The House by the Thames (6 page)

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre has been re-created by the riverside in our own day with loving care for authenticity, but I hardly think that an equally authentic ring in which blind bears were whipped or horses baited to death would be acceptable as an historical tourist attraction. Intimations of love or charity from the distant past still have the power to cheer us: in the same measure, the irremediable nature of long-ago cruelties of any kind weighs on our hearts. It comes as something of a relief to find that a sixteenth-century commentator too
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thought that bear baiting was ‘a full ugly sight' attracting ‘most fools all' who could have put their pennies to better use, and that was over a hundred years before both Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn expressed a civilised disgust at the sport in their respective diaries. Foreign visitors usually settled for describing the whole experience deadpan, as they did the plays they saw: such entertainments were just another English curiosity, along with characteristic eating habits: ‘They do not generally put fruit on the table, but between meals one sees men, women and children always munching through the streets, like so many goats, and yet more in the places of public entertainment.'
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National quirks change surprisingly little over the centuries.

While the presence of this entertainment industry on Bankside must have increased business for the Cardinal's Hat, none of the four theatres (Rose, Globe, Hope and Swan) was immediately near it. Stow refers to two Elizabethan animal baiting rings on Bankside; one was on a site further east that carries the name Bear Gardens to this day. From the Agas map and from another reference it seems possible the other one was near the Great Pike Garden, a little to the west of the inn, but, if so, it later moved from there. This was probably just as well, since another foreign visitor to England at the end of Elizabeth's reign (Thomas Platter) remarked of the dog kennels adjoining the ring: ‘And the place was evil smelling because of the lights and meat on which the butchers feed the said dogs.' The stench must have been strong to provoke a comment, for our ancestors walked through perpetual smells. Whiffs of fish would, for a long time, have been associated with the stewside, competing with the river breezes and the pleasant aroma of woodsmoke. Pig-keeping generated pungent scents, but general stable smells were not disagreeable – and they were so universally present in populated areas during the two-thousand-year dominance of the horse that few people would even have registered them. The same is probably true for human waste, some of which would have been consigned to underground cess-pits at this period, but much casually added to open manure heaps here, there and everywhere. Official attempts to keep it out of the drainage ditches that criss-crossed the south bank are a constant theme up to the nineteenth century, though the objection seems to have been not so much that faecal matter was unhealthy as that it choked the ditches and prevented water from running away.

‘Shakespeare's Globe' (actually the creation of the actor-manager Richard Burbage) rises again today on the south bank. It is a near-unique example of the distant past returning, but its presence obfuscates detailed facts of that past. Descriptions and drawings of the original theatres are not numerous, but it is almost certain that the new Globe, conforming to modern ideas of safety and comfort, is both higher and more solid than the Elizabethan and Jacobean structures, since they could be dismantled and re-erected elsewhere rather as open-air concert arenas are today.

Nor is the new Globe on the site of the original, whose exact location several hundred yards to the east was finally established in the twentieth century, and is marked today by a ring of distinctive cobbles in the courtyard of modern flats in Park Street. The new Globe is not, either, on the site of the Rose Theatre nearby, whose forgotten foundations right by Southwark Bridge Road were revealed by chance in 1989 when a Victorian warehouse was demolished. There lay hidden, sleeping, a perfect O, the original floor beneath layers of later dirt still strewn with the nutshells dropped by munching spectators.

This happy discovery gave further impetus to the actor Sam Wanamaker's campaign to resurrect the Globe. Indeed, so useful was the uncovered Rose for publicity purposes that the popular impression today is that the new Globe is built in the foundations of the old one, thus conflating two different theatres and three sites into one archetypal whole. So a pretend Shakespearean playhouse for our own time has now, by commemorating the original theatres, also superceded them. And for the first time ever the plot on which 49 Bankside sits finds itself with a playhouse right at its elbow.

