Worlds Elsewhere (6 page)

At this point, Gdańsk was perhaps the largest city in the Baltic
region and one of the most influential in Europe, home to 75,000 people – modest compared to London, which had a population of 200,000 by 1600, but still significant. Perfectly positioned for ship-borne trade, it was home to a vigorous mercantile community in contact with Denmark, Sweden, Flanders, France, Spain, Portugal and much further beyond. Thousands upon thousands of tons of wood and grain went out from Gdańsk, and ships from across Europe streamed in for the access it provided to central European markets.

Gdansk had never been more cosmopolitan – nor richer – than during the Renaissance. Długi Targ, the long market in the centre of town, is still lined by swaggering Hanseatic mansions – fantastical, many-gabled creations finished in toothsome colours of pink and marzipan yellow, carefully reconstructed after bomb damage in the second world war. In the National Museum a few streets away from my hotel (which had once housed the Dutch consulate) was further proof of Gdańsk's overseas connections: a vast triptych of the Last Judgment by the Flemish artist Hans Memling, commissioned for a Medici church in Florence but seized by a privateer from Gdańsk who won it after a sea battle with the English.

Despite such conflicts as the Hanseatic War of 1469–74, England was, on the whole, a valuable ally. Gdańsk had long sat at an oblique angle from Catholic Poland, an arrangement formalised in 1457 when the Polish king granted it independent jurisdiction. Lutherans had brought German translations of the scriptures to Gdańsk as early as the 1530s, and it became a hotbed of the new faith, home to one of the few sixteenth-century Protestant gymnasiums to be built on the Continent (not dissimilar from the grammar school attended by Shakespeare). In 1577, irked by its semi-detached Lutheran lodger, the Polish crown attempted to invade. Eventually the rival forces came to a compromise: fealty and repatriation fees if Gdańsk could have its old freedoms back. The agreement largely persisted until the Prussian invasion of 1793.

Little wonder the English found this bullishly independent port city congenial. In a side street off the main marketplace was Dom Angielski, the ‘English House', built in 1568–70 – three years after Elizabeth signed that letter – as a centre for the English community in Gdańsk. It was a towering edifice in louring grey stone that would have looked more at home on the streets of Manchester than here in Poland. When it was raised, the English community was one of the
largest outside England, perhaps 1,000 people strong, amplified by a substantial population of Scots.

Limon riffled fast through the documents: communiqués about diplomacy and trade from Elizabeth, a Latin note from James I politely declining to furnish Gdańsk's council with arms.

All at once, we hit the jackpot: letters from the English actors who had visited. I scanned them greedily, trying to decode the German as best I could (which was badly, even with Limon's help). Most were applications to the town council to perform in the city, generally during the annual St Dominic's fair in August. With the brown-nosing formality that is a burdensome feature of Renaissance written communication, they repeatedly protested the players' most excellent skill, and begged humbly to inform the authorities that the drama they performed, comedies and tragedies, was of the highest – and most moral – quality.

They also disclosed more enticing nuggets of information. From a letter of August 1601 by a rival German company one could glean that English actors had begun to visit Gdańsk ‘a long time ago', perhaps as early as the late 1580s. By 1600 or so the city had become a regular calling point for actors travelling north through the German states. The visitors were clearly admired: the same German company begged to inform the authorities, with a tart stab of envy, that ‘you may wish to see that we Germans have also learned a thing or two, and just as well as the English'.

This wasn't to say the English had it easy. In 1611, around the time
The Tempest
had its debut in London, one touring company appeared twice in Gdańsk. The players must have wondered why they'd bothered. On the first occasion they were forced to cut short their visit after struggling to drum up spectators; then, on their return, they had the opposite difficulty when an uninvited crowd burst into the theatre without paying, leaving them with no money (their letter lamented piteously) to pay the silk merchants who had made their costumes.

Generally, however, visits went smoothly, implying that the inhabitants of this worldly and wealthy city took visiting performers to their hearts. English companies would come for the next fifty-odd years, through the Thirty Years' War that tore apart Europe, beyond even the English Civil Wars and Cromwell's closure of the theatres in 1642 back in Britain.

At first the actors set up in a civic building at the top of Długi Targ,
an undramatic brick hall now heavily restored. But from 1612 references begin to appear in the records to a permanent acting space located in what had been a
Fechtschule
or fencing school. Companies petitioned to play there; one referred to it as a
publicum theatrum.
Limon showed me an image in an engraving: a blocky wooden building, the size and appearance of a large cow barn, with an open roof and galleries just visible inside, perhaps two or three shallow storeys high.

This was the evidence I was after. What made the building properly interesting was its resemblance to designs for the Fortune playhouse back in London, built in 1600 by the same architect-carpenter who had raised the Globe, Peter Street. Instead of the Globe's polygonal, doughnut-like form, the Fortune, raised north of the Thames on the edge of Shoreditch, was, unusually, in a box shape. According to Street's contract – which survives – it was 80 feet square (24.3 square metres) on the outside and 55 feet square (16.7 square metres) on the inside, made of ‘good stronge and substancyall timber', with galleries in three storeys, equipped with seats. Its other features were to be constructed ‘in the manner and fashion of the saide howse Called the Globe', one of which was the roofed stage that projected out into the middle of the space, around which the groundlings would hustle (though not too closely: Street was also instructed to surround it with iron ‘pykes').

