Roaring Boys (29 page)

He did, however, achieve burial in Westminster Abbey, not in Poet’s Corner with Chaucer and Beaumont, but in the north aisle. It is said that some time previously Jonson joked with the Dean of Westminster that he could not afford to be buried alongside the other poets as he was too big and it would cost too much. He suggested, therefore, that he should be buried standing up. This was considered apocryphal until the early nineteenth century, when a Lady Wilson came to be buried in the north aisle; Jonson’s cheap coffin was there, standing on end. Carved on his stone are the simple words: ‘O Rare Ben Jonson’.

His death finally drew a line under that extraordinary era which had witnessed not only the very beginnings of professional theatre but also its greatest ever flowering of dramatic writing talent. It not only produced the towering talent of Shakespeare but also offered Marlowe, Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton in the first rank, with Greene, Peele, Kyd, Dekker, Webster, Rowley, Marston, Chapman, Heywood, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher and Tourneur following close behind. It brought into being a whole new art form and a truly professional class of actors and writers, almost all of whom were drawn from modest backgrounds and who, thanks to a particular combination of circumstances, were offered creative fulfilment beyond their wildest dreams. It has never happened again.

In 1642 the curtain came down with the passing of the Edict stating that all stage performances were banned. It was a catastrophe for the players. For sixty years they had been licensed to perform. It had always been a hazardous profession, playhouses could be closed at short notice because of the plague, play-acting continued to be castigated by critics, they were at risk of offending the authorities even if it was unintentional and it was always a hand-to-mouth existence, but the professional theatre had survived it all. But the frantic pleas of actors and writers fell on deaf ears and after the end of hostilities, worse was to come. On 9 February 1648 a new Ordinance was enacted ordering the demolition of all the playhouses, the arrest of any actors found performing anywhere and substantial fines for each and every person found attending any kind of dramatic presentation. Indeed all forms of public entertainment were banned, even dancing round the maypole.

For eighteen years theatre went dark in England. Only towards the end of the Commonwealth was anyone brave enough to try again, and that person was William, now Sir William, Davenant. Having returned from France where he had been in exile with Prince Charles, he returned to London determined that one way or another he would bring back theatre and to this end set about ingratiating himself with Cromwell. He actually persuaded the Protector to allow him to write a little entertainment for his daughter’s wedding, along with a patriotic piece geared to promote the government line on its relationship with Spain. It was a major breakthrough.

With the Restoration in sight, actors started to trickle back to London from exile either abroad or in the country and quietly start to rehearse. With the return of the King, theatre was back in business. But it was theatre of a very different kind. Charles II and his Court, used now to the continental way of doing things, demanded playhouses with the new ‘picture frame’ stage, distancing the audience from the actors and completely altering the English style of acting. Not only that, women were finally allowed on stage even if the general belief was that they were no better than they should be and only doing it to attract the attention of a wealthy keeper, an attitude reflected in the Restoration Comedies, amusing as many of them are. As for the rest, nobody wanted the old plays, not even those of Shakespeare.
Antony and Cleopatra
was supplanted by Dryden’s
Love for Love
and until the time of Edmund Kean it was Colley Cibber’s version of
Richard III
to which audiences flocked.

Adrian Noble, a previous artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, says:

during the thirty-year period in which these plays were written, enormous political shifts were taking place. All that was reflected in the drama. The plays alert audiences’ imagination and edify it, not in a smug way, but because they are truly big experiences, great epic public experiences and the greatest single experience of the age is Shakespeare where you can have a laugh, followed by a love scene, followed by a battle, followed by political intrigue in a council chamber, followed by a rough street scene and all within twenty minutes.

He might have added that this was possible because of the big open space which was the stage and also because the action was not held up in those early days by the trundling in of elaborate scenery on trucks or flying sets down from the roof. Parts of Shakespeare’s
Antony and Cleopatra
read almost like a film or television script with scenes only a few lines long during which the action moves between Rome and Egypt. The audience would know which part of the stage represented each country and all an actor had to do was to walk across it. The speed added to the excitement.

Noble continues:

This is the thread which runs through all these plays and the measure of their continuing success in their impact on the public. What we see are big public issues debated in big public plays. They have the freedom of form because these playwrights virtually invented their own, even though they stole ideas from all over the place, but they were thieves who invented as they went along, saying to themselves ‘I’ll talk to the audience at this point’, or ‘I think I’ll bring a ghost in here’. In terms of reality it didn’t worry them at all because they were creating, play by play, their own worlds. The audiences would have applauded them at the end and then, quite possibly, gone off and cheered a public hanging!
³

It is impossible to surmise what the fate of the sixteenth and early seventeenth-century dramatists would have been had there not been a William Shakespeare, although it was not until nearly two hundred years after his death that he actually received the theatrical respect he deserved. But there is no doubt that so towering a talent totally overshadowed that of his contemporaries. Productions of their plays, other than Marlowe’s
Dr. Faustus
, and Ben Jonson’s
The Alchemist
and
Volpone
, were rarities until well into the middle of the twentieth century. The building of two new theatres, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and the new Globe on the banks of the Thames, close to the site of the original, has happily changed the situation for the better and new audiences have laughed at Marston and Jonson’s
Eastward Ho
!, Jonson’s
The Devil’s an Ass
and Middleton’s
A Mad World My Masters
. Like their Elizabethan counterparts they have been thrilled and pleasantly horrified by Tourneur’s
Revenger’s Tragedy
, Middleton and Rowley’s
The Changeling
, Webster’s
Duchess of Malfi
and
White Devil
. Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine
and
Edward II
have both had productions in recent years. While a proportion of the plays written to fill the playhouses were potboilers which have rightly sunk with little trace, there remains a large body of work on which to draw.

