a church rather than being thrown into a plague pit with the rest of the victims, among whom, quite possibly, was William Rowley who died at about the same time.

But outside the narrow confines of their own world, theatrical deaths passed largely unremarked and 1625 saw a far more important demise, that of King James. The accession of his son, Charles I, was to usher in a very different kind of Court with very different tastes and interests. The new King made it clear from the start that he would not tolerate slovenliness in dress or rude or drunken behaviour from anyone. His was to be a Court of elegant sobriety and those who presented themselves before him the worse for drink received short shrift, as did those free with ‘sordid words’. He enjoyed theatrical entertainment but of a tasteful kind.

In 1626 Edward Alleyn died, releasing his young wife, John Donne’s daughter Constance, from what for her had been a deeply unsatisfactory marriage and leaving behind the enormous sum of £10,000 to endow his college. He, in turn, was followed a year later by Middleton who died at his home in Newington Butts and was buried in the parish churchyard on 4 July 1627. He died, as he had lived, in straitened circumstances and the following year his wife, Magdalen, was forced to appeal to the city fathers for financial help. She was granted twenty nobles.

During the next few years virtually all the surviving playwrights of the golden age were to follow. Chapman’s last published work appeared in 1629 under the extraordinary title
A Justification of a Strange Action of Nero burying with a Solemn Funeral one of the Cast Hairs of his Mistress Poppaea; Also a Just reproof of a Roman smell-feast, being the fifth satire of the Juvenal translated
. History does not record whether or not it was a success but it hardly seems likely that it was a bestseller in such changed times. He died on 12 May 1634 and was buried in the churchyard of St Giles in the Fields in a tomb designed by his friend, Inigo Jones. Marston, who had resigned his living in 1631, died in June of the same year and was buried in the Temple Church, next to his father. We do not know what happened to Webster, even whether or not he married, except that by 1634 he was bracketed with Fletcher as a dead playwright; nor is there any record of what happened to Ford.

The demise of Philip Massinger, best known for his
A New Way to Pay Old Debts
which has received several recent revivals, offers a little mystery. His burial is registered as having taken place on 18 March 1638. He was living on the Bankside and was apparently in good health but ‘went to bed well and was dead before morning’, whereupon his body ‘being accompanied by “comedians” [actors] was buried about the middle of the churchyard belonging to St. Saviour’s Church’. He was said to have been buried in the same grave as his friend John Fletcher, but this is most unlikely if indeed Fletcher was a plague victim. The last we hear of Dekker is that he boasted he had reached the age of ‘three score’ and was still writing pamphlets in 1638.

Their deaths or disappearances provoked little or no comment. A whole generation of theatregoers had grown up since John Burbage first built The Theatre, many of whom would never even have heard of those early University Wits, or the fates which befell Kyd and Marlowe, except as dramatists whose work they enjoyed, nor would they be able to imagine a time before there were any playhouses. That first wave of dramatists, thrust suddenly into the public eye, the roaring boys of the 1590s with their determinedly outrageous behaviour, belonged to the past. Dramatists were no longer considered remarkable and anyway tastes had changed; city satires, Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’, historical epics, wordy (and worthy) plays were now quite out of fashion. Elegant and amusing comedies and ever more elaborate masques were what people wanted to see, particularly the Court.

By the 1630s the most popular playwrights were James Shirley, Richard Brome (who had once been Jonson’s servant) and the young William Davenant, who neither confirmed nor denied the strong rumour that he was Shakespeare’s son, rather than his godson. Certainly Shakespeare had known his mother, Jennifer, when she lived in London and regularly stayed overnight at the inn later run by her and her husband in Oxford. Anyway such a piece of gossip was hardly likely to hinder the career of a would-be writer.

Shirley had first taken Holy Orders, gone on to become a Catholic, then transferred his interests to the theatre, writing tragedies, popular comedies and masques, always with an eye to what was fashionable and careful not to upset the authorities. He shamelessly plagiarised the works of others, although that was hardly unusual, even producing his own version of
The Duchess of Malfi
under the title of
The Cardinal
, but he was best known for his comedies like
The Gamester
and
Hyde Park
. Brome, however, possibly because of his close association with Jonson, brought with him more than a whiff of that older theatrical world, especially with
The Antipode
, in which a miserly, autocratic man is persuaded that he has been transported there and that in this new world everything is the opposite from that in the old: the poor rule the rich, women have the upper hand on men and masters wait on servants. He also has the doubtful privilege of having the last play,
The Jovial Crew
, to be given a London production before the Civil War. Davenant had some small success as a dramatist before the war but was to play a far more crucial role after it than that of a writer.

The last remaining major figure linking the age of Elizabeth to the present-day Court of King Charles I was Ben Jonson, now an increasingly isolated and unfashionable figure, although King James’s gift of a state pension for life had made him, to all intents and purposes, England’s first Poet Laureate. But his style of writing, particularly for the theatre, simply did not suit any more even when, as in
A Staple of News
, he chose a topical subject, mocking the new fashion for publishing ‘newspapers’, an innovation looked on by the authorities with increasing alarm. His account of its first night rings all too true to any playwright who even now finds him/herself hanging around helplessly backstage before so crucial a performance. He describes his fraying nerves, his trundling in and out of the ‘tiring house’ and dressing room to give his advice to the actors before going off to have yet another drink. Such last minute advice is never welcome and has never been encouraged, but Jonson’s interference in productions was legendary, actors complaining that he prompted them loudly if they dried, railed at the bookholder (prompter), cursed the wardrobe master, shouted at the musicians and made them sweat for every last mistake they made.
²

Snubbed by the new regime, he founded the Apollo Club, its headquarters in a Fleet Street tavern, where he could surround himself with congenial company. He drew up his own set of rules for it, one of which might be welcome now since it stated that there was no music to be played by ‘a saucy fiddler presuming to intrude’, unless the musician was actually invited to do so. Another, that women were allowed to attend meetings by invitation, is more than can be said of today’s Garrick Club. In 1628 he suffered a severe stroke and was virtually bedridden for the rest of his life, describing himself as being ‘blocked up and straitened [sic], narrowed in, fixed to the bed and boards, unlike to win health or scarce breath’. He wrote to King Charles, in elegant verse, asking for an increase in his pension, but his request was ignored. He was comforted in his last years by a coterie of young men, known as the Tribe of Ben, who admired him as a poet. In spite of his physical affliction the following year he managed one more play,
The New Inn
, which was performed by the King’s Men at the Blackfriars Theatre, but it was not a success. He died in poverty on 6 August 1637 leaving behind a pile of unfinished manuscripts, an old wicker chair ‘such as women use’, and goods to the value of only £8 8
s
6
d
. His estranged wife was long dead and there were no surviving children.