No contemporaneous images survive of the London Fortune, once described as ‘the fairest playhouse in this town'. But if the information in the archives was accurate, it had a twin right here in Gdańsk, accommodating 1,000 spectators, 1,000 miles from the original. The best guess was that some kind of specification had been brought out from London and constructed locally: not difficult, in a shipbuilding city with skilled craftsmen and plentiful timber. Even the connection with fencing was in character – the same went for many Jacobethan playhouses, where displays of dazzling skill with rapiers and swords were part of the attraction.

The London Fortune's name proved unlucky. The theatre burnt down in 1621 and was replaced by a brick building, itself torn down in the anti-theatrical 1640s; whatever rubble survived the Blitz is now buried somewhere beneath the brutalist concrete of the Barbican (whose 1970s arts centre I had haunted the previous summer, during the World Shakespeare Festival).

But the Fortune's Polish twin flourished. In 1635 a ‘lords' room' was installed, after which an Italian architect added complex stage
machinery for the avant-garde art form known as opera. In 1695, space was made for an orchestra, and in 1730 the theatre's owners finally gave in to the biting Baltic winters and tacked on a roof. A visiting English merchant described it as ‘a large arena for the Baiting of Bulls, Bears and wild Beasts, Amphitheatre-like, capable of containing a vast Number of Spectators, strongly inclosed with Wood, and having convenient Galleries for that Purpose'.

The story was remarkable: a chunk of Elizabethan theatre history that had washed up here on the Baltic coast. The men responsible were assembled in front of me on the page. I turned another leaf: beneath the boldly inscribed names ‘John Green' and ‘Robert Rainold' were the words
‘die Englischen Comedianten'.
Even I could translate that.

But who were the English Comedians? What drew them? What drove them?

In a café opposite St Mary's church, with the photos I had taken at the archive and a jumble of books and notes, I worked through some answers. On the other side of the room a British stag party was clustered limply around a table, surrounding a formidable installation of Żywiec beer bottles. One man, shirt half off despite the temperature outside, was slurringly attempting to chat up the waitress. Another sported a foam hat in the shape of a giant cheese. The waitress gave me a sharp look as she went back to the bar: English comedians, all of us.

The historical variety began to tour continental Europe at the end of the sixteenth century. In Renaissance Europe no less than the present-day G8 it was customary for diplomats to bring substantial entourages, and given that some of these aristocrats had become enthusiastic patrons of the theatre, it was known for actors to travel, too – part entertainment, part political theatre. When one of Elizabeth's showiest nobles, the Earl of Leicester, landed at Flushing in 1585 to support the Dutch in a war against the Spanish, he was accompanied by a group of musicians and fifteen players.

One of Leicester's entourage, a man called Robert Browne, seems to have been bitten by the touring bug. In 1590, Browne crops up in the records at Leiden in the Netherlands, and he led companies that roamed around the northern – generally Protestant – parts of the continent for another thirty years. Usually troupes travelled from town
to town, playing at markets and fairs when they could get permission, in addition to being hosted by friendly merchants and nobles, who (assuming they could afford it) were only too delighted to welcome practitioners of this newly chic English art. Indeed, for a certain breed of European noble English Comedians became a must-have accessory: Maurice of Hesse maintained actors at his residence in Kassel for many years, eventually constructing them a theatre, while the Polish royals imported an entire English company wholesale from London to Warsaw in 1617.

The Archduchess Maria Magdalena of Austria seems to have been a devotee, according to a letter she composed to her brother, the Archduke Ferdinand, in February 1608:

Seven plays in seven days: these actors had more than earned their ‘good rest'.

So why did these men – women were not permitted to act professionally in England or this part of the continent, and most wives stayed at home – spend so much time in foreign lands, taking their chances with princes and audiences alike? Wanderlust must have played a part, but to find the rest of the answer one had to look back to Britain.

When we think of the surname Shakespeare, we think of William – a hugely successful royal servant who died in his bed in the second-largest house in Stratford-upon-Avon, having done extraordinarily well in the entertainment business. But William had a brother, Edmund,
sixteen years younger – also a performer, also in London. Edmund's shadowy career as a ‘player' only grazes the documentary record twice, in the funeral notice for his son (born out of wedlock), followed by his own death four months later in the harsh winter of 1607 at the age of twenty-seven. As far as anyone can tell, Edmund was a failure. I had always found it tantalising that William Shakespeare called the scheming younger son of Gloucester in
King Lear
‘Edmund'; it seemed a gloomy irony that, having failed to make his own mark on stage, Edmund Shakespeare was immortalised (somewhat unflatteringly at that) by his tiresomely successful sibling.

Edmund was, if anything, the norm. The late sixteenth century may have been the great golden age of English drama, but life for all but a lucky few Jacobethan players was desperately precarious (the word ‘career' in this period retained its older sense of something a horse does under you when it tries to bolt). A government statute of 1572 branded players as ‘rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars', and, unless they could acquire the protection of a patron, they were exposed to the whim of the authorities. The Puritan City fathers in London detested theatres and all they stood for, and endlessly, bad-temperedly, angled for them to be closed down: breeding grounds for bubonic plague, incitements to sedition, lewdness, frivolousness, time-wasting. Between 1603 and 1612, London theatres went dark for nearly eighty months, often for long stretches at a time, forcing actors into other work or out on to the road. In the harsh theatre closures of 1592–93 (when even Shakespeare attempted to find another job, as a courtly poet), as many as 200 players were cast out of work.

Some travelled around England and Scotland, hoping that authorities in the provinces would be more forgiving (sometimes they were, often not). A hardy few took their chances in Europe. That same year, 1592, the English traveller Fynes Moryson came across a flabbergasting sight at the annual September fair in Frankfurt: