Shakespeare's Theatre

Peter Thomson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136113642
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Reviews of the First Edition
`...valuable and enjoyable reading for all studying Shakespeare's plays.'
Following in the patternestablished by John Russell Brown for the excellent series (Theatre and Production Studies), he provides first an account of Shakespeare's company, then a study of three individual plays Twelfth Night, Hamlet and Macbeth as performed by the company. Peter Thomson writes in a crisp, sharp, enlivening style.' TLS
'`...the best analysis yet of Elizabethan acting practices, excavated form the texts themselves rather than reconstructed on basis of one monolithic theory, and an essay on Hamlet that is a model of Critical intelligence and theatrical invention.' Yearbook of English Studies
`Synthesizes the important facts and summarizes projects with a vigorous prose style, and expertly applies his experience in both practical drama and academic teaching to his discussion.' Review of English Studies

Part I

THE COMPANY

1

THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN’S SERVANTS

1597 was a bad year for the professional theatre in London. The Lord Mayor and aldermen of the city had been hostile to the professional companies since they began to engage public interest around the middle of the sixteenth century. Not only were plays liable to contain lewd or even inflammatory material, not only were the gatherings of people in theatres, gamehouses, inns or public halls a threat to public order and health, worst of all, these players were under aristocratic protection, and could hope to sidestep the law and cock a careful snook at the civic authorities. By 1597, the predominantly Puritan officers of the Guildhall were seeking to limit courtly privilege within the City of London. It was an opposition that, under the insensitive Stuarts, would eventually lead to civil war. Even in her dotage, the last of the Tudors was more supple. So it was that Queen Elizabeth and her Privy Council responded to a letter from the Guildhall, dated 28 June 1597 and requesting ‘the present stay and final suppressing of … stage plays, as well at the Theatre, Curtain, and Bankside as in all other places in and about the City’, with an astonishing compliance. Was this the end of fifty years of wrangling? If the Court were to withdraw its support from the players, if they were to be allowed no longer the protection of nobleman’s livery, they would immediately become liable under the 1572 ‘Act for the punishment of Vagabonds and for Relief of the Poor and Impotent’.¹ Clearly, the context and the aftermath of the Privy Council’s order that all the theatres in and around London be immediately demolished demand attention.²

When James Burbage had provided England with its first purpose-built playhouse, the Theatre, in 1576, he had the good sense to build it in Shoreditch, about half a mile north of the Bishop’s Gate of the City of London, outside the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor. The site is a little to the north of today’s Liverpool Street Station. The Curtain was built nearby in the following year, also in the grounds of the dissolved Holywell priory. The City fathers did not like the proximity of these new playhouses, and would no doubt have fancied their chance of influencing the justices of Middlesex to do something about them, had it not been for the abiding bugbear of aristocratic privilege. James Burbage, for example, had been a leading member of the company of players licensed as Lord Leicester’s Men. Leicester was formidable enough, but the status of the company was further strengthened by the award of a royal patent in 1574. Burbage sensed his opportunity and built his Theatre. There was an immediate problem. During the 1570s, the religious drama of England was finally suppressed, and Burbage, together with all his contemporary theatrical entrepreneurs, found himself searching for a new drama to replace it. The quest was sufficiently successful to encourage further theatre-building, south of the river this time. Of the theatre in the village of Newington, not far from the area now familiar to users of the Bakerloo and Northern Lines of the London Underground as Elephant and Castle, very little is known.³ The Rose, built in the Liberty of the Clink, just south of what is now Southwark Bridge but was then open river, was overseen by the shrewdest of all the theatrical speculators, Philip Henslowe. In or shortly after 1587 it became the home of the Lord Admiral’s Men. The Swan, built in 1595 or 1596, was the last of the theatres to be built before the Privy Council order. As we would expect, it was sited outside the City’s jurisdiction, in the Liberty of the Manor of Paris Garden, just south of what is now Blackfriars Bridge, but was then open river. It was because of the presentation there, in July 1597, of a new play by Nashe and Jonson that the Privy Council was brought into its unlikely alliance with the City fathers.

Thomas Nashe was a combative man, thirty years old but already a veteran pamphleteer. He had been engaged, on the anti-Puritan side, in the Marprelate Controvery of 1589. Eight years later, he provided the Earl of Pembroke’s Men, playing at the Swan, with a new play called The Isle of Dogs. The fervent Nashe had as his equally pugnacious collaborator on this lost text, Ben Jonson. Either openly, or by inference, The Isle of Dogs criticised the government of the country, and of the City of London too. It was, we presume, the immediate cause of the Lord Mayor’s July complaint to the Privy Council. It certainly provoked the council, not only into concord with the Guildhall, but also into instructing the Middlesex justices⁴ to investigate the writing and performing of ‘a lewd plaie that was plaied in one of the plaiehowses on the Bancke Side, contanygne very seditious and sclanderous matter.’ Ben Jonson and various members of Pembroke’s Men were imprisoned (Nashe may have taken refuge on the continent – he lacked Jonson’s resistance to deviousness), and the Privy Council issued the order that ought to have spelled the end of the still-youthful professional theatre of England:

Her Majestie being informed that there are verie greate disorders committed in the common playhouses both by lewd matters that are handled on the stages and by resorte and confluence of bad people, hathe given direction that not onlie no plaies shalbe used within London or about the city or in any publique place during this tyme of sommer, but that also those playhouses that are erected and built only for suche purposes shalbe plucked downe.