Burbage's company, the Chamberlain's Men, was originally set up by his father, James, in Shoreditch which, like Bankside, was just outside the City jurisdiction. But, with no river to act as a barrier, it was uncomfortably close to the City and therefore subject to interference. The City Corporation disapproved of playhouses, which they regarded as the resort of undesirable people including thieves, horse-stealers, pimps, fraudsters and (rather oddly) rabbit catchers and those likely to commit treason. Actors were still by tradition ‘rogues and strolling vagabonds', though a new generation of players, aristocratic patronage and fixed places for performance were making this designation obsolete. By 1598 James Burbage, a joiner by trade, was in dispute with the ground landlord, who was unwilling to renew the lease but was laying claim to the theatre's fabric. At Christmastide, while this City grandee was known to be celebrating the holy day in the country, the Burbage father and sons dismantled the theatre plank by plank, took all the material over on a series of boat-trips to the south bank, and re-erected it there as the Globe.

This location was no doubt influenced by the fact that the Rose was already on Bankside, erected there some ten years earlier by the moving spirit of the other leading company, the Admiral's Men. This was Philip Henslowe, theatrical manager, pawn broker, dyer, ruff-starcher, Groom of the King's Chamber, Master (after 1604) of the King's Bears, landlord, vestryman, and an emblematic Southwark citizen of his time. He later built a second Rose and the Hope Theatre, married his step-daughter to the leading actor, Edward Alleyn, and thus became indirectly part-responsible for the benevolent founding of Dulwich College (Alleyn's Gift). He was the son of a game warden of the Royal Ashdown Forest in Sussex: the family also had iron-ore mining and smelting interests in the forest. He came to London as an apprentice in the dyers' trade; evidently he knew how to make his mark, and when his employer died he married the widow. His busy and variegated life exemplifies the first period in London when entrepreneurial energy could win fortune and near-gentlemanly status, and Southwark, lacking the august dignitaries of London proper, was the ideal place for such a man to thrive. He stands as the first in a long line of them.

Because Henslowe wrote a wildly phonetic English, bought and sold second-hand clothes and lent money at interest to actors, later generations have tended to write him off as a vulgarian and a predator. However, his role with the actors was more like that of banker and he put up the money for production costs and costumes. It is clear that he was loved and respected by his son-in-law Alleyn, and was sufficiently honoured in his parish of St Saviour's to become a churchwarden and eventually one of the governors of the Free Grammar School. He had no children of his own, but tried to do his best by assorted orphaned nephews and nieces, not all of whom were grateful or as hard working as he was. When he died in 1616 he was worth a substantial amount of money, and owned the leases of much property in Paris Garden and on Bankside, including some in the Great Pike Garden, and several inns.

It has sometimes been asserted that Henslowe owned the Cardinal's Hat. Documentation would suggest that he did not, nor even that he owned a lease on it, but one can tell from the addresses on family letters that both he and Alleyn and their respective wives lived on Bankside. One letter from 1592, before his Rose was constructed, indicates Henslowe (‘hinslo') ‘dwelling on the bank sid right over against the clink', which would suggest a house on the waterfront very near the Bishop's palace. But I think that later Henslowe or Alleyn or both may have moved much nearer to the Cardinal's Hat. In the Southwark archive collection is a nineteenth-century Deed of sale, plus earlier documents, relating to a parcel of land which, by then, represented numbers 44, 45 and 46 Bankside, plus a considerable amount of land to the back of them where other houses were built. The location of this sixty-six-foot frontage on the river, just two more house-widths east of number 49, is thus clear – by coincidence, it is roughly the stretch occupied by the Globe today. The oldest extant Deed in the bundle relating to this particular plot of land is dated 1698, but this one recapitulates, on durable parchment, the earlier history of the plot, going back to 1604, when a ‘gentleman' called Devonish Rymen sold it to Philip Henslowe, complete with several ‘messuages' (houses). The next sale occurred in 1616, which is the year Henslowe died.

So the Cardinal's Hat would have been conveniently near to hand, and that the family were good customers is undoubted. The year after Henslowe's death, Alleyn's engagement-diary-cum-accounts records several dinners there, one for local vestrymen, for he, like his late father-in-law, was on the parish council: ‘December 12. I went to London [from Dulwich, where he had a country retreat] and supped at the Cardinalls Hatt wt. Mr Austen Mr Archer and Mr Ordes. 4.0 shillings. Dec 17. Dinner at Cardinalls Hatt wt. Vestry men. 3.0 shillings. Supper ther wt. Mr Austen etc. 2s.6d.' In a world in which a working man was doing well if he made twenty pounds in a year (four hundred shillings), and a skilled artisan, shop-keeper or clergymen only perhaps two or three times that, it will be seen that dinner bills counted in shillings indicate a certain standard of prosperous comfort in both inn and diners. People transacted business now in inns, in a haze of newly popular tobacco; it had become customary to erect high-backed settles like screens at each table to create a degree of privacy. Fourteen years later the Cardinal's Hat was clearly still the good inn where theatre people went; there is a record of them dining John Taylor, the waterman-poet, there at their expense.

