Jacobean Public Theatre (Theatre Production Studies)

JACOBEAN PUBLIC THEATRE THEATRE PRODUCTION STUDIES General Editor: John Russell Brown University of Michigan There ha...

Author: Alexand Leggatt

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JACOBEAN PUBLIC THEATRE

THEATRE PRODUCTION STUDIES General Editor: John Russell Brown University of Michigan There has long been a need for books which give a clear idea of how the great theatres of the past worked and of the particular experiences they offered. Students of dramatic literature and theatre history are increasingly concerned with plays in performance, especially the performances expected by their authors and their audiences. Directors, designers, actors and other theatre practitioners need imaginative, practical suggestions on how to revive plays and experiment with rehearsal and production techniques. Theatre Production Studies fills this need. Designed to span Western theatre from the Greeks to the present day, each book explores a period, or genre, drawing together aspects of production from staging, wardrobe and acting styles, to the management of a theatre, its artistic team, and technical crew. Each volume focuses on several texts of exceptional achievement, and is well illustrated with contemporary material. Already published:

ELIZABETHAN POPULAR THEATRE Michael Hattaway JACOBEAN PUBLIC THEATRE Alexander Leggatt THE FIRST GERMAN THEATRE Michael Patterson RESTORATION THEATRE PRODUCTION Jocelyn Powell THE ROYAL COURT THEATRE 1965–72 Philip Roberts JACOBEAN PRIVATE THEATRE Keith Sturgess SHAKESPEARE’S THEATRE Peter Thomson ENGLISH MEDIEVAL THEATRE William Tydeman

JACOBEAN PUBLIC THEATRE Alexander Leggatt

London and New York

First published in 1992 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1992 Alexander Leggatt All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Leggatt, Alexander Jacobean Public Theatre I. Title 792.0942 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Leggatt, Alexander. Jacobean public theatre/Alexander Leggatt. p. cm.—(Theatre production studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Theater—England—London—History—17th Century. 2. English drama—17th century—History and criticism. 3. Theater and society—England—London. 4. London (England)—Popular culture. I. Title. II. Series. PN2596.L6L37 1992 792’.09421’09032–dc20 91–47105 ISBN 0-415-01048-9

for

R.A.Foakes

CONTENTS

Part I

List of illustrations

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

Playhouses and audiences 1

2

PLAYHOUSES, STAGES AND PERFORMANCES

9

The older playhouses

9

The Boar’s Head

14

The Globe

16

The Fortune

17

The Red Bull

19

The Hope

22

Stages

23

Performances

24

THE AUDIENCES AND THEIR CULTURE

27

The popular audience

27

Popular culture

31

The theatrical occasion

37

Part II Popular dramaturgy 3

PRODUCTION VALUES

47

Using the stage

47

Dressing the stage

50

Stage pictures

57

vii

4

5

Devils and fireworks

64

Stage fighting

67

ACTING VALUES

73

Actor, role and audience

73

Actors at work

85

Boy actors

89

The Clown

91

TELLING THE STORY

103

The eclectic occasion

103

Shaping the action

105

Generalizing the experience

112

The failure of The White Devil

120

Part III Plays 6

THE FAIR MAID OF THE WEST

129

7

THE HONEST WHORE

145

8

IF YOU KNOW NOT ME YOU KNOW NOBODY

159

9

THE TRUE CHRONICLE HISTORY OF KING LEAR

175

Appendix

195

Notes

19 9

Select bibliography

211

Index

213

ILLUSTRATIONS

1 The foundations of the Rose playhouse, excavated in 1989 2 The interior of the Swan playhouse 3 A conjectural drawing of the Boar’s Head playhouse interior 4 A fight scene from The Four Prentices of London 5 Thomas Greene, the clown of Queen Anne’s company 6 The trial scene in Swetnam the Woman-hater, Arraigned by Women

11 13 15 70 93 177

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My first debt is to John Russell Brown, who started me on this project, and whose advice and encouragement have been valuable throughout. I had the opportunity to try out some of the material by presenting papers to R.A.Foakes’s seminar on theatre history at the International Shakespeare Conference at Stratford-upon-Avon, and to the Work in Progress in English group at the University of Toronto. I am grateful to the organizers of these occasions, and to the colleagues who responded with advice, extra information and salutary warnings. I am grateful to John Astington, Karen Bamford, David Bevington, William Blissett, Linda Hutcheon, Peter Saccio and Susan Snyder, who have helped in various ways. Finally, I wish to thank the University of Toronto for a term’s leave of absence that allowed me time to write.

x

INTRODUCTION

In the libraries and bookstores in which we normally encounter them the plays of Jacobean England are arranged by author; in their own time they were arranged by playhouse. Broadly speaking, there were two types of playhouse in London in the early years of the seventeenth century: the public playhouses, open to the sky, with the audience surrounding the stage on three or even four sides, and the private playhouses, indoors, with the stage at one end of a hall. The latter charged higher prices, prided themselves on a more select clientele, and offered a more sophisticated type of drama—intellectual, sceptical and satiric, where the public tradition was rough, sentimental and romantic. It is to the private tradition that modern literary criticism most often turns when it ranges outside Shakespeare; these are the plays that generate theses, books and articles, reading lists in universities, and productions in the modern theatre. 1 Not that the popular tradition outside Shakespeare has been altogether neglected: The Shoemakers’ Holiday and A Woman Killed with Kindness have been in the theatrical repertoire for a long time, and have recently been joined by The Fair Maid of the West and The Roaring Girl. Others may follow. These plays, and a few others, have also entered the academic repertoire, usually for their social and political interest; but the literature on them is still small, and there is not much sign of enthusiasm for the tradition as a whole. Shakespeare and the popular drama that preceded him have been studied for their carnivalesque and subversive elements. 2 But the popular theatre of Jacobean England—a large part of what may be the most vital theatrical culture England has ever seen—still lies largely neglected. One practical reason for this is that the surviving plays are found (when they can be found at all) in research libraries and on microfilm—not usually in bookstores, and hardly ever in theatres. Scripts designed for a large general audience have been reduced to texts for specialist study. When that study is literary—and to encounter a play in book form makes one think of it as a literary text—it will generally turn away. These are scripts for performance, and their chief values are theatrical. To understand Jacobean popular plays, we need to recover the theatrical occasion of which they were a part. That is the aim of this book. The difficulties are obvious. The playhouses have vanished, leaving only fragmentary hints of the features contemporary audiences took for granted. Instead of regular theatre criticism we have scattered allusions. Playwrights and

2 JACOBEAN PUBLIC THEATRE

actors have left few accounts of their work. Most important, the audiences are gone, and in the theatrical occasion I would like to reconstruct the audience was essential. Public theatre was popular theatre not only because it played to a large general public, but also because it was audience-centred, giving that public what it wanted. These are plays whose chief function is not to express an artist’s personal vision but to cater to the needs and tastes of an audience; they are a consumer product, part of a commercial enterprise. The intelligentsia, as we shall see, wrote condescendingly about such popular ingredients as clowns, fireworks and fight scenes; but it is a fair assumption that these elements occur in play after play because audiences wanted them. In recovering the theatrical occasion offered in the public theatre, I am particularly interested in how that theatre worked on its audience. The evidence has to be drawn for the most part from the very play texts whose survival in book form leaves them so far from their original ambience. This was not a literary theatre, yet the texts are nearly all we have. We have to read them not as literary documents but as scripts for performance. The line is admittedly a fine one—what can move an audience can move a reader—but it is still worth drawing. It means concentrating on what would strike an audience, immediately, in the heat of performance, and on the script as a series of opportunities for performers and stage technicians; it means putting aside effects that reveal themselves only on close and repeated study, effects that turn the scripts into opportunities for a reader. It also means reading stage directions. 3 It is remarkable how many modern editions do not include stage directions in their line numbering, as though they are somehow not part of the play; it is even more remarkable how many editors take liberties with stage directions they would never dream of taking with dialogue. Depending on the provenance of the text— author’s manuscipt, playhouse copy, pirate’s report—stage directions can be of three kinds: what the author asks for, what the company actually did, and what a reporter or actor remembered. I have felt free to use all three types, even the first: an author’s request may not be good evidence of what actually happened (ask any playwright) but if the author was a professional it is normally evidence of what was possible. I have called attention to cases where the provenance of a stage direction could be important, and where an author seems to be talking to a reader, or to himself. With a few exceptions, I have not tried to speculate on what an actor might have done, or how a scene might have been blocked; I have concentrated on effects the script appears to dictate. To reconstruct a whole Jacobean performance in one’s imagination can be a fascinating speculative exercise, but I have not attempted it here; instead I have looked at particular moments to draw out the sort of detail that can, I hope, stimulate the imagination of any readers who want to try speculative reconstructions of their own. Besides the tricky and incomplete nature of the evidence, there are other warnings to keep in mind. The distinction I have drawn between public and private traditions is a common one, but in practice it was anything but simple. Stylistically, individual scripts do not always fit the traditions associated with

INTRODUCTION 3

their playhouses. If we did not know that one was performed at the Globe and the other at the Swan, we would think of The Revenger’s Tragedy and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside as private-theatre plays. The King’s Men, the leading company of the period, used both a public playhouse, the Globe, and a private one, the Blackfriars, taking the same plays back and forth. After 1617 the former repertoire of the public Red Bull would be seen at the private Cockpit. Even within the public tradition, plays did not stay in one place. The life of a successful play could be extended over a generation or two and over a number of different playhouses. By the same token a theatre season would mix old and new, so that revivals of, say, Doctor Faustus were as much a part of the Jacobean theatre scene as the first productions of new plays. In choosing the plays for discussion I have kept to those that appear to have begun their lives in one of the public playhouses, including the Globe up to (but not after) the time the King’s Men began to use the Blackfriars (though I have included The Late Lancashire Witches, a late King’s Men play we can confidently locate at the Globe). I have excluded Shakespeare (with one exception) and Jonson, neither of whom has exactly suffered neglect. Their relation to the tradition I am describing is a fascinating subject, but one I have been able to touch on only once, in a preliminary way, in the last chapter. These decisions mean that the principal emphasis falls on the work of the Admiral’s-Prince Henry’s Men at the Rose and the Fortune, and Worcester’s-Queen Anne’s Men at the Boar’s Head, the Curtain, the Rose and the Red Bull. This puts the focus where I think it ought to be, on the unfashionable theatre. ‘Jacobean’ is necessarily a loose term. In search of interesting plays belonging to the tradition I am describing, I have allowed myself to range a bit earlier than James’s accession in 1603 and a bit later than his death in 1625. But the main emphasis falls on the remarkable first decade of the seventeenth century, which brought the sort of creative explosion in all forms of theatre that comes, with luck, once or twice a century. In choosing plays for particular emphasis I have tried to avoid duplication with other volumes in this series: Peter Thomson’s Shakespeare’s Theatre, Michael Hattaway’s Elizabethan Popular Theatre and Keith Sturgess’s Jacobean Private Theatre. Since we have all had to spend some time on the general nature of theatre at this period, there is inevitably some overlapping, but I have tried to find my own emphasis and to keep the overlapping to a reasonable minimum. With a few exceptions, I have avoided using the names of playwrights. This is not out of a theory that there is no such thing as an author, but rather as an exercise for myself and the reader, trying to bring us a little closer to the initial effect of these plays on audiences who would have associated them more with a playhouse and a company, and less with an author, than we do. Instead, I have identified plays with the playhouse in which they were first performed. The appendix, in which plays are listed alphabetically by title, identifies the authors and the editions used for references. That last point has involved some hard decisions, the result of which is an eclectic mix of modern editions and original


printings. I have decided, with some misgivings, to use modern editions where possible so that a reader interested in a particular point and wanting to look more closely at it can find it in an accessible text. Where no good modern edition was available to me I have used originals, or Malone Society reprints. By ‘good’ in this case I mean an edition that allows one to see the editor’s choices and to judge for oneself whether an editorial change is justified. This also means an eclectic mix of reference systems, as follows: act (II), scene (ii), line (27–30), page (p. 24) signature (H3r). (There is perhaps some decorum in working this way when the subject is a theatre that was itself eclectic.) One concession to system is that spelling and punctuation for all sources have been modernized. I have tried to cure myself of the habit of referring to the audience as ‘we’, since this is primarily a work of history discussing what these plays meant to their first audience, not a work of criticism discussing what they might mean now. But readers may notice that the cure is incomplete. There is so much in these plays that is moving and entertaining—and occasionally outrageous—that ‘they’ can sometimes become ‘we’ as a modern reader trying to reconstruct the first audience’s experience momentarily identifies with it (identification is not always approval). There are barriers to cross: the romantic, sentimental and moralizing qualities of this drama do not always travel well historically, though even the most sophisticated reader can be caught taking a furtive pleasure in all these qualities. More disturbingly, this drama is occasionally racist and xenophobic, and persistently sexist. There is some of it that we would not want to travel. But if we are to understand it, and to understand the popular culture it comes from, we need to look frankly at passages we may now find repugnant. I have put this warning here, to avoid repeating it endlessly throughout the text; the plays themselves do not come with warnings attached, and to recover the first audience’s experience means imagining what it would be like to be undisturbed by things that now disturb us deeply—such as the identification of black skin with evil, the belief that Roman Catholics are doing the devil’s work, and the assumption that a wife who submits patiently to abuse by her husband is exercising a woman’s highest virtue. Finally, it should be noted that, whatever one thinks of this theatre, it was remarkably persistent. Though most of our plays come from the early years of the seventeenth century, they represent a tradition that lasted right to the closing of the theatres in 1642, and beyond. Martin Butler has called the continued playing at the Fortune and the Red Bull in the 1630s ‘perhaps the single most underrated fact in the history of English theatre’. 4 His point can be taken further. On 12 September 1667 Samuel Pepys saw at ‘the Duke’s house’ a revival of Greene’s Tu Quoque, a Red Bull play of 1611. Though it was spruced up by Davenant, Pepys found it ‘a very silly play’, adding ‘but it will please the citizens’. On 1 January 1663 he complained that the same playhouse was ‘full of citizens and so the less pleasant’; and on the same date in 1668 he was even more offended: ‘Here a mighty company of citizens, prentices and others’. They were paying prices that a few years ago he could not afford himself: ‘so much the

INTRODUCTION 5

vanity and prodigality of the age is to be observed in this particular’. 5 These are the recognizable descendants of the old Red Bull-Fortune audience; neither the closing of the theatres nor the Restoration has been able to drive them away. They are a rough, stubborn and vital element in the history of the English theatre.