At first reading, this excerpt, like the document as a whole, looks unequivocal enough, but Professor Wickham’s detailed analysis has provided it with a sub-text as surprising and as hopeful as the one Portia finds in Antonio’s bond. Those interested in the Tudor genius for regulating the relationship between the left and the right hand are advised to read that analysis. It will be sufficient here to emphasise three of the major factors leading to the preservation of the professional stage at the end of the sixteenth century:

1 The continuance of aristocratic protection. It is of particular interest that the patrons of the two leading companies, the Lord Admiral and the Lord Chamberlain, were both members of the Privy Council.

2 Queen Elizabeth’s pleasure in the plays performed for her at Court.

3 The acceptance by the Privy Council, and its assumption of the general acceptability, of the need for the theatre companies to rehearse in public the plays they would later perform in courtly seclusion.

A gloss on each of those points will provide a background for many of the subsequent considerations of this book:

1 Whilst it is true that aristocratic patronage of the professional theatre outlasted the 1597 order, it is also true that the order represented an attempt to limit that patronage. The Privy Council seems to have intended to save two companies of players, and two companies only. One of these, the Lord Admiral’s Men, was well settled in Philip Henslowe’s Rose Theatre on the South Bank. The other, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, may have been settling into Burbage’s Theatre in Shoreditch, but it was not yet settled there. It was, perhaps, the shock of the 1597 order that urged this company, the one to which Shakespeare belonged, into a new cohesiveness. However gratified by the Privy Council letters of 19 February 1598, licensing the Admiral’s and the Chamberlain’s Men ‘to use and practise stage playes’, the alert leaders of the two companies would not have missed the hardening of attitudes implicit in an act of parliament of the same month. Its effect was to limit the right to maintain a company of actors to barons or to persons ‘of greater Degree’.

2 It was fortunate for the actors that James I also took pleasure in court performances of plays; but his fondness was possessive, and his patronage accelerated the professional theatre’s drift away from its popular audience. Queen Elizabeth died in March 1603. On 19 May, James translated the Chamberlain’s Men into the King’s Men. Through his first parliament, he removed even from barons the right to maintain a company of actors. Under the Stuarts, theatrical performance was to be primarily and emphatically a royal pastime.

3 A profession that owes its preservation to the court, and whose survival in law is based on the provision of performances at court, will base much of its thinking on the requirements of the court. It would have been eccentric of the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men after 1597 to evolve in the Globe a stagecraft too complex or too particular to be adapted to performance in the makeshift ‘fit-up’ theatres of the royal residences. The need for flexibility, and the advantages of simplicity, should never be overlooked in speculation on Elizabethan and Jacobean performance styles.

The years of crisis between 1597 and 1604 saw the beginning of the end of the ‘popular’ theatre. They also saw, despite the appearances of 1597, the end of civic influence over the progress and control of the theatre. The loss of all traces of Puritan interest in the drama may not have worried the actors at the time – on the contrary, they were probably delighted – but it helped stunt the growth of the English theatre. The Puritans’ respect for the individual, and their determination to re-examine moral precepts, were first swallowed and then rejected by the greedy Jacobean court. But that is another story, and one which could not have been predicted in 1597. Our concern is with a particular group of people who, in 1597, must have felt themselves to be on the edge of the abyss, but who were in fact on the threshold of a glorious decade.

We can name the eight leading members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in August 1597 with moderate confidence. They were Thomas Pope, Augustine Phillips, William Kempe, John Heminges, Richard Burbage, William Shakespeare, William Sly, and Henry Condell. The first six of these held shares in the company. The system of self-government so far had been a simple one. The sharers financed each production and divided the takings proportionately. The profits could be used in a variety of ways, and there were presumably company meetings to determine them; but the owner of the theatre would have to be paid for the use of his building (customarily, his payment amounted to half of the gallery receipts), and the hired men – actors, musicians, wardrobe-master (tireman), prompter (book-keeper), stage-hands – would need their weekly wage. The female roles were played by boys, some or all of whom were apprenticed to actors in the company. It seems unlikely that Shakespeare ever took on an apprentice, because choice or necessity kept him in theatrical lodgings in London rather than in the comfortable domesticity which he seems to have confined to Stratford; but Phillips had several, of whom he mentions Samuel Gilburne and James Sands in his will, Heminges was master of the more successful Alexander Cooke and John Rice, and Richard Burbage of the talented Nicholas Tooley and the ‘ingenious youth’⁵ Richard Robinson. After Burbage’s death, Robinson did the decent thing and married his widow. Heminges had probably done the same for the widow of his master, William Knell, and Philip Henslowe did himself no harm at all by marrying the wealthy widow of his non-theatrical employer. It was a custom honoured in the observance, preserving a nice domestic economy at the same time as it allowed a widow to maintain a hold on life.