Many other people connected with the playhouses lodged on Bankside in the early years of the seventeenth century, though not the Burbages: their home remained on the other side of the river in Shoreditch. Similarly, although much scholarly effort has been expended trying to find the name of Richard Burbage's colleague, William Shakespeare, among such records of Southwark residents of that era as survive, it does not figure. Elusive as ever, he seems to have paid taxes to the Bishop of Winchester in 1600, but these may relate to his part-share in the Globe since, apart from hopeful forgeries, the only faint indications are of addresses for him on the London side. Presumably, like Burbage, he commuted across the river by boat. There is a tale that he used to frequent the Falcon Inn, which was on an inlet on the boundary between Bankside proper and the Paris Garden, near Paris Garden stairs; certainly, if he was living west of Temple Bar, that would have been a logical landing place for him. Then a short walk along the riverfront, past the Cardinal's Hat, and down past the Bear Garden to the Globe.

What
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known is that Shakespeare's younger brother Edmund, who followed the successful elder to London but had not much acclaim as an actor himself, died aged twenty-seven in 1607 at his lodging in Hunt's Rents, Maid Lane. Maid or Maiden Lane was the first track to develop across the meadows immediately south of Bankside and roughly parallel with it. It followed the line of the long, meandering drainage ditch that had been cut in the thirteenth century to channel waters off the land and round into the Thames the other side of Paris Garden. The lane still exists today as Park Street. Straddled by Southwark Bridge Road and by railway viaducts, but now without the iron gantries between warehouses that made it cavernous in its industrial heyday, Park Street is a classic example of an urban contour persisting through time when the world that created it has utterly passed away.

It has been said that the playwright John Fletcher lodged for a while at the Cardinal's Hat. I have not found any reliable authority for this, but John Aubrey, that invaluable seventeenth-century gossip and man-about-town, wrote of Fletcher and his co-author Francis Beaumont: ‘They lived together on the Bank-side, not far from the Play-house, both bachelors, lay together, had one Wench in the house between, which they did so admire, the same cloathes and cloake etc. betweene them.' In spite of the implications of this, Beaumont eventually married and fathered two daughters, before dying, less than three years later, in 1614. Fletcher very quickly took up with another stage writer, Philip Massinger, and apparently lived as closely with him as he had with Beaumont till his own death in Southwark in a plague year: ‘In the great Plague 1625 a Knight of Norfolk (or Suffolke) invited him to the Countrey. He stayed but to make himselfe a suite of Cloathes, and while it was making, fell sick of the Plague and dyed.' (Aubrey again.) Clothes seem to have been an important item for Fletcher. The image of the dramatist feeling he must have a nice suit to accept a grand invitation adds a further touch to our picture of the stage world, in which actors were regularly the recipients of cast-offs from noble wardrobes. Ostensibly these were for use on stage; in reality, they were often worn as part of a flamboyant lifestyle, or else sold off to Henslowe or another dealer to raise ready cash. Henslowe, incidentally, knew Massinger well, had him as a lodger at one time, and once bailed him out of debtors' prison. He reproached him for extravagant entertaining.

Massinger was buried in St Saviour's church in the same grave as Fletcher. Massinger's wish to join his great and good friend there must have been well known to his associates, for he himself was not by then an inhabitant of the parish and it cost more for ‘strangers' to be buried. Their joint dust is in theory still there, though in practice it was probably scooped out, along with that of many others, when the old floor was levelled in the 1830s for the nave's rebuilding and the grave-slabs re-laid. Perhaps that debris, human dust and all, was used as hardcore beneath some terrace of houses in the then-expanding suburban districts of Kennington or Camberwell.
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