6

Part I PLAYHOUSES AND AUDIENCES

8

1 PLAYHOUSES, STAGES AND PERFORMANCES

Though our concern is with the theatrical occasion, the spaces in which plays are performed are an important part of that occasion. A decision to go to the theatre now is generally a decision to see a particular play; in Jacobean London it may have been rather a decision to visit a particular playhouse. In the Praeludium to The Careless Shepherdess, written for the private Salisbury Court playhouse in the late 1630s, the citizen Thrift, deciding the Salisbury Court is not for him, announces, ‘I’ll go to th’ Bull, or Fortune, and there see/A play for two pence, with a jig to boot’. 1 His decision is not for a particular play or a particular actor, but for a particular type of playhouse, where his tastes and his budget will be accommodated. Making some allowance for the satiric intent of the Praeludium, this probably represents the kind of decision a great many playgoers made. What were the playhouses like? Our attempts to answer this question are of course handicapped by a shortage of evidence: it is a jigsaw puzzle from which most of the pieces are missing. Moreover, we know enough to know that we cannot generalize from one playhouse to another. There was no such thing as ‘the Jacobean playhouse’ or ‘the Jacobean stage’: there were playhouses and stages, each with its own peculiarities. The common factors in the public playhouses can be briefly summarized: a stage in the central yard of a large building, open to the sky but surrounded by galleries that offered comfort and protection to audience members willing to pay extra; a tiring-house for the actors behind the stage; and a close relationship with the audience, which surrounded the stage on three or even four sides, in the same light as the players. Apart from that, there were many variations; and a survey of the playhouses available in Jacobean London will give us a chance to look at some of these, and to get our bearings before we look more closely at what went on in those playhouses. THE OLDER PLAYHOUSES By the turn of the century the oldest of the major public playhouses, James Burbage’s Theatre in Shoreditch, 2 north of the city, had been pulled down and its timbers used to build the Globe. But its near-contemporary, the Curtain, which had been built just south of it in 1577, still stood. It was used by a variety


of companies, including the Chamberlain’s Men in the period between the autumn of 1597, when the Theatre became unavailable to them, and the opening of the Globe in 1599. The Chamberlain’s Men, who became the King’s Men on James’s accession in 1603, were by this time the leading acting company in England, and the status of the Curtain is indicated by the fact that they used it only as a temporary expedient. The same is true of Worcester’s Men, who in 1602 were authorized as the third acting company in London (after the Chamberlain’s and the Admiral’s) and who became Queen Anne’s Men in 1603. They used the Curtain between 1604 and 1606, but they also used the Boar’s Head during the same period, and they too were waiting for a more permanent home, the Red Bull, into which they moved in 1605 or 1606—though they continued to use the Curtain occasionally afterwards. Later, between 1620 and 1622, the Curtain was used by Prince Charles’s (I) company. (There were two ‘Prince Charles’s’ companies in this period, the earlier named for the future Charles I, and the later for his son.) The Curtain, in other words, was what we would call a rental house, having no longterm association with any particular group. It was also used for fencing displays and other sporting events, and acquired a reputation for the bawdiness of its jigs, comic song-and-dance routines performed by the clowns of the day. It was still occasionally used up to 1624, and still standing in 1627; but there is no record of plays being performed there after 1625. We know that it was round—bearing in mind that in this period a ‘round’ playhouse was more likely to a be a polygon than a smooth circle—but other than that we know little about it. We know more about the Rose, whose foundations, lying in Southwark on the south side of the Thames, were partially excavated in 1989 (see Plate 1). This playhouse was an enterprise of Philip Henslowe, one of the leading theatrical entrepreneurs of the time. The Rose was built around 1587 and remodelled in 1592 and 1595; the archaeological dig uncovered the outlines of both the original playhouse and the remodelled one. 3 The original playhouse was a fourteen-sided polygon, with an external diameter of about 74 ft. The galleries were about 10 ft 6 in. deep, with bay fronts of about 11 ft 2 in. The erosion pattern in the yard indicates that the roof had no gutters and was therefore probably thatched. Until the excavation of the Rose, it was generally assumed that the yards of Elizabethan playhouses were flat, but the Rose yard is raked downward towards the stage—though it is hard to tell how much of this effect was designed and how much was produced by subsidence. The stage was on the north side of the yard—another surprise, since it had been thought that stages were on the south-west, protected from the prevailing wind and the sun and assuring an even light. That may have been true of other stages, but it was not true at the Rose. Another peculiarity of the Rose is that the stage was not a rectangle, as we believe other stages of the period were, but tapered towards the front. In the original playhouse the stage was 24 ft 9 in. wide at the front, about 37 ft 6 in. wide at the rear, and about 15 ft 6 in. deep. In the second version (probably dating from 1592) the northern end of the playhouse was demolished

PLAYHOUSES, STAGES AND PERFORMANCES 11

1 The foundations of the Rose playhouse, excavated in 1989, showing the outlines of both the original stage and the remodelled version. (Photo: Andrew Fulgoni, Museum of London).


and rebuilt a few feet farther north, creating a bulge in the original polygon and moving the stage back about 6 ft 6 in. The second stage appears to have been roughly the same size as the first. It is possible that the tiring-house facade—in effect, the back wall of the stage—was not flat, as we have generally imagined tiring-house facades to be, but followed the line of the galleries. By the standards of the time, the Rose was small, with a possible capacity (assuming it had three galleries) of 2,000 people before rebuilding and 2,425 afterwards. Its stage was also small, with an area of 475 square feet, as opposed to the 1,182 square feet of the Fortune stage. This was the playhouse of Tamburlaine, The Spanish Tragedy, Henry VI and Titus Andronicus, plays that seem to require a big, flamboyant acting style; yet the relation of stage to audience was intimate. The audience was not passively receiving large effects transmitted over a great distance; it was at close quarters, able to catch the excitement and participate in it. The importance of this close relationship is something we shall examine in later chapters. Revealing as the Rose excavation has been for theatre scholars, it is as well to remember that it tells us only about the Rose. But the number of surprises it contains is a necessary reminder of how much we have had to guess, and how little we really know. The small size of the playhouse, which for us is one of its surprises and perhaps its principal attraction, may have told against it. The revision would have increased its capacity, but not by much. The Admiral’s Men used it to 1600, when they moved to the larger Fortune; Worcester’s Men used it around 1602, but left it after the plague closing of 1603–4. There is no record of playing in it after 1603. In a memorandum of 25 June 1603, Henslowe refers to ‘the little Rose’, and ‘little’ does not seem to be a term of endearment, since he goes on to comment that he would rather pull it down than lay out the money to rebuild it. 4 By 1606 it was disused and may have been demolished. The Swan was built around 1595, also in the suburbs to the south of the Thames. Of the South Bank playhouses, it was easily the furthest from London Bridge, and this was presumably a disadvantage. It too has left a major piece of evidence, a drawing made about 1596 by Johannes de Witt, which survives in a copy by Aernout van Buchell (see Plate 2). Much reproduced, and much debated, this is our only contemporary view of the interior of a public playhouse. It shows three actors playing a scene on a rectangular stage, towards the back of which two imposing pillars support a canopy covering the rear of the stage. At the back is a flat wall, with two arched doorways, the doors of which are closed. In the upper part of this wall is a gallery in which eight figures are watching the actors. Above the canopy is a hut topped with a flag showing the figure of a swan. In a doorway in the hut a figure blows a trumpet, from which the swan emblem hangs. We can also see three levels of galleries, an entrance to the lowest gallery from the yard, and a roof that looks tiled rather than thatched. Clear in its general effect but crude in its details, the drawing has generated as many questions as it answers; and, as with the Rose excavation, we need to remember that we are seeing only one playhouse, not a standard model. The human figures


2 The interior of the Swan playhouse, from a copy by Aernout van Buchell of a drawing by Johannes de Witt. (Photo: University Library, Utrecht, MS 842, fol. 132R)


are probably there to show the different spaces in use rather than to reproduce a particular moment in rehearsal or performance. De Witt estimated the capacity of the Swan at 3,000. Like the Curtain, the Swan had a chequered history. It was used by a variety of companies, none settling there for long, for fencing and other entertainments, and on one occasion for a hoax, when Richard Vennar distributed handbills for England’s Joy, a spectacular allegorical show celebrating Queen Elizabeth. Once the audience was assembled he absconded with the takings, leaving his dupes to console themselves by vandalizing the playhouse. Lady Elizabeth’s Men took over the Swan in 1611, and from this period comes the only extant play we can confidently associate with it, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613). It was still standing, but much decayed, in 1632. THE BOAR’S HEAD The Boar’s Head playhouse stood in Whitechapel, a working-class area just to the east of the city limits. 5 There had been an inn on this site as far back as the 1530s; it underwent a cheap and primitive adaptation for use as a playhouse in 1598, and a much more elaborate one in 1599—possibly in an effort to compete with the newly opened Globe (see Plate 3). In the 1598 version a large stage, 39 ft 7 in. by about 25 ft, was built in the middle of the innyard. Placed as it was, the stage required the actors to enter through the audience (as generations of actors had done before them, with cries of ‘Room!’, when performing interludes in banqueting halls). It would have allowed only the most basic performance conditions, actors and an audience. Its audience would have been mostly in the yard, since the galleries were small. In the 1599 rebuilding, the stage— essentially the same stage—was moved to the west wall so that actors could enter directly on to it from the tiring house, a roof was built over the stage, and the galleries were considerably expanded and roofed with tiles. Like the Rose, the Boar’s Head was small by the standards of the time. While most playhouses were round, it was rectangular. While the Swan and the Fortune had three levels of galleries, the Boar’s Head had two on the east side, and one each on the north and south sides. Even in the 1599 expansion the galleries held a smaller proportion of the audience than would have been the case at other playhouses, and this suggests that the lower-paying spectators were correspondingly more important. This, together with the fact that it was not a purpose-built playhouse but a converted inn, would likely have established the Boar’s Head as part of the unfashionable theatre; but as Herbert Berry has pointed out, its peculiar design gave it two advantages: since the galleries hung over the yard, they would be closer to the stage than those at other playhouses, and the yard itself would have enjoyed a degree of protection from the elements unavailable elsewhere. 6 Like the Curtain and the Swan, the Boar’s Head housed a variety of companies, but its main association was with a combined company of Worcester’s and Oxford’s Men, beginning in 1601. This group, normally known

3 A conjectural drawing of the interior of the revised Boar’s Head playhouse, by C.Walter Hodges. (From Herbert Berry, The Boar’s Head Playhouse, Folger Books, 1986)



as Worcester’s, moved to the Rose in 1602 but returned to the Boar’s Head in 1604 (by which time they were Queen Anne’s Men), dividing their time between this playhouse and the Curtain till they moved to the Red Bull in 1605 or 1606. A Privy Council order of 1602 describes the Boar’s Head as ‘the place they [Worcester’s Men] have especially used and do best like of’. 7 They may have been succeeded by the Duke of Lennox’s Men, who later became Prince Charles’s (I) company and (after a brief stay at the Hope) took over the Red Bull from the Queen’s Men in 1617. The Boar’s Head itself appears not to have been used as a playhouse after 1616; but it may have given more to the Red Bull than the two acting companies that moved from one to the other. The Red Bull was also a converted inn, and if we knew more about its physical arrangements we might find that lessons, both positive and negative, had been learned from the example of the Boar’s Head. In an age of round playhouses the Boar’s Head acted as a reminder that other models were possible and might have their advantages. The Fortune was square and so, probably, was the Red Bull. In the end the Boar’s Head could not compete with more famous and better-appointed playhouses; but it should not be written off as insignificant. It may even be that of all the playhouses of the period, the Boar’s Head is the one whose importance is most often underestimated. THE GLOBE The Globe was erected in Southwark, not far from the Rose, using timbers from the demolished Theatre. It was the only playhouse of the period to be occupied continually by one company, the Chamberlain’s-King’s Men, the most successful and easily the most stable company of the time. Though Shakespeare’s plays were the mainstay of its repertoire, it drew on the whole spectrum of dramatic writing from sophisticated satiric works like The Revenger’s Tragedy to rough popular ones like The Merry Devil of Edmonton. The King’s Men were less inclined than other companies to court favour by appealing to the lowest tastes; while other public playhouses were notable (in some cases notorious) for their jigs, the Globe seems to have abandoned this form of entertainment by 1614. But it was still a popular playhouse, it could be vulgar when it chose, and it was run by people who knew they were in a commercial enterprise. (As I write this, its foundations have been partly excavated, but much less information is available than in the case of the Rose.) Closer to London Bridge than the Rose, and much closer than the Swan, the Globe was larger than the Rose, holding perhaps 3,000 people; it was, one might say, built for success, designed to cut out the competition. It was a polygon, with 20 or 24 sides; its diameter has been estimated at 100 ft, though the exploratory dig suggests it may have been smaller. It was destroyed by fire in 1613, during a performance of All is True (the play we now know as Henry VIII) when, during the scene in which Henry attends a banquet in Cardinal Wolsey’s House,


certain chambers being shot off at his entry, some of the paper, or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where being thought at first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds. It was actually fortunate that the fire broke out during a performance, since there were enough people around to rescue the company’s playscripts and most of its wardrobe: ‘nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale’. 8 A contemporary ballad drew the following moral: 9 Be warned, you stage-strutters all, Lest you again be catched, And such a burning do befall As to them whose house was thatched; Forbear your whoring, breeding biles, And lay up that expense for tiles. The King’s Men did just that, and more. The second Globe, built in 1614 on the site of the first, not only had a tiled roof but also cost twice as much to build as the first. ‘It actually cost as much to build as the Boar’s Head, Fortune, and Hope combined’. 10 The King’s Men had begun to use the indoor Blackfriars around 1610, and theatre histories sometimes give the impression that it became their principal venue, with the Globe receding sharply in importance; but the expense they lavished on the second Globe, and the special appointments that expense implies, show the real value they still placed on it. They continued to use it, along with the Blackfriars, until playing was forbidden in 1642. Modern theatres that are not doing business are said to be ‘dark’; we might think of a deserted seventeenth-century playhouse as silent. While after 1642 illicit performances continued in the Fortune and the Red Bull, the Globe, so far as we can tell, was silent. We do not know when it was demolished. 11 THE FORTUNE In the early years of the seventeenth century the Globe’s principal competition was the Fortune. It was built in the northern suburbs in 1600, by Philip Henslowe, for the Admiral’s Men—the company whose status as runner-up to the king’s Men was confirmed in 1603 when they were assigned to Prince Henry. Here again we have a major (and not totally satisfactory) piece of evidence: the contract drawn up with the builder Peter Street, who also built the Globe. 12 This tells us that the Fortune was square, 80 ft each way on the outside and 55 ft each way on the inside; that the stage was 43 ft wide and perhaps 27 ft