It is worth trying to piece together an outline of the background and the individual qualities of the people who together formulated and carried through the extraordinary scheme that shuttled Shakespeare from Shoreditch to the Bankside in the thirty-fifth year of his life. We can begin somewhere between 1590 and 1592, with a performance by Lord Strange’s Men, probably at the Rose, of Part Two of The Seven Deadly Sins. The play, by the greatest of all Elizabethan clowns, Richard Tarlton, has been lost, but a quirk of book-binding has preserved a playhouse synopsis clearly intended to help with backstage organisation. Almost all the actors are mentioned by name, and several of them have a part in the subsequent history of the Globe. Richard Burbage played Gorboduc, Augustine Phillips Sardanapalus. Thomas Pope, William Sly, John Sincler, Richard Cowley, and perhaps Nicholas Tooley played several smaller roles. The ascendancy of Strange’s Men at this time is attested by their popularity at court. They were commanded for nine of the fourteen performances recorded in the Revels accounts during the two winters of 1591–2 and 1592–3. How long the supremacy and cohesion of Strange’s Men might have continued, but for the major outbreak of bubonic plague that reached its peak in London in 1593, is necessarily unknowable. Forced to tour until deep into the winter of 1593, since London performance was banned until 30 December, the Seven Deadly Sins company split up. In the meanwhile, their patron had become Earl of Derby, on the death of his father in September 1593.

It is as well that we should understand the characteristics of bubonic plague, since its effect on professional theatre was so severe throughout the Elizabethan and Jacobean age. Major outbreaks in London, causing the banning of public performances, occurred in 1563, 1574, 1577, 1578, 1581, 1593, 1603, 1625, and 1636, and the stutter of a secondary outbreak often led to a restraint on plays in the years immediately following major epidemics, as in 1580, 1583, 1586 ‘in respect of the heat of the year now drawing on’, 1587, 1594, 1604, and 1605. To the Elizabethans, it was a medical mystery, and it is not surprising that each visitation provided a text for the morally manipulative sermons of the theatre-haters. It became an established custom to order the closing of the theatres when London deaths reached forty in any one week. The effect on the morale of the professional actor is acknowledged by Smallshanks in Lording Barry’s Ram Alley (1607–1608), when he confesses that he dwindles at the sight of a sergeant ‘almost as much as a new Player does at a plague bill certified forty’⁶

What then was mystery is now understood. Bubonic plague reached England in 1348, and remained, sometimes dormant sometimes virulent, at least until the Great Fire of London in 1666. It was spread from rats to humans by rat-fleas. When a flea bit an affected rat, its digestion was blocked, and no blood could reach its stomach. The blocked flea continued to bite in quest of more blood, and when the rat died, the ravenous flea sought a human alternative. It was the bite of the rat-flea that spread the plague. Since the thatched roofs of English houses welcomed rats, the epidemics spread with savage, though measurable, speed. Plague killed over a quarter of the population of Stratford in 1564, the year of Shakespeare’s birth. Roger Green, who lived in Henley Street, almost next door to Shakespeare’s birthplace, lost four children to it that summer. The stone-built town of Aberdeen, on the other hand, was not affected. The mystery of preservation was as great as the mystery of doom. The parish register of St Peter’s upon Cornhill contains an indicative verse:

In a thousand five hundred ninety and three,
The lord preserved my house and mee.
When of the pestilence theare died,
Full manie a thousand els beeside.

Explanations of the dwindling of an epidemic were as fanciful as those of its origin. Salvation was, in fact, owed to the hibernating habit of the ratflea. We can be fairly certain that, under normal climatic conditions, winter epidemics were not of the bubonic plague. Typhus, spread by unhibernating body-lice, was a likelier cause, or measles. The English plague months were April to November, and the usual peak from July to October. Although the cause was never identified, there is evidence of intelligent deduction in the 1587 restraint on plays because the summer is growing ‘hotter and hotter’; but the attempts to improve hygiene had less effect than is fondly supposed. Rats dislike strong smells.

The epidemic did not die out in London until 1595, and continued virulent elsewhere in England until 1598.⁷ It was an inauspicious time to form a new company of players, but what is extraordinary about the group that assembled in 1594 under the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, is the familiarity of its names. This was not a random collection of individuals, but a re-union of friends. Loyalty and genuine affection play a part in the subsequent history of the Chamberlain’s Men in a way that we can neither ignore nor adequately measure. Even among some of the hired men, there is evidence of a commi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Part I The Company
• Part II The Plays
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index of Plays
• General Index