Perhaps we should leave the last word to ‘I.C.’, the anonymous author of
Two Merry Milkmaids
who, in his Prologue, wishes on his audience then what we hope they will find in that same body of work today:

We hope, for your own good, you in the yard
Will lend your ears, attentively to hear
Things that shall flow so smoothly to your ear,
That you returning to your friends shall say,
How e’er you understood it, ‘T’was a fine Play’.

Although in some cases the author has worked from original documents, where possible publications in which they are more easily accessible are given as a source.

1
.   A.D. Wright and V.F. Stern,
In Search of Christopher Marlowe
(Macdonald 1965), p. 137.

1
.   M.C. Bradbrook,
The Rise of the Common Player
(Cambridge University Press 1962), p. 52.

2
.   Ibid., pp. 56–67.

3
.   Ibid.

4
.   Ibid. (quoting Stephen Gosson’s pamphlet of 1582), pp. 72–4.

5
.   Andrew Gurr,
The Elizabethan Stage
(Cambridge University Press 1980), pp. 113 ff.

6
.   
Henslowe’s Diary
, ed. R.A. Roakes and R.T. Rickert (Cambridge University Press 1961), pp. 274–5.

7
.   Bradbrook,
Rise of the Common Player
(quoting from Stockwood’s Sermon of 24 August 1587), p. 101.

8
.   Andrew Gurr,
Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London
(Cambridge University Press 1987), pp. 206–7.

1
.   Seminar on Elizabethan Theatre, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 2002.

2
.   
Fair Maid of the West
by Thomas Heywood (Methuen edn 1986), Act I Scene iii.

3
.   Robert Greene,
A Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance
(pamphlet, Bodley Head Quartos, Vol. IV 1922).

4
.   Judith Cook,
Dr Simon Forman
(Chatto & Windus 2001), pp. 113–14.

5
.   
Privy Council Registers, Elizabeth I
(Public Record Office), vol. VI, P381b. This is published in many biographies of Marlowe, including Wraight and Stern,
Marlowe
, p. 88, along with a facsimile of the original.

6
.   S. Schoenbaum,
Shakespeare, A Documentary Life
(complete edn, Oxford University Press 1970), indexed under Katherine Hamlet.

7
.   Mark Eccles,
Shakespeare in Warwickshire
(University of Winsconsin Press 1963), p. 82.

1
.   Andrew Gurr,
Shakespearean Stage
, p. 88.

2
.   
Henslowe’s Diary
, pp. 38–40.

3
.   
The Works of Thomas Nashe
, ed. R.B. McKerrow, revised F.P. Wilson (Oxford University Press 1958), vol. III, pp. 311–12.

4
.   Bradbrook,
Rise of the Common Player
, pp. 74–5.

5
.   Ibid, quoting Northwood, pp. 69–70.

1
.   
A Notable Discovery of Cosenage
and
The Art of Cony-Catching
(Bodley Head Quartos, Vol. 5, 1922). There are many editions of these pamphlets.

2
.   
A Gull’s Horn Book
(facsimile edn, Scolar Press 1969).

3
.   Bradbrook,
Rise of the Common Player
, chapter note 13, p. 292.

1
.   A.L. Rowse,
Christopher Marlowe
(Macmillan 1964), pp. 154–5.

2
.   A.L. Rowse,
William Shakespeare
(Macmillan 1965), pp. 124–5.

3
.   S. Schoenbaum,
Shakespeare, A Documentary Life
(Compact edn, Oxford University Press 1977), p. 205.

4
.   Jonathan Bate,
The Genius of Shakespeare
(Picador 1997), pp. 24–5 (and almost all other biographies).

5
.   Wraight and Stern,
Marlowe
, quoting from Middlesex Sessions Roll 284, Elizabeth I 1589, pp. 117–23.

6
.   R.B. McKerrow,
Works of Thomas Nashe
, Vol. III, p. 168.

7
.   Wraight and Stern,
Marlowe
, pp. 120–2.

8
.   
Henslowe’s Diary
, pp. 276–7.

9
.   J. Cook,
Dr Simon Forman
, from Ashmol Folio 280.

10
.   F. Laroque,
Shakespeare, Court and Playhouse
(Thames & Hudson 1977), pp. 146–7, a useful small compendium of general information which includes the Chettle apology in full.

1
.   Wraight and Stern,
Marlowe
, pp. 151 ff.

2
.   Ibid., pp. 235–7, quoting Dr S.A. Tannenbaum,
The Book of Sir Thomas More
(Tenny Press, New York), Chap. VII, p. 59.

3
.   Ibid.

4
.   
Henslowe’s Diary
, p. 274.

5
.   Thomas Kyd,
Touching Marlowe’s Monstrous Opinions
, British Library Mss Harley 6848 143 ff., 1593, also Charles Nicholls,
The Reckoning
(Jonathan Cape 1992), pp. 45–6. Alexis was in the original verse in Virgil’s
Ecloques
.

6
.   J. Hotson,
The Death of Christopher Marlowe
(Harvard University Press 1925). This small, but vital, book gives details of the inquest and facsimile of part of the report of the proceedings. This was a breakthrough piece of research. For those interested there is a wealth of material, including F.S. Boas,
Christopher Marlowe, A Critical Study
(Oxford University Press 1940), Charles Norman,
The Muses’ Darling
(Falcon Press 1947) and Nicholls,
The Reckoning
, as above.