6 in. deep. The furnishing of the stage was to be the same as that of the Globe; this would help us more if we knew, as Henslowe and Street did, what exactly that meant. But the Fortune contract also specifies an exception: that the pillars of the stage were to be square, and topped with carved satyrs. (This at least tells us what the Globe pillars were not like.) There was a cover over the stage, and there were three levels of galleries, rising to a height of 32 ft. Four sections of gallery were set apart as ‘gentlemen’s rooms’. A picture of Fortune acted as the sign for the playhouse. The total capacity of the Fortune has been estimated by Richard Hosley as 2,340; 13 if that is true, the significant increase over the Rose was not in audience capacity. but in the acting area. The playhouse burned in 1621, and the new version, opened in 1623, was later described as ‘a large, round brick building’. This is unfortunately late evidence, from 1699; 14 but if accurate it suggests that the square format was seen as a failed experiment, and that the lesson learned from the burning of the Globe had been taken one stage further. The new playhouse continued in regular use up to 1642, and occasionally housed illegal performances afterwards. By 1656 it was badly run down; in 1661 the property was offered for lease as a site for building tenements, but there were no takers. One account suggests its ruins were visible as late as 1739. 15 When it opened, the Fortune must have looked like serious competition for the Globe—a contemporary account of the 1621 fire calls it ‘the fairest playhouse in this town’ 16 —but in the event it had a more mixed history. Prince Henry’s Men (who on the Prince’s death in 1612 became the Palsgrave’s Men) continued to use it for many years, with a repertoire of old favourites like The Spanish Tragedy and the plays of Marlowe and new, popular plays with a London slant like The Honest Whore and The Roaring Girl. But the 1621 fire was more damaging to them than the Globe fire was to the King’s Men. Since it broke out at night, there was no chance to mount the sort of rescue operation the King’s Men evidently managed, and the Palsgrave’s company lost not only their playhouse but also their playscripts and costumes. When they returned to the rebuilt Fortune, they had a large number of new plays licensed; but they were evidently struggling, and the long plague closing of 1625 finished them off. The King and Queen of Bohemia’s Men (who may have included some of the same actors) took over the Fortune; they were succeeded in 1631 by the King’s Revels company. In 1634, confusingly, a troupe known as the King’s Men in the provinces (no relation to the real King’s Men), and the Red Bull company in London, took over. In 1640, amid a certain amount of ill feeling, they were succeeded—forced out, they claimed 17 by Prince Charles’s (II) Men, a group that had been occupying the Red Bull. Like the Curtain, and unlike the Globe, the Fortune was noted for its jigs, including a notoriously bawdy jig (now lost) called ‘Garlic’. 18 The sheer popularity of its jigs got the Fortune into trouble: in 1612, jigs at this particular playhouse were banned by an order of the General Sessions of the Peace at Westminster on the grounds that ‘divers cutpurses and other lewd and illdisposed persons in great multitudes do resort thither at the end of every play


many times causing tumults and outrages’. 19 We detect here the natural official suspicion of any large, uncontrolled gathering, and the characterization of the crowd need not be taken at face value; what is interesting is the evidence that crowds gathered at the end of the play, when it was time for the jig, suggesting that this entertainment may have been a greater draw than the play itself. There was more trouble in 1626, when the Fortune was the scene of a dangerous riot involving a company of sailors. 20 But it would be wrong to single out the Fortune as a trouble spot: in the same year the authorities were warned of an impending riot, also involving sailors, at the Globe, though in this case the trouble seems to have been headed off. 21 Any playhouse was a potential scene of violence, and such incidents are scattered throughout the period—scattered, not endemic. The trouble that really mattered was on stage: in 1641 an anonymous satirical broadside The Last Will and Testament of the Doctor’s Commons singled out the Fortune and the Red Bull as places where acting standards had deteriorated: ‘Item, I will and bequeath all my large Books of Acts to them of the Fortune playhouse…in regard they want good action. All my great Books of Acts to be divided between the Fortune and the Bull; for they spoil many a good play for want of action’. 22 This is one writer’s joke, of course, but such a joke has value only if the point it makes is recognizable. Whether it represents a general view, or a view that would have been current a few years earlier, is another matter. THE RED BULL The Red Bull stood in Clerkenwell, in the northern suburbs of London. Queen Anne’s Men moved there in 1605 or 1606, establishing in the early years of the Jacobean period, when the public theatre was relatively stable, a pattern of three major companies, each with its own playhouse: the King’s Men at the Globe, Prince Henry’s at the Fortune, Queen Anne’s at the Red Bull. Like the Boar’s Head, the Red Bull was a converted inn, but we do not know if it was an adaptation like the Boar’s Head or a complete rebuilding. Because of its origins we may reasonably infer that it was square or rectangular. It was a large playhouse, demanding big-scale acting; there is a late reference to Fortune and Red Bull actors as ‘terrible tear-throats’. 23 Though we are confined to guesswork about the playhouse as a whole, we have more information about the stage, since a number of Red Bull plays have survived and the tendency of this playhouse to show off its scenic resources makes for some useful stage directions. Its resources included pillars supporting a canopy, flying machinery, a large trap—and perhaps more than one—with some form of lift for ascents and descents, three doors, and, by 1608, a music room over the stage. There was some form of curtained discovery-space, which was put to frequent use. Queen Anne’s Men occupied it until 1617, when their manager Christopher Beeston moved the company to a new private playhouse in Drury Lane, variously known as the Phoenix and the Cockpit. On Shrove Tuesday of that


year there was a serious riot at the Cockpit, in which apprentices wrecked the playhouse, forcing the company to return temporarily to the Red Bull. They were back at the Cockpit in June. Andrew Gurr has speculated that the riot was the Red Bull audience’s way of showing resentment at the transfer of its favourite plays to a house whose higher admission prices put them out of reach. 24 If so, this audience was as serious about its playgoing as the ‘O.P.’ (Old Prices) rioters who in 1809 forced the admission prices at Covent Garden back to their original levels by three months of systematic disruption. The Red Bull was taken over by Prince Charles’s (I) Men; Queen Anne’s Men, now the Company of the Revels, returned in 1619; Prince Charles’s (I) returned in 1622 or 1623, only to disappear in the plague closing of 1625. The confusingly named Red Bull-King’s company took over in 1625. Their tendency to call them selves the King’s company when on provincial tour is probably connected with the fact that in 1627 the real King’s Men took action to stop the upstarts from using the plays of Shakespeare. They appear to have been trying the old commercial dodge of competition by imitation. Around 1634 this company went to the Fortune and was succeeded at the Red Bull by Prince Charles’s (II) Men—evidently a more respectable troupe, since they were invited to play at court. In 1640 they took over the Fortune, which they evidently considered a more desirable playing space, and the Red Bull-King’s Men returned. The Red Bull continued to be used for illegal performances after the closing of 1642. Like the Fortune, the Red Bull appears to have made a solid start with a permanent company, only to decline into a long period of instability. Both playhouses in their later years seem to have depended on revivals rather than new plays. The two playhouses were frequently equated by contemporaries, and as we have seen the same companies tended to shuttle back and forth between them. But there was something special about the Red Bull. It had, from its early days, a more distinctive house style than any of the other playhouses. It was a style not to everyone’s taste, and easy enough to poke fun at, but it evidently answered the needs of a large and loyal audience. As early as 1613, it was favourably noticed by William Turner, in A Dish of Lenten Stuff: 25 The players of the Bankside The round Globe and the Swan Will teach you idle tricks of love, But the Bull will play the man. Battle scenes were a Red Bull speciality; so were clown routines. A later ballad, the lament of a gallant who loses his money in London, reports: 26 Most of my money being spent, To St. Johns Street to the Bull I went, Where I the roaring rhymer saw,


And to my face was made a daw. This suggests old-fashioned, broad clowning, with the clown working directly on the audience. Devils with fireworks were another speciality of the house. Remembering his boyhood, Thomas Killigrew told Samuel Pepys how he got to see plays: ‘He would go to the Red Bull, and when the man cried to the boys, “Who will go and be a devil, and he shall see the play for nothing?” then would he go in and be a devil upon the stage, and so get to see [the] play’. 27 This way of recruiting extras points to two things: a rough-and-ready performance style and a loyal audience that could be recruited when necessary and had seen the plays often enough to know what to do. The image of boys hanging around the playhouse hoping for a chance to join in also suggests a circus atmosphere that helps us understand the playhouse’s appeal, and why that appeal was not for everybody. The prologue to The Two Merry Milkmaids, a Red Bull play of around 1619, offers the audience a novelty: This day we entreat all that are hither come, To expect no noise of guns, trumpets, nor drum, Nor sword and target; but to hear sense and words, Fitting the matter that the scene affords. So that the stage being reform’d, and free From the loud clamours it was wont to be, Turmoil’d with battles; you I hope will cease Your daily tumults, and with us wish peace. In other respects, it seems the Red Bull formula will be not abandoned but modified: For we have in’t a conjurer, a devil, And a clown too; but I fear the evil, In which perhaps unwisely we may fail, Of wanting squibs and crackers at their tail. The Two Merry Milkmaids appears to have been successful, and to have entered the repertory. But the Red Bull formula was strongly established, and the audience had to be carefully prepared for a change. That audience’s rowdiness is indicated by a prologue John Tatham wrote in 1640 to mark the return of the Red Bull-King’s company to their former haunts: 28 Only we would request you to forbear Your wonted custom, banding tile or pear


Against our curtains, to allure us forth. The reference in Two Merry Milkmaids to ‘your daily tumults’ suggests that this was a long-standing complaint. In the theatre there is always a market for old favourites, and it was the Red Bull that eventually took over plays like Tamburlaine. Survival was another Red Bull speciality. The playhouse not only carried on past the closing of the theatres, but also reopened after the Restoration—the only public playhouse of the Jacobean period to do so. Its last days, as reported by Samuel Pepys, were shabby and pathetic: 29 Dined at home. And then out to the Red Bull (where I have not been since plays came up again)…. I was led by a seaman that knew me, that is here as a servant, up to the tiring-room; where strange the confusion and disorder that there is among them in fitting themselves, especially here, where the clothes are very poor, and the actors but common fellows. At last into the pit, where I think there was not above ten more than myself, and not 100 in the whole house—and the play (which is called All’s Lost by Lust) poorly done—and with so much disorder; among others, that in the music-room, the boy that was to sing a song not singing it right, his master fell about his ears and beat him so, that it put the whole house into an uproar. On a second occasion Pepys saw Doctor Faustus ‘so wretchedly and poorly done, that we were sick of it’. 30 The Red Bull’s mission was still to keep the old plays going, but the heart had gone out of the enterprise. The last sign of life in the last active Jacobean public playhouse is a handbill for a prize fight at eight weapons, to be held on 30 May 1664, after which the Red Bull falls silent. 31 It was not just the building that took a long a time dying. Dryden’s essay ‘Of Heroic Plays’, prefixed to The Conquest of Granada, defends his use of drums, trumpets and onstage battles: ‘that the Red Bull has formerly done the same is no more an argument against our practice than it would be for a physician to forbear an approved medicine because a mountebank has used it with success’. 32 There is an implied tribute here, not just to the success of the mountebank, but to the striking and durable nature of the Red Bull tradition. It could be mocked or disdained, but not ignored or forgotten. No other playhouse had quite its capacity to raise the hackles of the sophisticated, long past the time when a truly ephemeral form of entertainment would have been forgotten. THE HOPE The last public playhouse, the Hope, was built in 1614 on the Bankside, to replace the old bear garden. From the beginning it was to house two forms of


entertainment, playing and bearbaiting. It was modelled on the Swan, but its stage had no posts and was removable, to accommodate the bears. The only extant play we can confidently associate with it, Bartholo mew Fair, includes in its Induction sardonic references to the dual function of the playhouse and its persistent smell. It was used by Lady Elizabeth’s Men in 1614 and by Prince Charles’s (I) Men from 1615 to around 1617. Both companies found timesharing with the bears a constant source of difficulty and of friction with the management. Neither stayed for long, and there is no record of a regular replacement. Bearbaiting had won out, and continued until 1642 when, like playing, it was banned. Like playing, it continued illegally; but in 1656 the bears were shot by a company of soldiers. 33 There is no reliable record of the end of the playhouse itself. Like the older Swan and Curtain, the Hope failed to establish the sort of consolidated tradition that could have challenged the Globe, the Fortune and the Red Bull. STAGES There was, we have noted, no standard form for a stage in this period. But it may be useful at this point to pull together what we know, or can guess, about the recurring features and local variations of the stages in the playhouses we have surveyed. The stage stood in the yard of the playhouse, up against the wall of the tiring-house (the exception being the Boar’s Head’s brief experiment with theatre-in-the-round). In some playhouses the edge of the stage appears to have been fenced with low rails, allowing a minimal symbolic separation of the players from the groundlings who surrounded them. No rails are seen in the Swan drawing, but in The Hector of Germany, acted by amateurs at the Red Bull and the Curtain, two comic characters, having decided that the action they are watching is a play (which it is), ‘sit on the rails’ (H3v) to watch it. Actors entered the stage through the doors in the tiring-house facade. The Swan drawing shows two such doors, and the surviving plays of the Globe repertoire require two; but in the case of the Globe all we can say is that two was the minimum: it may have had three. The Four Prentices of London, a hard play to date and one that may have played in any or all of the Curtain, the Rose, the Boar’s Head and the Red Bull, opens with the stage direction ‘Enter three in black cloaks, at three doors’. However many doors there were, they would have had one notable effect: an actor coming out of a door in the tiring-house facade would have come straight at the audience, unlike an actor entering from the wings in a prosceniumarch stage, who has to take a downstage curve before he can face the auditorium. The older method is, from the actor’s point of view, much stronger. At the back of the stage was some form of discovery-space. We know this from the number of times a curtain is drawn to ‘discover’ one or more actors, posed in a stage picture. What we do not know is how this was done: a curtained booth? a curtain hanging from the stage roof? or even a curtain hanging in one of the tiring-house doors, allowing the doorway itself to become the discovery-


space? There may have been local variations; what seems to be a constant is the need for a discovery-space of some kind. Another constant is the need for actors to appear ‘above’. This may have been in the gallery over the stage, where we see the spectators in the Swan drawing. Some scholars have cast doubt on this, one argument being that the management would be unwilling to lose revenue by denying this space to spectators. 34 The alternative may have been ‘scaffolding’, or platforms, brought on as needed. 35 There is no doubt that portable platforms were occasionally used. But in The Knave in Grain, New Vampt, a Fortune play of the 1630s, as the title character is drawn on the stage and taunted by a crowd of boys other taunts are hurled by ‘Tomaso in a corner of the gallery’ and ‘Lodowick in another corner’ (V.iii.2908, 2915). In that case at least, the gallery was considered a usable acting space. There may have been no need to keep the audience out of areas the actors would occasionally invade. These players’ immediate predecessors had been used to elbowing their way through spectators to reach the playing areas in banqueting halls. No one felt the need to preserve the magic of theatre by keeping actors and audience separate; on the contrary, close contact was a normal condition. Most later playhouses had some form of canopy over the stage. Over the canopy there was room for a hut that could house machinery for the descent of a god or a throne. It may be that neither the Boar’s Head nor the first Globe was so equipped, 36 but the evidence for this is negative—a lack of stage directions in extant plays—and if the vision of Jupiter was part of the original text of Cymbeline as acted at the Globe, and not a later addition, then the first Globe had such machinery. A 1620 account of Doctor Faustus at the Fortune suggests another use of the hut: ‘twelve-penny hirelings make artificial lightning in their Heavens’. 37 The music room was also above the stage at the Red Bull, but evidently within the tiring-house, on stage level, at the first Globe. 38 The stage itself, whatever the playhouse, would be richly decorated, though we have only a few actual details: the pillars of the Fortune were topped with satyrs, the pillars of the Swan were painted to resemble marble, and in some playhouses sun, moon and stars may have decorated the underneath of the stage roof, the ‘Heavens’. 39 One thing we know from evidence of the visual taste of the period is that theatre owners would not have seen the point of austere simplicity. The stage was not expected to represent this setting or that; but it was expected to make a strong visual statement of its own. PERFORMANCES Public playing in London took place in the afternoon, beginning at 2 or 3 p.m. The reference in Romeo and juliet to ‘the two hours’ traffic of our stage’ sticks in the mind, and—given that hardly any play of this period can now be done in two hours—has led to speculation about rapid delivery or persistent cutting. Some cutting there undoubtedly was; but there is no need to believe that two hours was really the standard time; references in other plays suggest two-and-a-half or


three. 40 This was not a clock-watching culture like ours, timing actions to the nearest minute or second; what evidence we have about starting times or playing times must be taken as approximate. But the evidence does have one consequence: the later scenes of winter performances would have been played in gathering darkness. 41 Playwrights could actually exploit this effect if they wanted to: the sunless days that begin late in Richard III and Romeo and Juliet, and the final taunting of Holofernes as he leaves the pageant of the Nine Worthies in Love’s Labour’s Lost: ‘A light for Monsieur Judas! It grows dark, he may stumble’ (V.ii.626–7). Herbert Berry has suggested, from evidence of expenditures at the Boar’s Head, that cresset lights—bundles of rope coated with pitch and hung in baskets—were used to illuminate later scenes in winter. Webster’s reference to the Red Bull as ‘so open and black a theatre’ could be accounted for by the effect of oily smoke on the woodwork. 42 Whatever the facts, we may assume that players and audiences at this time had nothing like the modern concern for efficient lighting, and took for granted conditions no modern actor would find tolerable—though any modern actor who has suffered through an endless technical rehearsal may wonder if they had the right idea after all. The performances were given by companies with a standard structure: the sharers, who played the leading male parts; the boys apprenticed to them, who played the women; and the hired men, who played small parts, fetched and carried, made offstage noises, and generally filled in. In speculating on what performances were like, we frequently make an effort to imagine the effect of the boy actors, who represent a convention far removed from us; but we need also to imagine the effect of the hired men. Modern stagehands work almost entirely unseen; the hired men placed and removed furniture and other scenic elements in full view of the audience. In many modern productions, the furniture-moving is done by carefully choreographed actors in costume, who sing, dance and generally ensure that the scene-change is an integrated part of the show. Jacobean performances were not expected to be integrated packages of this kind. The hired men doing their jobs were just that, no more part of the performance than their modern equivalents who move furniture between numbers in a concert, and no more disruptive either. Printed stage directions may tell us that furniture comes on, but hardly ever tell us who brings it. As Peter Thomson puts it, ‘You do not “get away” with things in such a theatre, you get on with them’. 43 When they played small parts their presence was probably just as matter-offact. Since there was no design package, but a combination of contemporary dress and occasional historical additions (we can see the effect in the Peacham drawing of the first scene of Titus Andronicus), the hired men could appear in their normal dress, the blue livery of the servant. The prologue to Hannibal and Scipio, a private-theatre play of 1635, promises that the audience will be spared ‘the more horrid noises of target fight/By the blue-coated stage-keepers’. 44 Modern stage battles take many hours of rehearsal; Jacobean stage battles were probably more ad hoc affairs, done by theatrical functionaries who knew and followed a few routines. Judging by the evidence of surviving plays, this does not


seem to have hurt their popularity or made playwrights reluctant to introduce onstage fighting. Doubling was also a practical matter, and also involves some expedients we would find strange. We are used to seeing one actor doubling different parts; there is evidence that in a Jacobean playhouse doubling also went the other way, with two or even three actors playing the same part in different scenes. 45 This hardly implies a Stanislavskian relation of actor to role. The principle, again, is simple: get on with it. A company would have had what seems to us an inordinately large number of plays in its repertory, and the same play would not usually be given on consecutive days. Old favourites like Doctor Faustus could be kept going for years. Modern repertory companies plan and announce their seasons months in advance; Jacobean procedures would have been more ad hoc. There seems to have been a custom of ending a performance by announcing the next day’s offering; 46 one of the tasks of the hired men was to put up playbills around the town. The audience lured in by these means—or just by the desire to see a play, any play—would have its choice of location, standing in the yard or more expensive seating in the galleries. The ‘gentlemen’s rooms’ at the Fortune were probably the galleries closest to the stage, representing the most prestigious seating. The practice of allowing audience members to sit on the stage seems to have been more characteristic of private theatres than of public ones, where occasional attempts to introduce it caused resentment. 47 The poorest section of the audience, standing in the yard, had the closest relationship to the players, and this was the reverse of the pattern in the private houses. 48 The well-to-do paid extra for comfort, shelter, and the chance to be seen in their fine clothes; but the groundlings who were dedicated enough to come early got the equivalent of what in a modern theatre—or a Jacobean private one—would be the best seats in the house. The implications of this will be considered in the next chapter.

2 THE AUDIENCES AND THEIR CULTURE

THE POPULAR AUDIENCE A contemporary satiric sketch of ‘a common player’, possibly by a disgruntled playwright, declares, ‘howsoever he pretends to have a royal master or mistress, his wages and dependance prove him to be the servant of the people’. 1 In other words, though royal patronage and court performances may have conferred status on the players, their survival depended on the people who filled the playhouses. Who were those people? In the public playhouses, we may fairly speak of a ‘popular’ audience: popular in the sense that admission prices were low, the capacity of the playhouses was large, and it was here that one could expect to find a mixed general public. David Mayer has defined popular drama as ‘that drama produced by and offered for the enjoyment or edification of the largest combinations of groupings possible within that society’; he adds that ‘the educated, moneyed, aristocratic and professional classes’ can be spectators too, but cannot expect their special tastes to affect the performance. His criteria for separating ‘popular’ and ‘aesthetic’ drama include the following: Does the piece give the undiscriminating spectator ‘what he wants’ at the expense of meeting the tastes and predilections of an educated class? Is the dramatic plot embellished with actions and displays offered as much for their own effect as for their relevance to the plot? Does the piece reassure the audience in the validity of traditional values and in the continuity of belief rather than reinterpret traditional attitudes, accepted facts, or mythologies? 2 The last two points we shall return to later. With respect to the first, it is worth restating that ‘popular’ does not necessarily imply a particular social class; it implies a kind of taste. The educated spectator can share it; all he has to do is leave some of his expectations behind when he enters the playhouse. The aristocratic spectator (not necessarily the same category) is welcome on the same terms, and may have even fewer expectations to leave behind.


We know that the Jacobean public playhouses catered to just such a mixed audience. The price structure would suggest as much even if we did not have other evidence. Philip Henslowe would not have built ‘gentlemen’s rooms’ at the Fortune if he did not expect them to be occupied, and Ann Jennalie Cook has collected cases of titled, elite spectators who did not wait for a play to come to court but sought it out at the Globe, the Fortune or the Red Bull. 3 On the other hand the occasional visits of ambassadors and the like, which Cook records, were probably just that: occasional. When the Spanish ambassador Count Gondomar visited the Fortune in 1621, and the players, ‘not to be overcome with courtesy’, treated him to a banquet afterwards, his visit may have been, as Andrew Gurr suggests,‘a calculated piece of political slumming’. 4 Given that the public playhouses, as we shall see, were among the chief proponents of the Protestant cause, and that Gondomar with his extraordinary influence over King James was perceived as the great enemy of that cause, this must have been an occasion with a fascinating subtext. It must also have been quite unusual. Cook has argued that what she calls the privileged playgoers were the dominant element in the audience, even at the public playhouses. But her conclusions have been disputed by Martin Butler and Andrew Gurr, who argue that the size of the playhouses, the low admission prices, and the relatively small number of the ‘privileged’ even in London, would have left that group very much in the minority. 5 When the Duke of Buckingham or Count Gondomar went to the playhouse, such an event was worth recording. No one recorded the thousands of visits by citizens and artisans whose names are lost to posterity; but without them the playhouses would not have survived. They formed a large group with many subdivisions— shopkeepers, merchants, professional people, craftsmen—reflecting the variety of a stratified, class-ridden society. Though Cook agrees such people went to the theatre, it is an important part of her argument that they could not go in significant numbers because they could not afford to: not only were the prices of admission and such extras as food and transportation high in relation to average income (Butler and Gurr dispute this) but also the fact that performances were in the afternoon took too big a bite out of the working day: the shopkeeper could not afford to leave his shop, the worker could not afford the lost wages and the threat of dismissal. There would be legal problems too: working hours were regulated by the Statute of Artificers, which set hours for wageearners from March to September at from five in the morning to between seven and eight at night, with a total of two-and-a-half hours allotted for eating and drinking. 6 Afternoon performances, in short, assumed a leisure-class audience; people who had to work for a living could not go, and should not go. All the same, people are in the habit of doing things they should not do and cannot afford. In some societies the economy depends on it. All the evidence that the non-elite should not have attended the playhouses is countered by a substantial body of evidence that they went anyway, though we will never know exact numbers and exact proportions. As Martin Butler points out, the Statute of Artificers, as evidence, cuts two ways: it points to a need to regulate hours

JACOBEAN PUBLIC THEATRE 29

because too many people were taking time off. 7 A character in jack Drum’s Entertainment (1600) expresses relief that in the private playhouse used by the Children of Paul’s A man shall not be chok’t With the stench of garlic, nor be pasted To the barmy jacket of a beer-brewer. (V, p. 234) The joke would have no point if the threat were not real. Accounts of the audience list porters, carters, butchers, serving-men, and, quite frequently, apprentices. 8 This last group forms a special and interesting case. They were totally under the control of their masters, their lives were strictly regulated, and most would have no money of their own. 9 Yet, in defiance of authority and common sense, there they were. In 1572 the Lord Mayor of London ordered masters of companies to get their apprentices out of fencing and dancing schools and back to work; 10 we may imagine that playhouses formed a similar threat to good order. The situation is comically dramatized in Eastwood Ho (1605), where playgoing is one of the vices of the idle apprentice Quicksilver; when his exasperated master finally dismisses him, he responds with a few lines from The Spanish Tragedy. In The Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a play that actually celebrates hard work and middle-class ambition, the central character Simon Eyre marks his establishment of an annual feast for the apprentices with the words, ‘Boys, that day you are free, let masters care,/And prentices shall pray for Simon Eyre’ (V.i.51–2). There are no ‘boys’ on stage at this point, and the line makes best sense if it is addressed to a visible group of apprentices in the audience. In 1597 the Lord Mayor and Aldermen complained to the Privy Council that plays ‘maintain idleness in such persons as have no vocation and draw apprentices and other servants from their ordinary works’. 11 This is only one of many such complaints. There may be a theatrical in-joke in the opening lines of Julius Caesar, when the tribune Flavius rebukes the commoners of Rome: Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home! Is this a holiday? What, know you not, Being mechanical, you ought not walk Upon a labouring day without the sign Of your profession? (I.i.1–5) He might be one of the city fathers of London, lecturing the playgoers. Complaints from the civic authorities dropped sharply after the accession of James. Were they cowed by the King’s action in putting the players under royal patronage? 12 Or had they come to realize—slowly, in the manner of officials—


that in some playhouses at least citizen values and citizen interests were being promoted? 13 Broadly speaking, the principal actors and dramatists were of their own kind: citizens and artisans. A number of players and managers were members of city companies: ‘Robert Armin, Andrew Cane, Robert Keysar, and John Lowin were Goldsmiths; John Heminges was a Grocer; John Shank was a Weaver; Thomas Downton was a Vintner; Thomas Taylor was a Pewterer; James Burbage was a Joiner’. 14 We recognize here two of the trades represented in Peter Quince’s acting troupe, Bottom the Weaver and Snug the Joiner. Like the Chamberlain’s Men they perform at court, but they prepare by going outside the city walls. Perhaps Philostrate’s scorn for the hard-handed workmen who try to put on a play is a more complicated joke, closer to home, than we might at first think. Dramatists were also drawn from the non-privileged, non-elite: ‘Chettle’s father was a dyer, Greene’s a saddler, Kyd’s a scrivener, Marlowe’s a shoemaker, Munday’s a draper, Peele’s a clerk and Shakespeare’s a glover’. 15 Among the major Jacobean playwrights only Ben Jonson made a serious effort to move in court circles, and anyone who wanted to poke fun at him could remind him of his background as a bricklayer. If anything, theatre people had come down in the world by taking to this profession. If Shakespeare’s Sonnet CI is about his work in the theatre, his complaint that Fortune has provided for him no better than ‘public means which public manners breeds’ suggests a certain social embarrassment. Royal patronage after 1603, and the wealth and status attained by successful artists like Shakespeare and the actor Edward Alleyn, point in one direction. Thomas Bodley’s refusal to sully his great book collection with such ‘idle books, and riff-raffs’ as play-texts points in another. 16 So does the fact that the entry price for the common playgoers, one penny, was the same as the price of a broadside ballad. 17 We can see Jacobean theatre as high art for a sophisticated clientele only if we filter out a good deal of evidence that it was also cheap entertainment for a mass audience. In the early years of the seventeenth century those two traditions are not always easy to disentangle. Works as different as Volpone and Pericles have this in common: we can imagine them appealing simultaneously to the most sophisticated intelligence and the most basic need for entertainment. This is one of the great strengths of the drama of the early Jacobean period, part of its inheritance from the Elizabethan age. 18 But as the century advanced (or declined) theatre became increasingly polarized. The reopening of the private playhouses with boys’ companies in 1599 began a bifurcation of the audience, though ‘the branching was gradual and intricate’. The northern playhouses, the Fortune and the Red Bull, ‘sup- plied the wants of the lowest social levels, and went on in the same way for forty years. The Globe players and the boy companies aspired higher’. 19 In the early years, when Queen Anne’s Men were occupying the Red Bull, we do not hear much about its vulgar, unruly audience. But Fortune jigs, as we saw, acquired a certain notoriety by 1612; and the Prologue to Two Merry Milkmaids (c. 1619) is the first serious complaint of ‘daily tumults’ at the Red Bull. After 1630 the complaints increase sharply, as does the


scorn heaped on the audiences of the northern playhouses. ‘Prentices and applewives’ haunt the Fortune; the Red Bull and its hall-playhouse equivalent the Cockpit are described as 20 that adulterate stage, where not a tongue Of th’untuned kennel can a line repeat Of serious sense; but, like lips, meet like meat. Looking back from 1699, James Wright could say that the Fortune and the Red Bull ‘were mostly frequented by citizens and the meaner sort of people’. 21 This polarization reflects an increasing polarization in English society throughout the period, a growing gap between rich and poor, and a withdrawal of polite society from the popular culture in which it used to participate. 22 The result was an impoverishment of both traditions. POPULAR CULTURE In the later years, when it was smart to poke fun at the public playhouses, it was also easy. A few references to fights, clowns and devils, and the point was made. 23 But popular theatre is an aspect of popular culture, and while those easy jokes tell part of the truth, a broader look at the popular culture of seventeenth-century England is needed to help us understand the full tradition the theatre was working in. It is not just a matter of clowns, fights and devils, but of a whole range of habits and conventions, a whole way of thinking and imagining. Peter Burke and other historians of popular culture call this the ‘little tradition’ as opposed to the ‘great tradition’; Burke adds that the two traditions ‘did not correspond symmetrically to the two main social groups, the elite and the common people. The elite participated in the little tradition, but the common people did not participate in the great tradition’. 24 Writing of seventeenthcentury London, however, he modifies this view to speak of ‘interaction between the two cultures, learned and popular, dominant and dominated’. 25 If it is possible in this community to think of interaction rather than one-way traffic, the theatre is one reason why. The unlearned and the dominated, the custodians of the little tradition, were not without their resources. Literacy rates were higher than might be supposed, and particularly high in London. A sampling of craftsmen and shopkeepers in early-seventeenth-century London shows that 76 per cent could sign their names. The fact that this was the test may have concealed the true literacy rate, since reading was taught before writing, and the second skill was acquired only by those who found it professionally useful. There must have been many people who could read but not write, and the frequently quoted figure of a 90 per cent illiteracy rate among women should be seen in this context. 26 Andrew Gurr has pointed to the advantages of playgoing as an entertainment for the illiterate, who would simply have to look and listen. 27 True enough; but we need not imagine a


lower-class audience as necessarily or exclusively an illiterate audience. As participants in popular culture many of them brought to the theatre interests formed by material available in print. Literate or not, the audience wanted an experience that was clear, striking and accessible. According to Edmund Gayton, in Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixote (1654), ‘men come not to study at a playhouse, but love such expressions and passages which with ease insinuate themselves into their capacities’ (p. 271). This was connected with the strong visual element in popular culture. Shops, inns and alehouses advertised their presence by pictures; labourers at hiring fares held tools in their hands to identify their trades (‘the sign of your profession’). 28 This was a concession not just to illiteracy but to the need for immediate clarity; and we shall see how important visual signs were in popular drama. Popular literature showed ‘the survival of pre-literate frames of mind’ in ‘Its repetition, its use of epithet, its strange rhythm and use of cliché’. 29 These devices too had a function, and the function was clarity. Popular works in print show a fascination with symmetry, balance and opposition. The title page of Robert Armin’s Fool upon Fool (1600) sets two lists of fool-types side by side, ranged against each other by the rhyme: ‘A flat fool, a lean fool, a merry fool’ are set across the page from ‘a fat fool, a clean fool, a very fool’. Broadside ballads are regularly presented in two parts, divided by the formula ‘The second part, to the same tune’; and the two parts often work against each other. The first part of The New Scotch Jig, or the Bonny Cravat’ begins, ‘Johnny wooed Jenny to tie his cravat’; the second part begins, ‘The case is alter’d now; Jenny woos Johnny’. 30 Peter Burke has noted the popularity of pictures divided in the middle, setting parallel images against each other, and relates this to the fondness for antithesis in popular literature: ‘large and small, rich and poor, Goliath and David, Dives and Lazarus, St. George and the Dragon, Christ and the Devil’. 31 John Barton advises actors picking their way through Shakespearean verse to look for patterns of antithesis. 32 A love of fixed patterns, in language and idea, shows itself in other devices, like catch-phrases and proverbs. ‘The Soldier’s Delight in the North’, a ballad on the unpromising subject of impotence, is made catchy by the refrain in the wife’s lament: 33 Canst thou not cuddle me Cuddie, And canst thou not cuddle me now? I pray thee come cuddle me Cuddie As thou hadst wont to do. It has the effect of a tune you can’t get out of your head. Proverbs functioned as ‘rough guidelines to popular ethics and morality they could “define the rules” and transmit collective wisdom’. 34 The concept of definition is important: giving clear outline to an idea, making it striking and memorable in order to fix it in the mind as a principle. The same is true of popular culture’s tendency to


deal in stock characters and stereo-typed situations, a tendency that persists in modern popular drama, where its function, according to one sociologist, is ‘to inform members of a community about social structure’. 35 Popular songs and stories move from storytelling to generalizing statements, drawing conclusions and giving advice. In ‘A Country new Jig between Simon and Susan’, to the tune of ‘I can nor will no longer lie alone’, two young people want to get married, the girl’s mother agrees, her father objects but quickly relents, and all the characters sing together at the end, drawing the moral and capping it with the refrain: You maidens and bachelors We hope will lose no time: Which learn by experience That youth is in their prime, And daily in their hearts desire Young married folks to be More sweeter than the blossoms That bloom from the tree. ‘Clodd’s Carol’, a dialogue in which a woman advises a man not to marry, is equally decisive on the other side -of the question. 36 ‘A Caveat or Warning. For all sorts of men both young and old, to avoid the company of lewd and wicked women’, does just what its title promises: 37 You young men that in London live, Take heed by this my fall: For if you still will follow whores, They will devour you all: Your coin, your states, your health and friends, Then turn you out of door, O young men all by this my fall Take heed, trust not a whore. In other ballads children who turn against their parents are warned by example that God will bring them to a nasty end. 38 James Sharpe concludes, of the many popular ballads and chapbooks on crime, ‘if the tone of this literature was essentially sensationalist, its intentions were overwhelmingly normative. The object of the ballads and pamphlets was to demonstrate that crime did not pay’. 39 All of this comes together in one of the underlying principles of the popular aesthetic: the experience is not complete until it has been generalized. Whether the story is of love or murder, it is not over until it issues in advice based on the general principles of life. That the moral of one ballad may contradict the moral of another does not matter; what matters is that a moral is drawn. The morals are presented as generally valid, and this is connected with another feature of


popular literature: its tendency to imagine a timeless world, free of historical periods. Margaret Spufford comments on the ‘curious, muddled timelessness’ that allows chapbooks published in the 1680s to imagine priests ‘are still saying Mass…and friars cheating old women of their food’. She adds, ‘The past that does exist in these stories is a kind of composite, fabricated past, a very long time ago, a past strongly related to the “Once upon a time” of fairy stories’. 40 In the theatre this loose sense of period allows Julius Caesar to pluck open his doublet, and Hamlet to listen to some Elizabethan theatre gossip in a Denmark that is exacting tribute from England. In the miracle plays it allows Noah and his wife to swear by the saints, and a party of shepherds to travel from contemporary Yorkshire to Bethlehem at the time of Augustus. The proverbs and moral tags belong in the same timeless world, a world of wisdom that is always true and stories that are beyond history. The values of popular culture are traditional values. ‘Saints, rulers and knights’ provide a structure of authority the imagination accepts; proverbs counsel the wisdom of following old customs. 41 Even riots could have a traditionalist basis: a crowd in the Forest of Dean, burning timber ‘that the Earl of Pembroke had unjustly cut,…did so to shouts of “God save the King!” ’. 42 David Mayer’s definition of popular drama includes the point that it is traditional and reassuring; this is borne out by J.S. R. Goodlad’s study of popular British drama in the years 1955–65 (the years of the revolution that followed Look Back in Anger): he finds it ‘over-whelmingly moral in outlook’ and notes a direct connection between moral conservatism and popularity with audiences. 43 The drawing of the moral confirms the solidity and wisdom of the community, whose values are free from the vicissitudes of time and history. Every repetition of a story, a character type, a proverb or a refrain contributes to the building of that community. Some of the recurring stories and character types have a particular bearing on the drama. One is the monarch who is a good fellow, on easy terms with his people, redressing grievances and showering rewards on the deserving. The effect of such stories is traditionalist and reassuring. Poverty and injustice exist, and the king may be surrounded by evil counsellors, but if you can get at him directly all will be well. 44 Linked with this motif is the Dick Whittington figure, the young man who rises through the middle class to wealth and position in London. Stories of middle-class success in which the entrepreneur becomes a popular hero are, apparently, unique to England. 45 They frequently link with stories of the benevolent king, as in Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury (1597), where Jack not only rises to wealth but also impresses Henry VIII with his achievements and persuades him to provide generously for a group of poor children. Sometimes heroes were drawn from lower on the social scale: in ballads and chapbooks, ‘many of the heroes are artisans, husband-men, labourers and servants, and the landlords and other wealthy folk who appear are remote figures glimpsed from below’. When these heroes make their fortunes it is another sign that the world is benevolent. 46 Benevolence is a key value in these stories. Even Henry VIII’s famous fool Will Sommers (whom we will meet


again) is remembered not just for his disruptive comedy but for his charity work: 47

Only thus much, he was a poor man’s friend, And helpt the widow often in the end: The King would ever grant what he did crave, For well he knew Will no exacting knave, But wisht the King to do good deeds great store, Which caus’d the court to love him more and more. The generous fool, we note, is inseparable from the generous king; we see here the benevolence not just of the individual but of the system. In many cases the benevolence of the hero is directed to members of his own class, to help them in difficulties and allow them their place in the Dick Whittington myth. In Deloney’s novel, Jack of Newbury raises the bankrupt Randoll Pert by setting him up in business and lending him £500, to be paid back when Pert becomes sheriff of London—as of course he does. 48 Stories like this reflect social reality in one respect at least. The benevolence of the London middle class was real, but it was extended to members of their own group who were down on their luck, not to the lowest hard-luck cases like prostitutes and vagabonds, who were more likely to be set to work or whipped. 49 Similarly, the world of popular fiction, the world that operates as it should, could be rather a closed one. Popular religion reflected the mix and muddle inherited from the changes of the sixteenth century, lingering pockets of Catholicism alongside a burgeoning Protestantism and the growth of a Bible-centred culture. 50 Religious questions were also political ones, and to that extent the populace participated in the political life of the nation. Less attractively, its Protestantism was bound up with a persistent xenophobia, directed largely at foreigners from Catholic countries but not always confined to them. Riots against foreigners were a recurring feature of London life. In literature, Scots, Dutchmen and Welshmen were among the targets; Margaret Spufford attributes the hostility to the latter group to the number of poverty-stricken immigrants from Wales who flooded into England. 51 Spaniards and Italians were fair game. In Jack of Newbury an Italian merchant who has the effrontery to woo one of Jack’s maids in broken English gets his comeuppance when he is put to bed with a sow. (Deloney is not consistently xenophobic, however; an important character in The Gentle Craft (1597) is a Frenchman who, despite his comic accent, is treated not unsympathetically.) In broader ways popular culture could turn from complacency to attack. It is full of complaints of exploitation, which are the other side of its belief in traditional values: the traditionalist holds ‘that change is usually at ordinary people’s expense’. 52 The rich and powerful, no less than foreigners, are the targets of satire. Cardinal Wolsey often has this role, as he does in Jack of Newbury: he is the Dick Whittington legend gone wrong, the butcher’s son who becomes not the people’s spokesman but their enemy. The targets of practical jokes in the


jestbooks are often haughty and overbearing folk who get what is coming to them. The pairing of Wolsey and Will Sommers as sparring partners, as in the Fortune play When You See Me You Know Me (c. 1604), is a classic instance of popular disrespect. The little tradition could also appropriate whatever it found attractive in the great one. It did this with chivalric romance; as the aristocracy gave it up, it filtered down into popular literature as fantastic tales of errantry, ‘breathless gallops through incredible adventures and vast slaughter’. 53 This sort of tale appealed especially to the apprentices, who had a distinct subculture of their own ‘With a strong sense of fraternity, a tradition of collective action (usually violent), and a literature especially designed to appeal to them’. There were perhaps ten to twenty thousand of them in London, and they generally picked Shrove Tuesday, their traditional holiday, to go on a rampage; at least twentyfour Shrove Tuesday riots, including the sacking of the Cockpit, are recorded between 1603 and 1642. 54 There was a particularly serious outbreak in 1595, a protest against food prices that ended in arrests and executions. 55 (Matters were ordered better in the eighteenth century, when the traditional Shrove Tuesday outing for apprentices was a performance of Lillo’s edifying tragedy The London Merchant.) Their tendency to riot was one reaction to the strict regulation of their lives. Another was their indulgence in fantasy literature in which apprentices had extraordinary adventures. Steven R. Smith has described them as adolescents seeking role models. 56 Their fantasies were also sexual, and could be directed at the nearest available women, their masters’ wives. The affair between the apprentice and his mistress is a recurring theme in ballads and chapbooks. Even the title of ‘A Pleasant Jig between Jack and his Mistress’ has bawdy overtones. 57 As Margaret Spufford has pointed out, not one chapbook in the Pepys collection describes the hard lives apprentices actually led. 58 Popular writers also had a distinctive way of putting things together, or rather of throwing them together. If you bought a book like Jack of Newbury you got your money’s worth. To the modern reader, it is more like a magazine than a novel: comedy, political allegory, ballads, moralizing tales, and scatological practical jokes lie side by side. Even within a single episode the manner is not always consistent. In Deloney’s Thomas of Reading the murder of the hero is played for pathos and horror; then the tone changes abruptly as a man tries to describe the murder to his foolish wife. Told that Thomas was killed by the host of an inn, she asks, ‘But did they make pies of him?’ Told that Thomas’s horse provided a clue to the murder, she asks, ‘Could the horse speak English?’ 59 As in popular drama, the comic voice can demand a hearing at any time, with no thought of literary propriety. The title of one chapbook, A Hundred Notable Things for a Penny, tells us what principle is at work. 60 Sometimes different value systems operate simultaneously. The anonymous Long Meg of Westminster (1620) is a series of encounters between Meg and various men, whom she deals with by beating them. The stories are strung together one after another. As the function of the central character in a work of


pornography is to have a series of sexual encounters, Meg’s function is to administer a series of beatings. The popularity of this figure may be attributed to her subversive fascination: a woman, frequently dressed as a man, taking over the traditional male prerogative of violence, beating the men at their own game. The karate-chopping Emma Peel of the television series The Avengers had a similar appeal in the 1960s. In both cases the interest is partly erotic: Meg sometimes fights in her petticoat. Yet Meg also exemplifies absolutely conventional virtues: she is kind to the poor, submissive to her husband, and patriotic. These values do not control or absorb her other role as a woman who beats men; they simply intersect with it. If anything, ultimate priority is given to the episodic principle: in the last chapter Meg beats a friar who has lectured her on her ill life, a story not significantly different from any of the others, and at this point the book simply stops. Walter N. Davis has noted the presence of two voices in Robert Greene’s cony-catching pamphlets: the storyteller who delights in the cleverness of the con-games he describes, and the stern moralist who denounces them. There is no modulation between one voice and another. 61 Perhaps the clearest example of this is the pervasive double attitude to sexuality: solemn warnings against fornication, brothel-going, and adultery—‘take heed, trust not a whore’—that seem to reflect an actual lower-class concern with sexual probity; 62 and, at the same time, an equally pervasive sexual comedy that simply enjoys the fun. The final thing to say about popular culture is that it is full of such contradictions: there were rival ballads, for example, urging the wisdom and the folly of marrying an older widow in preference to a young girl, and the enterprising Martin Parker [a prolific ballad-maker] was in the habit of replying to his own publications, stating both sides of a case with equal vehemence. 63 These contradictions were not destructive; they were held in suspension in an imaginative system that was ultimately secure—‘The second part, to the same tune’. THE THEATRICAL OCCASION Popular theatre itself was based on a series of contradictions. It promoted the solid, traditional values of its culture: loyalty, patriotism, generosity, hard work, middle-class success, sexual continence. At the same time the playhouses were surrounded by brothels, and were regularly used for flirtations and pick-ups. 64 Prostitutes and cutpurses plied their trade in the audience. As afternoon occasions that took people from their work, plays lay outside the routines of labour and devotion the authorities were prepared to sanction. 65 There was literally no time, and no place for this sort of thing. Hence the location of the public playhouses, outside the jurisdiction of the city; 66 hence the regular attempts by the city authorities to close them down. Praising the virtue of thrift, plays helped


people waste their money. In contemporary accounts, playgoing is regularly linked with other disreputable activities in a pattern of dissipation: 67 Then with my punk each day Rode I to see a play, There went my gold away, Taking tobacco. For some audience members an afternoon at the playhouse would end in a brothel; and there was a similar traffic between playhouses and gaminghouses. 68 Plays regularly celebrated the chastity of virtuous women; but no respectable woman went to a playhouse alone. 69 One of the most interesting contradictions was political. An important subcategory of popular drama was what has recently been labelled the ‘Elect Nation’ play, celebrating England’s destiny as the leading Protestant power in Europe. 70 Surely, we might think, no authority could object to such a patriotic vision. And in a sense no authority could; yet it was also a subversive vision. In the early years of the period it was a focus of opposition to King James’s policy of peace with Spain, and later to the proposed Spanish marriage for Prince Charles. Closer to the Civil War, it was a way of opposing the high-church policies of Archbishop Laud. It drew on the traditionalist strain in popular culture, taking that familiar stance in English satire, the attack on innovation. James with his pacifism and his insistence on the royal prerogative, Charles with his novel ways of raising money—the first Stuart monarchs were innovative; that was just the trouble with them. And so the drama idealized Edward VI, and turned Elizabeth into the Protestant champion she never quite was in history, offering an implicit rebuke to the present regime. Yet it was all done under the guise of celebrating England. In the early years of the Jacobean period the boys’ companies got into regular trouble with particular, topical jokes about Scotsmen and thirty-pound knights. But it could be argued that the popular playhouses adopted an anti-government stance that was more fundamental, principled and sustained. They were also more successful at getting away with it, because they were more guarded. It was, one might say, a subversive patriotism. In what we might loosely call the aesthetics of the theatrical occasion there was also a contradiction between order and disorder, attention and distraction. It was the player’s job, we might have thought, to grasp and hold the interest of the audience. Yet he had to work against severe competition, and the competition was part of the occasion. Food and drink were sold and consumed during the performance. The Globe and Fortune, and probably the Red Bull, had taprooms. Apparently the public playhouses did not adopt the private-theatre custom of actbreaks till around 1607, 71 and the refreshment business seems to have gone on during the performance. Even when act-breaks came in, the eating and drinking must have continued throughout. Players complained of the sound of nutcracking; 72 a bad playwright, according to one wit, could pass off the sound of


hissing as bottle-ale being opened. 73 Nuts, apples, oranges and pears—all potentially messy—were available, as well as beer and wine. On a bad day at the Red Bull, as we have seen, fruit could be used as missiles. Normally we read through a Jacobean play text with no awareness of all the activity that is going on while the players are speaking; but from time to time we catch a hint. In The Duchess of Suffolk (Fortune, c. 1623), the clown Jenkin, having escaped from his interrogators, who have simply forgotten about him, tells the audience: Nay, if I put them in mind on’t let me be chokt, For want of drink; since, ale, thou art so lucky, I’ll take the tother pot while it is nappy. (II.vii.D4v) Coming as it does at the end of an act, could this speech be an attempt to promote liquor sales? Books were sold before the play began. 74 This would be one way to pass the time; another was to cast an eye over likely members of the opposite sex. A hostile witness, Stephen Gosson, reports: In the playhouses at London, it is the fashion of youths to go first into the yard, and to carry their eye through every gallery, then like unto ravens, where they spy the carrion, thither they fly, and press as near to the fairest as they can. 75 Another possible diversion was the taking of a cutpurse; there is at least one case of an apprehended felon being tied to one of the stage pillars. 76 Thomas Dekker complained of the eclecticism of the performances, in which ‘a nasty bawdy jig’ could follow ‘some worthy tragedy’; 77 but the whole occasion was eclectic. Obviously the Jacobean audience was utterly different from the modern audience, sitting quietly in the dark, in rows facing the stage. Not only was its attention pulled in many different directions, but also its energy level seems to have been much higher. A crowd of two or three thousand is substantial even now; in Jacobean England it would be hard to find such a gathering anywhere outside the playhouses, and complaints about playgoing spring in part from this factor: the sheer number of people involved, as in the 1612 banning of jigs at the Fortune, worried the authorities. The anonymous Tarlton’s News out of Purgatory (1590) begins by describing ‘a concourse of unruly people’ at the Theatre; the narrator is intimidated: ‘I thought it better solitary to walk in the fields, than to intermeddle myself amongst such a great press’ (B1r). In the end, the sight of an enormous crowd pouring through the fields tells him the play is over. The crowd, once assembled, was voluble and responsive. It was packed in more tightly than modern safety requirements would allow, and a significant part of it was standing up; both factors would raise the energy level. Michael Drayton refers to ‘Shouts and claps at ev’ry little pause,/ When the proud round on ev’ry side hath rung’, evoking reactions that were not occasional interruptions of a


performance but a constant commentary on it. For Richard Fennor, it was a vulgar commentary: 78 Clapping or hissing is the only mean That tries and searches out a well writ scene. So is it thought by Ignoramus crew, But that good wits acknowledge’s untrue; The stinkards oft will hiss without a cause, And for a bawdy jest will give applause. A reference in Jack Drum’s Entertainment suggests that the audience would not wait patiently even for something they knew was coming: ‘the jig is call’d for when the play is done’ (I, p. 193). Calling for it was presumably a warm-up for the more energetic business of reacting to it as it was performed. The audience had a keen sense of the ludicrous, and could be delighted when things went wrong. Richard Fowler, who inherited something like Edward Alleyn’s range of heroic parts in the later days of the Fortune, once had trouble with his supporting cast in a battle scene: 79 he laid so heavily about him, that some mutes who stood for soldiers fell down as they were dead ere he had touch’t their trembling targets; so he brandish’t his sword and made his exit, ne’er minding to bring off his dead men; which they perceiving, crawled into the tiring-house, at which Fowler grew angry, and told ’em, ‘Dogs, you should have lain there till you had been fetch’t off’; and so they crawled out again, which gave the people such an occasion of laughter, they cried, ‘That again, that again, that again.’ Sometimes the audience went right out of control. The Florentine visitor Antonio Galli reports an incident in 1613 when the eccentric Venetian ambassador Foscarini went to the Curtain, which Galli describes as ‘an infamous place in which no good citizen or gentleman would show his face’. He stood in the yard ‘among the gang of porters and carters’ and at the end of the performance got permission to announce the next play. ‘But the people, who wanted a different one, began to call out “Friars, Friars” because they wanted one that they called “Friars” ’. They then took it into their heads that Foscarini was a Spaniard, ‘and began to whistle at him in such a fashion that I don’t think he’ll ever want to go back there again’. 80 The account plays off the eccentricity of Foscarini against the equally strong character of the theatre crowd—xenophobic, excitable and demanding. Edmund Gayton, reporting on the last days of the public theatres, claims that the audience could get so worked up by a battle play it would end ‘in six acts, the spectators frequently mounting the stage, and making a more bloody catastrophe amongst themselves than the players did’. He goes on to report Shrove Tuesday outbreaks when the players were forced


notwithstanding their bills to the contrary, to act what the major part of the company had a mind to, sometimes Tamburlaine, sometimes Jugurth, sometimes The Jew of Malta, and sometimes parts of all these, and at last, none of the three taking, they were forc’d to undress and put off their tragic habits, and conclude the day with The Merry Milkmaids. If the players did not co-operate, ‘the benches, the tiles, the laths, the stones, oranges, apples, nuts, flew about most liberally’ as the spectators, ‘mechanics of all professions’, used their special skills to tear the building apart. 81 Before we settle too firmly into the notion of the audiences as a violent and unruly mob, we should recall that Gayton is describing a holiday outbreak, not normal conditions; and that his account—which in any case has the exuberance of comic exaggeration—comes from the end of the period. The general picture of a rough, vulgar theatre public needs to be complicated in two ways. One is a report by the Venetian Orazio Busino, who saw in a playhouse ‘such a crowd of nobility, so very well arrayed that they looked like so many princes, listening as silently and soberly as possible’. This was at the Fortune in 1617. This is so at odds with the conventional view that G.E.Bentley has claimed the playhouse must be wrongly identified. 82 But it need not strain our credulity to imagine that the Fortune had its good days, with attentive audiences following an effective performance; or that its mixed public would include a substantial number of people so well dressed and well behaved that a foreigner could take them for nobility even if not all of them were. (Contemporary observers noted that people went to the theatre in their finest clothes.) 83 Nor should we assume that rowdy behaviour was peculiar to the playhouses, and this leads to the second complication. Sermons, with their vivid stories leading to moral conclusions, were also a part of popular culture, 84 and contemporary accounts tell us sermons were disrupted by jests, laughter, and the showing off of new clothes, just as plays were. Preachers whose sermons did not please were known to have been pulled from the pulpit, or, at the very least, harassed by coughing and heckling. 85 In theory, social activity could be divided into the disreputable and the respectable; in practice, the polarization was not always so neat. We hear about the bad days because they make better stories. But there must have been days of another kind, when the energy level issued not in violent disruption but in a sustained flow of excitement, when the sense of community that popular culture seeks to create operated powerfully. A day of this kind is evoked early in The Roaring Girl (Fortune, 1611), when Sir Alexander Wengrave shows his friends his parlour, and by a curious sleight-of-hand his description of the room becomes a description of the playhouse on whose stage the scene is being acted:


Nay, when you look into my galleries, How bravely they are trimm’d up, you shall swear Y’are highly pleased to see what’s set down there: Stories of men and women, mixed together, Fair ones with foul, like sunshine in wet weather. Within one square a thousand heads are laid So close, that all of heads the room seems made. As many faces there, fill’d with blithe looks, Show like the promising titles of new books Writ merrily, the readers being their own eyes, Which seem to move and to give plaudities; And here and there, whilst with obsequious ears Throng’d heaps do listen, a cutpurse thrusts and leers With hawk’s eyes for his prey; I need not show him; By a hanging villainous look yourselves may know him, The face is drawn so rarely. Then, sir, below, The very floor as ’twere waves to and fro, And like a floating island, seems to move, Upon a sea bound in with shores above. (I.ii.14–32) This may be idealized, as Gayton’s tales of disaster may be exaggerated. Even the cutpurse is in a way admired, picked out by the unusual stillness of the audience around him. But at times it must have felt like this: the packed attention in the galleries, the excited movement in the yard as people jostled for a better view of the stage. There is an energy here that might break out destructively; but it is also an energy waiting to be drawn on. It was part of the business of the players to control and focus that energy. The audience, first of all, needed to be settled down. The traditional three soundings of trumpets before a performance would help, not only giving a certain formality to the occasion but also warning the audience to get settled, and building expectation. Some prologues explicitly demand silence and attention. The first words spoken in The Whore of Babylon (Fortune, c. 1606) are ‘The charms of silence through this square be thrown’. If This be not a Good Play, the Devil is in It (Red Bull, c. 1611) opens with a contradiction. The play itself will use the crowd-pleasing device of devils with fireworks as freely and inventively as it was ever used. Yet in the prologue the playwright (Thomas Dekker) declares he is uninterested in easy, popular success with a vulgar audience—this, audience, even to the point of risking insult, to praise an author who at the Red Bull! He goes on, partly cajoling and partly challenging the audience, even to the point of risking insult, to praise an author who


Can draw with adamantine pen, even creatures Forg’d out of the hammer, on tiptoe to reach up And from rare silence clap their brawny hands, T’applaud what their charm’d soul scarce understands. (33–6) The author draws the audience not directly, but by giving the actor sorrow, rage, joy, passion, Whilst he again, by self-same agitation Commands the hearers, sometimes drawing out tears, Then smiles, and filling them both with hopes and fears. (39–42) More was involved than the skills of individual artists. In the long run playwright, players and audience all drew strength from a popular culture whose values they shared and understood in their different ways, a culture that helped create the laws of popular dramaturgy that controlled the theatrical occasion. The rest of this book will examine how that dramaturgy operated.

44

Part II POPULAR DRAMATURGY

46

3 PRODUCTION VALUES

USING THE STAGE When in Coriolanus Volumnia urges her son to use visual language in pleading with the common people, she claims, ‘Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th’ignorant/More learned than the ears’ (III.ii.78–9). In a similar vein Hamlet complains that the groundlings ‘for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise’ (III.ii.11–12). Both speakers, condescendingly, give a social value to the kind of performance that emphasizes the visual language of theatre: it gives the vulgar something to look at. It is true that popular culture had a strong visual component; but it is also true that visual language is inherent in all theatre. Giving the audience something to look at can best be seen not as a reluctant concession to the groundlings but as a creative response to an important element in popular taste, an encouragement to use resources the theatre has in any case, and to use them as skilfully and eloquently as possible. The first of those resources, and the one I want to begin with, is the stage itself. We are used to thinking of the stages of this period as empty spaces, to be filled in as required by the imaginations of the playwrights and the audience. Yet of the stages surveyed in Chapter 1, the Boar’s Head’s brief experiment with theatre-in-the-round was probably the only one that had that kind of simplicity. Elsewhere, there were distinctive features: the tiring-house facade, the entry doors, the pillars, the gallery, the discovery space. The stage was not just a place for acting but an instrument to be played on. Appearances ‘above’ (and I believe this usually meant the gallery, though the point is debatable) could express power relationships. Throughout the ‘Four Ages’ cycle, the remarkable five-play dramatization of Greek mythology performed at the Red Bull early in the tenure of Queen Anne’s Men, the gods appear ‘above’ to show their power. The Brazen Age (c. 1611) includes a comic variation when, as Vulcan catches Mars and Venus in his net ‘All the Gods appear above, and laugh’ (p. 237), adding mocking detachment and superiority to the usual image of power. There are two scenes in The Seven Champions of Christendom (Red Bull, c. 1635) in which a


single hero, alone on the main stage, is confronted by a crowd of adversaries ‘above’. In the first of these, ‘Orman dine, his friends, Tarpax, and spirits’—an enchanter, a devil, and their allies—loom over David of Wales (III.vi.G3r). In the last act the upper area becomes the stronghold of the giant Brandron, who captures six of the champions and makes them swear to fight for him; Brandron, the champions, and the clown stand ‘aloft’ as George of England appears alone, below (V.vi.K4r). This crowding of the upper area might suggest platforms would be more practical than the gallery; but the extra height of the gallery, and the effect of actors looking down both at the stage and at the bulk of the audience, might give a greater air of menace. Menace is created by simpler means in Lust’s Dominion (Rose or Fortune, ?1600) when the hero-villain Eleazar turns the stage from an open area to a closed space under his control, by having two of his servants appear above with muskets (III.ii.189–90). The gallery could be a place of refuge—as it is, for example, in Fortune by Land and Sea (?Red Bull, c. 1608), when Forrest, fleeing his pursuers, is told by Anne Hardy, ‘climb into that hovel’ and later, speaking from ‘above’, asks, ‘may I descend?’ (II.iii.872, 935– 6); but more often it is used as a place of power and control. The stage posts had a similar double function. They act as shelter in When You See Me You Know Me (Fortune, c. 1604), when Will Sommers hides behind a post as his fellow clown Patch tackles Henry VIII, who is in a foul mood (C4r). More often, however, characters are bound to posts for torture or punishment. The title character of Swetnam the Woman-hater, Arraigned by Women (Red Bull, 1618) suffers this fate at the hands of his female captors, who prick him with pins and bodkins (V.ii.161–87), and in A Larum for London (?Globe, c. 1600) two soldiers bind a fat burgher to a post by his thumbs and threaten to tickle him (F3v). The audience who bound a cutpurse to a post (see Chapter 2, n. 76) were subjecting him to a form of instant theatre, using the stage as they had seen it used in performances. This way of using the stage reflects the mentality of a society in which punishments were public occasions. The stage trap was employed for similar ends. In The Duchess of Suffolk (Fortune, c. 1623) the Catholic villains who pursue the Protestant heroes throughout the play are physically punished. Bonner falls down a well, and has to be pulled out with ropes (III.i.E3r). Presumbly the trap is used for this; in an effect whose staging is less clear, Clunie hides in a tree and falls to the stage when Fox cuts the branch he is sitting on. He creeps off stage muttering, ‘Oh, my guts, a vengeance on this Fox’. Fox himself connects the two punishments: ‘So hateful Bonner dived into the well,/So fall this damned parator to Hell’ (H1v). The Hell-associations of the trap are more fully developed in Lust’s Dominion, where a couple of moors, whose black faces made them devilfigures (V.ii.3), thrust their victims one by one down the open trap. The Cardinal, as he falls, curses his tormentors: ‘Slave, as thou thrusts me down,/Into this dungeon, so sink thou to hell’ (V.ii.76–7). In the following scene this is just what happens, as the moors themselves are killed and dropped down the trap. In A Larum for London a traitor is dropped into the trap and stoned to death (E4v–

PRODUCTION VALUES 49

F1r). At the end of The Silver Age (c. 1611), in a chance for the Red Bull to show off its equipment, Jupiter and his fellow gods ascend to heaven while Pluto, the Fates and the Furies sink to Hell (p. 164). 1 The Hell-associations of the trap were not automatic. It could also be used for miraculous appearances: in The Silver Age, as Ceres calls for help in her search for Proserpina, figures representing Earth and the river Arethusa rise from under the stage (pp. 139–40). The lift machinery of the Red Bull trap allows for a sudden transformation in The Brazen Age (c. 1611), when Mars punishes Gallus for his failure to keep watch: ‘Gallus sinks and in his place, riseth a Cock and crows’ (p. 231). This may explain how the onstage transformation of three swans into women in The Seven Champions of Christendom was managed: the stage direction reads simply, ‘The swans turn’ (V.vi.L3r). The powers of good no less than the powers of evil could use the trap for magical entrances. In A Shoemaker a Gentle man (Red Bull, c. 1608) an angel rises out of St Winifred’s well, accompanied by soft music, and blesses the water (I.ii.C3v–4r). The most eerie and dramatic of these effects occurs in The Martyred Soldier (?Red Bull, c. 1618). This is one of a group of late Jacobean plays about early Christian martyrs, plays which bear a curious resemblance to the religious spectacles produced by Hollywood in the Cinemascope era in the way they turn religious conflicts into occasions for material spectacle. The heroine Victoria, dressed in rags, is imprisoned in a cave, represented by the area under the stage. Twice an angel rises from the cave, singing, and descends; then, after her captors assume she must be dead, Victoria herself rises from the pit dressed in white (V.i.H3–I1r). Her transfiguration suggests a common factor in the varied uses of the pit: the world we see on stage is not the only world; there are more things in heaven and earth, angelic and demonic, and they inhabit a world around, above and beneath the world we can see. Flying effects also played their part: in The Seven Champions of Christendom the devil Tarpax makes his first entrance descending amid thunder and lightning (I.i.B2r), and the enchanter Argalio and his friend Leonidas escape capture by soaring into the air (IV.iii.I2v). The popular imagination needed strong contrasts of good and evil, heroes and villains, angels and devils; the theatrical language embodied in the stage trap and the flying machinery fed that appetite. A significant amount of the blocking at the Red Bull in particular was vertical. At the opposite extreme is the close, protected area represented by the discovery-space, sometimes called the ‘study’. If the trap suggests an unseen world, the discovery-space allows the display of clear, tightly defined images. It can be just a device for springing a striking picture on the audience, as in The Iron Age, Part Two, where the Trojan horse is ‘discovered’ (p. 372). But the space itself can be significant, as it is later in the same play: ‘King Priam discovered kneeling at the Altar, with him Hecuba, Polixena, Andromache, Astianax. To them enter Phyrrus, and all the Greeks, Phyrrus killing Polytes, Priam’s son, before the altar’ (p. 390). Within a few minutes the rest of the Trojans are slaughtered. A closed, sacred space is invaded and violated. There is


a similar effect of threatened enclosure in The Rape of Lucrece (Red Bull, c. 1606), when Sextus Tarquin ‘discovers’ Lucrece in her bed, a figure at once displayed and threatened (p. 222). In The Trial of Chivalry (?Boar’s Head, c. 1600), another play in which a threatened heroine is ‘discovered’, this time asleep in a chair, a convention is established that the discovery-space is a locked room, opened with a key (C4v–D1r). In The Devil’s Charter (Globe, 1607)— which, as Richard Hosley has noted, uses the discovery-space eight times, far more than any other extant Globe play 2 —it is the villain’s lair. Several times the wicked pope Alexander VI is discovered surrounded by signs of his power: books, coffers of gold, a magic glass, the triple crown. When the powers of darkness to whom he has sold himself turn against him, ‘Alexander draweth the curtain of his study where he discovereth the devil sitting in his pontificals; Alexander crosseth himself, starting at the sight’ (V.vi.3339–42). His private space has been invaded, and we know he is finished. DRESSING THE STAGE The stage features just considered would have varied from one playhouse to another (there were no pillars at the Hope, for example); but on any given stage they would have been standard and permanent. Other forms of decoration would come and go according to the needs of individual productions. Given that these companies kept a very large number of plays going in a demanding repertory system, we might expect that most of the stage furnishing would be done out of stock, reusing the same pieces in play after play. But in a theatre that took care to make strong visual statements, the appearance of a new property designed for a specific effect would have greater impact than the reappearance of stock items the audience was used to. Philip Henslowe’s financial records bear this out: while his list of properties for the Admiral’s Men includes many items that appear to have been reusable stock, he also records on 22 October 1602 a payment for making a table and a coffin ‘for the play of the three brothers’, and the property list itself includes ‘one cauldron for the Jew’ (i.e. The Jew of Malta). 3 The table and coffin are particularly interesting, since such items could easily have been stock properties; evidently this play required something special. Chairs, tables and beds are standard furnishings, but even these familiar properties can have special value. Hired men would normally take furniture on and off, making no particular point in the way they did it; but in The Devil’s Charter Lucretia Borgia enters in night attire, ‘bringing in a chair, which she planteth upon the stage’ (I.v.575–7). We wonder why this high-class character has to move her own furniture; then, later in the scene, she uses the chair to immobilize her husband while she strangles him. At the end of the sequence she removes the chair; it has become identified with her, and with her power. Furniture is also used as a sign of power in the opening council scene of The Valiant Scot (Fortune, c. 1637), where Old Wallace’s imminent fall is signalled as he tries to take his place in the one remaining chair and is told, Presumptuous groom, this is


a seat for eagles/And not for haggards’ (I.i.34–5). Beds are regularly used for death scenes, but the ending of A Woman Killed with Kindness (?Rose, 1603) goes one stage further. At the end of the play, as Anne Frankford lies dead in her bed, her husband promises: on her grave I will bestow this funeral epitaph, Which on her marble tomb shall be engrav’d. In golden letters shall the words be fill’d: Here lies she whom her husband’s kindness kill’d’. (xvii. 136–40) As he speaks, the figure in the bed becomes a reclining figure on a tomb. Her death has been a public occasion, as deaths so often were in this society, and she now becomes her own memorial statue. Henslowe’s property list includes a rock, a cage, a hellmouth, and a number of tombs. 4 Some plays call for banks and arbours. Characters frequently climb into trees. All the evidence suggests a theatre that was prepared to use not just easily portable furniture but large scenic pieces. When extra levels were required on the main acting area, portable platforms, or scaffolding, could be brought in. In The Travels of the Three English Brothers (Curtain, 1607) the Pope is evidently seated on a platform; when he shows favour to Sir Anthony Sherley’s enemy Halibeck by inviting him up beside him, Sir Anthony exclaims, ‘Down for thy pride and for the wrong thou didst me!’ Halibeck’s retort—‘Even step by step, whereas this business tends,/My place admits me and my feet ascends’ (D2r)— implies a fairly high platform, with more than one step up. Sir Anthony goes on to compare his rival to Phaeton, but the theatrical memory that lies behind this scene is of the miracle plays that used different levels to dramatize the ascent and fall of Lucifer. 5 A platform could stand not only for power but also for punishment, when it func tioned as the scaffold for an execution. In The Virgin Martyr (Red Bull, c. 1620) the buildup to the death of the title character Dorothea includes the stage direction, ‘A scaffold thrust forth’. This draws the comment: By this preparation You well may rest assured that Dorothea This hour is to die here. (IV.iii.4–6) When in The Fair Maid of Bristow (Globe, c. 1604) an execution is called off, the King orders, ‘Away with that same tragic momument’ (F2v). There is no stage direction, ‘Exit scaffold’, but its removal would be a neat way to embody the relief of characters and audience. A stage direction in Herod and Antipater (Red Bull, c. 1621), ‘Enter Hillus, officers with the scaffold, and the executioner’


(V.ii.215SD), implies a set-piece that could be carried on and off with relative ease and speed. Like the permanent features of the stage, furniture and set-pieces could be used not just for the convenience or decoration but to embody principles important in the story: power, punishment and display. The visual language of drama is also a social language. Houses of the time were not cluttered with furniture in the Victorian manner; this meant that every piece mattered. Even so with the stage; I have listed a few cases where the signficance of the furniture is obvious, but presumably it was never there simply for decoration or atmosphere. Whenever a character stands instead of sitting or sits instead of standing a social and dramatic point is made. The same would be true of scaffolding. Throughout the twentieth century stage designers have used different levels for picturesque effect; by mid-century it had become a cliché, and there is noticeably less of it now. The examples we have looked at suggest that the portable scaffolding was not just part of the theatre’s scenic effect but, more importantly, part of its social language and its storytelling function, clarifying the characters’ relationships and their changing fortunes. When it came to costume there may have been more decoration for decoration’s sake. The chaplain of the Venetian embassy, who was taken to a London playhouse in 1617, could not understand a word of English and was bored by the performance itself; but he derived ‘some little amusement…from gazing at the very costly dresses of the actors’. 6 The pleasures of the theatre evidently included the display of rich clothing on stage, and this clothing was one of a company’s principal assets. An actor’s contract that survives includes a fine of £40 for leaving the playhouse wearing a company costume; 7 and in the burning of the Fortune the loss of the wardrobe was no less a disaster than the loss of the playscripts. We can sense the richness of the wardrobe in a list of playing apparel found in the Henslowe papers; the recurring colours are red, black and gold. 8 In this class-ridden society, not only was clothing an important social signal but also the question of what classes were entitled to wear what fabrics was actually regulated by law. 9 In several plays a social point is made by opposing characters in plain clothes, even rags, to characters who are richly dressed, usually with some critical point against the finery. In Patient Grissil (Rose, 1600) the heroine begins the play in ‘thread-bare russets’ (I.ii.48), and the Marquess, as he falls in love with her, draws a moral from her plainness and simplicity: Did but the proud world note her as I do, She would cast off rich robes, forswear rich state, To clothe them in such poor habiliments. (I.ii.177–9) He himself seems to lose this insight a few minutes later:


this base attire These ladies shall tear off, and deck thy beauty In robes of honour, that the world may say, Virtue and beauty was my bride today. (I.ii.271–4) The clash of values suggests a certain unease about Grissil’s apparent good fortune in marrying the Marquess. In The Royal King and the Loyal Subject (? Curtain, c. 1602) Captain Bonville tests the loyalty of his friends by pretending poverty. The results are predictable. He challenges the ‘gentlemen’ who have turned him out of a tavern because of his ragged clothes: Are you so fearful of a ragged suit? They were first paid for ere they were put on; A man may question whether yours were so. (II.iv.pp. 31–2) Later he appears ‘in all his bravery, and his man in a new livery’. His man, the Clown of the play, remarks, ‘Methinks we are not the men we were’ (IV.ii.p. 58) and when his family and acquaintances profess delight at seeing him again, Bonville draws the moral: ‘A few good clothes put on with small ado/Purchase your knowledge and your kindred too’ (IV.ii.p. 61). Clothes make the man in the most literal sense, by determining the social relations that define him; this play both demonstrates the principle and attacks it. There is a typical contradiction here; to attack fine clothing was to attack one of the theatre’s chief attractions. At the same time, popular drama is conservative enough—conservative in the sense of insisting that the old ways are best—to accept the coding implied by dress, and to treat departures from the norm as deplorable, or comic, or both. When in Fortune by Land and Sea Philip displeases his father Old Hardy by making a love-match, Hardy disowns him as a son but takes him and his wife Susan on as servants. He tells them, ‘Off/With these gay clothes…. Go search in the clown’s wardrobe’ (II.i.633–6). They change clothes on stage, dramatizing their fall, and when the Clown enters Philip calls him ‘fellow simkin’ (II.i.675). But the Clown has trouble recognizing him, and while the play elicits sympathy for the young man’s philosophical acceptance of his descent to the Clown’s level, it also makes it clear that what has happened is unnatural. When at the end of the play Philip and Susan appear ‘well habited’ (IV.vi.2033), and other characters who have turned against them are reduced to mean apparel themselves, the effect for the audience is simple satisfaction. A sinister costume change occurs in Match Me in London (Red Bull, c. 1620), where a citizen’s shop is invaded by a party of ladies and gentlemen from the court, and his wife is spirited away ‘mask’d, and in other garments’, with only one word to her husband: ‘Farewell’ (II.iv.86–7). She is on


her way to the court, where her chastity is in danger, and the first stage is the blotting out of her personal and social identity by the changing of her clothes. In all these plays a visitor with no English, like the Venetian chaplain, could find in the costumes not only a temporary diversion but also a large part of the story; and not only the story but also social codes and moral messages. Other codes were involved, besides the contrast of plain and fancy. A state of undress is used at points of crisis to signal panic and disruption, as in The Iron Age, Part Two (Red Bull, c. 1612), where the sack of Troy is poignantly symbolized by the entrance of an ordinary Trojan and his wife in night attire, and Priam himself in nightgown and slippers (pp. 381, 385). When we look for evidence of costume designs for individual characters, we find only a very small number of special cases, as in Grim the Collier of Croydon (playhouse unknown, 1600): ‘Enter Robin Goodfellow in a suit of leather close to his body, his face and hands coloured russet-colour, with a flail’ (IV.i.p. 51). What we find much more often is the costuming of a situation, a class confrontation, a turn in the story. Hand properties also speak a social language, the language of the pictures on shop signs and the workmen standing at hiring fairs with tools in their hands. They bring on to the stage the life of ordinary work, the life of a substantial part of the audience. In Patient Grissil the return of the heroine’s family to their old life when she falls into apparent disgrace at court is symbolized when they come on with bundles of osiers for basket-making (IV.ii). In The Duchess of Suffolk a ladder and a tray of tiles allow one of the Protestant fugitives to fool his pursuers by pretending to be a workman, gaining sympathy by identifying him with a life of ordinary labour. More detailed is the first appearance of Barnaby Bunch the botcher in The Weakest Goeth to the Wall (?Curtain, c. 1598), with ‘a pair of shears, a handbasket with a crossbottom of thread, three or four pair of old stockings, pieces of fustian and cloth, etc.’ (ii.0.1–4). Props do not just create an ambience (as in the realistic clutter of some twentiethcentury drama) but help to point the direction of the story. Greene’s Tu Quoque (Red Bull, c. 1611) uses tennis rackets, tobacco pipes, cards, dice and candles to establish a life of debauchery in visual terms (iv, viii, ix) and a begging-basket with scraps of food to symbolize the natural result, life in prison (xv). Once again, an audience member with no English could follow the main line of the story just by watching. A Woman Killed with Kindness takes unusual care to dramatize the routines of the Frankford house: ‘Enter 3 or 4 servingmen,…one with a voider and a wooden knife to take away all, another the salt and bread, another the tablecloth and napkins, another the carpet [table cover]. Jenkin with two lights after them’ (viii.0.1–4). After dinner, cards, counters and lights are brought on. All this establishes the comfortable, familiar routine of the house, whose order will be shattered by the discovery of Anne Frankford’s adultery. In a startling contrast to the normal routines we have been watching, Anne’s lover Wendoll runs over the stage in his nightgown, pursued by Frankford with a drawn sword (xiii.67.1–2).


Protestant England had turned away from visual language in worship, but on the stage the visual signs of religion retained their power. In A Shoemaker a Gentleman the hermit Amphiball gives Albon (the future St Alban, a Briton who has been siding with the Roman occupation but is about to change allegiance) a cross as a sign of his conversion: Wear but this emblem of a Christian, Not as a thing material to avail you, But for the strengthening of your memory. (II.ii.D2v) This interpretation of the symbol carefully blocks any suspicion of popish idolatry; it is in keeping with the Protestant interpretation of the Eucharist as a memorial service. At the same time, the symbol functions as intended, giving Albon the courage to face down an entire Roman army. In The Virgin Martyr Theophilus is converted to Christianity when an angel gives him a basket of fruit and flowers, symbolic of the joys of heaven. Some of the flowers are formed into a cross, which he uses to drive away his attendant devil Harpax. A book is a more securely Protestant religious symbol; in Edward IV, Part Two (?Boar’s Head, c. 1599), when Brackenbury finds Jane Shore begging, he gives her food ‘to relieve thy body with’ and a prayer-book, ‘Manna of heaven to refresh thy soul’ (p. 167). The religious properties are held up for inspection and for comment on their significance. The same can be true of the weapons that appear in play after play. The drama of this time is so preoccupied with violence that on long acquaintance we begin to take this preoccupation for granted. But sometimes a weapon is brought into close focus, and we are made to think about what it means. It can be introduced with a flourish, as when Susan in A Woman Killed with Kindness displays ‘a knife,/To save mine honour, shall slice out my life’ (xiv.84–5) or the title characters of The Four Prentices of London (?Rose, c. 1594) show off their weapons as they do pike drill: ‘Thus do I bear him when I use to march;/Thus can I fling him up, and catch him thus’ (1104–5). That scene was famous enough to be recalled in The Knight of the Burning Pestle: ‘read the play of The Four Prentices of London, where they toss their pikes so’ (IV.47–8). It shows off not only the actor’s skill but the weapon itself. In the play as a whole a variety of weapons is used, including pikes, rapiers and poleaxes; a company doing such a play could show off its weaponry as well as its wardrobe. The most striking instance comes in The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green (Rose, 1600), where for the climactic fight sequence Gloucester, on orders from the King, commands, ‘Herald, bring forth all sorts of weapons’ and promises that the sheer variety on display will ‘hearten others in pursuit of knowledge’. What follows is practically an illustrated lecture on weaponry, as the combatants make their choices, commenting on their significance: the sword and dagger are for servingmen, sword and target are more noble, ‘sword and buckler’s a safe fight’ and the King rules


out the rapier as ‘too desperate’. Finally Tom Stroud, representing the common man, insists on using an ‘ashen gibbet’. The King has never heard of such a thing, and Tom is amused by his ignorance: ‘I think you be sib to one of the London Cockneys, that ask’t, whether haycocks were better meal broil’d or roasted; an ashen plant, a good cudgell, what should I ca’it?’ The King commands, ‘If there be such a weapon in the court, let one go fetch it’ (V.i.I4r–v). Weapons, like clothes, are class-coded, and Tom Stroud’s cudgel is part of his plain Englishness and his popular appeal. (Tom is named on the title page, and Henslowe’s records include references to two sequels, now lost, both named after him.) In the English theatrical tradition, we can trace this appeal at least as far back as the Chester play of Noah, where the building of the ark is preceded by a display of tools: ‘I have a hatchet wondrous keen’; ‘Here is a good hackstock’ (57, 69). 10 There is class pride, and class interest, in displaying good tools and good weapons before an audience many of whom worked with their hands. 11 Tom Stroud’s cudgel has a more specific function, signalling his character as a plain Englishman. In The Devil’s Charter the handbell Pope Alexander rings throughout the play to summon his servants also becomes a personal signature for the character, a sign of his power and his sheer busyness. In A Yorkshire Tragedy (Globe, c. 1606), a top and scourge establish the playful innocence of a child about to be murdered. In When You See Me You Know Me, in a scene in which the future Edward VI is put on display as a studious and thoughtful prince with ideas on music and theology, he also carries a tennis racket to round out his character. The most striking association of prop with character involves a musical instrument. In A Woman Killed with Kindness Frankford, having banished Anne from his home, searches the house for anything that might remind him of her, and finds a lute. He holds it in his hands, recalling how she used to play it; even its present silence—‘Now mute and dumb for her disastrous chance’ (xv.19)—is symbolic. He orders his servant Nicholas to overtake her on the road and return the lute to her; she too holds it, and plays it for the last time. Across the scenes, the lute makes a bridge between two characters who have vowed to part forever. It evokes their whole life together, not just in the standard Renaissance association of music with harmony, but in recalling the ordinary civilized pleasures they used to share; the play has stressed from the beginning that Anne and Frankford are both cultivated people. Anne then orders Nicholas: Go break this lute upon my coach’s wheel, As the last music that I e’er shall make— Not as my husband’s gift, but my farewell To all earth’s joy; and so your master tell. (xvi.71–4) We never see the lute broken. This solves a technical problem for the company; but it also tells us that this is not a fake stage prop, with which a trick could be


played. It is a real lute, possibly belonging to one of the company musicians. To the symbolic associations of the stage image, we may add respect for the object itself. 12 STAGE PICTURES While the stage, the costumes and the properties all contributed to the theatrical occasion the main burden was on the actors. The next chapter will examine their work in greater detail; I want to look now at the way they were used to contribute to the visual language of the theatre, beginning with the way they made entrances. The entrance of a single actor puts the focus on his character; the entrance of a mass of actors serves the larger interests of the story. It can signal a dramatic turn in the action before a word is spoken. Part way through Act IV of Hoffman (Fortune, 1602) a new character enters, and we know, even before the dialogue reveals that she holds an important key to the plot, that she is special: ‘Flourish…. Enter as many as may be spar’d, with lights, and make a lane kneeling while Martha the Duchess like a mourner with her train passeth through’ (IV.ii.1681–4). At the start of Act V of The Two Noble Ladies (Red Bull, c. 1621) a play that survives in a manuscript marked for performance, the Roman general Claudius enters ‘with captain and soldiers’, to which the prompter’s marginal notes add ‘Drum’ and ‘Colours’. This is the first time colours have been used in the play, and the manuscript shows the company’s decision, improving on the work of the playwright, to mark this as an important entrance: Claudius is the authority figure—much needed by this point—who will sort everything out. A similar figure on the domestic scale is old Chartly, father of the prodigal hero of The Wise-woman of Hogsdon (?Curtain, c. 1604). His entrance, like that of Claudius, marks the return of authority: ‘Enter Old Mr. Chartly as new come out of the country to inquire after his son, and three or four serving men with blue coats to attend him’ (V.i.1936–8). The reader of this stage direction gets more information than the audience does, but even if the actor does not catch the right air of authority the servants, just by being there, do it for him. Other stage pictures are designed to move the characters on stage, just as they are designed to touch the audience, by showing the power of visual language. The hero of Hoffman kills without mercy through most of the play, but the image of the Duchess Martha reclining with a candle, like a still, pious figure on a tomb, stops him cold. Scarborow, the hero of The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (Globe, 1607), is rescued from a career of destruction, partly by a fortuitious inheritance, but (in theatrical terms at least) essentially by the picture of his family united around him: BUTLER: Yet look, sir, Here’s your brothers hand in hand, whom I ha’ knit so. [SISTER]: And look, sir, here’s my husband’s hand in mine.…


His wife and children kneel to him. In the reconciliation that follows, brothers, husbands, and wives embrace, and the line ‘Children and servants pay their duty thus’ is marked by the stage direction, ‘Bow and kneel’ (K4r–v). The twinned principles of affection and hierarchy are essential to the contemporary concept of the family, and the sight is enough to restore Scarborow’s humanity. The kneeling children recall figures on contemporary tombs. Visual symbols of piety and morality also work on Romelio in The Devil’s Law-Case (Red Bull, c. 1619). Before he and Julio are to fight in a trial by combat, his mother Leonora enters ‘with two coffins borne by her servants, and two winding sheets stuck with flowers; presents one to her son, and the other to Julio’. He sees ‘In this dumb pageant, a right excellent form/Of penitence’ (V.iv.125SD, 146–7), and his characteristic cynicism appears to dissolve. At this point his repentance is only apparent, but it becomes real by the end of the play; the visual symbol has greater power over him than he knew, and produces a delayed reaction. Stage pictures, like changes of clothing, display power relationships. At the opening of The Duchess of Suffolk we see the Duchess, ushered and attended, dispensing charity to beggars, as her enemies Gardiner and Bonner are led off to prison. Then Edward VI is succeeded by Mary, and the Duchess becomes a refugee (her sufferings, it has been suggested, parallel the ordeal of the contemporary Queen of Bohemia). 13 Mary dies, Elizabeth succeeds, and at the end of the play the Duchess returns for the last time, formally attended, distributing alms to prisoners, as Bonner, accompanied by a few jeering commoners, is marched off to prison again. The restoration of the proper state of things—accompanied by a Protestant Harrowing of Hell as we see a number of reformers released from prison—is done in stage images that neatly echo those of the play’s beginning, and work on a traditionalist audience’s desire to see the good old days come back. The Duchess’s power is linked with her charity, a link we also see in Thomas Lord Cromwell (Globe, c. 1602), where Cromwell has a formal entrance accompanied by attendants, and by people he has rescued from poverty (IV.iv.SD). This image takes a more ironic turn in Edward IV, Part One, where the King’s mistress Jane Shore displays her generosity, ‘lady-like attired, with divers supplications in her hand, she unpinning her mask and attended on by many suitors’ while on the other side of the stage her deserted husband appears with ‘two watermen, bearing his trunks’, on his way out of England (p. 81). The most striking use of a double stage picture, showing the popular fascination with opposed images, occurs near the end of Herod and Anti pater. This includes the device of having the stage represent two different locations simultaneously. On one side Antipater, in prison, is told that Herod is dead; attendants enter with a crown and hail him king of Judah. The other side of the stage represents the court of Herod, who is still alive and plotting Antipater’s death. As Antipater in prison boasts of his new fortune, officers and an executioner enter the court, bearing a scaffold. The royal symbols are empty; the scaffold is the true power. This daring use of the split-stage convention allows


the symbols to work against each other, and makes a sharp comment on the nature of power itself. 14 In this society executions were done in public but torture was done in private. Playwrights brought it on stage, in another display of the nature (and in some cases the limitations) of power. In Lust’s Dominion Eleazar boasts of having invented ‘A torturing iron chain’ (V.i.219) and shortly afterwards we see it, with several of his victims chained by their necks, standing together in a line, showing off Eleazar’s power over them. In the end his fascination with power undoes him, as he dies trapped in one of his own devices, manacled in a chair with an ‘Iron engine’ imitating ‘a Pope’s mitre or a Cardinal’s cap’ clapped on his head (V.iii.97–8). His intention was to show off the device: his enemies take the occasion to immobilize and kill him. Most torture devices used on stage allow a full display of the victim’s body: the strappado, which involves hanging the victim up and dropping him, may have used the company’s flying machinery. 15 It is one of the scare tactics of A Larum for London, which warns the audience of the dangers of Spanish invasion. The Spaniards use the strappado on a factor to get him to say where his wealth is hidden; the stage direction reads: ‘Hoise him up and let him down again’ (D4v). He is later despatched with a simple ‘Hang him’ (E4v). In The Martyred Soldier Bellizarius is strung up with weights hung from his feet, as two angels descend, singing, to welcome him to heaven. In this case three figures are suspended as opposing images of human pain and angelic might. In The Virgin Martyr Dorothea enters ‘led prisoner, a guard attending, a bangman with cords in some ugly shape, sets up a pillar in the middle of the stage’ (IV.ii.61SD). She is bound to the pillar and beaten with cudgels; but her guardian angel is holding her, and the beating merely exhausts the torturers, leaving her unharmed. Dorothea’s prolonged ordeal, which ends with her decapitation on stage, displays Christian faith in visual terms. 16 The machinery of torture shows the power of the oppressor, and sometimes the victim is simply helpless. But a body displayed vertically has a power of its own—the audience may think of a crucifix—and characters bound and hung can trigger admiration as well as pity and outrage. The language of. power is also the language of spectacle: masques, processions and ceremonies. The public playhouses, with their relatively large stages and their visually oriented audiences, used that language freely and sometimes critically. The Devil’s Charter is one of the most spectacular plays of the period; its spectacles are grand, elaborate set-pieces, showing off the company’s resources and giving the audience more than enough to look at. They are also expressive, not just stunning the audience with display but demonstrating different kinds of power in action. The first of these is the power of art, implicitly controlling the whole occasion. After the opening lines of the prologue, the historian Francis Guicchiardine takes over as presenter. He waves a silver rod in the air three times, and this conjures up an elaborate dumb show in which we see a cardinal, Roderigo, bribing two other cardinals with money and plate. Then a monk goes through a conjuring ceremony, using a rod, in a parody


of the artistic conjuring that begins the play. He produces ‘exhalations of lightning and sulphurous smoke in midst whereof a devil in most ugly shape’ appears (Prologue, 43–4). Two more devils present Roderigo with pontifical robes, a triple crown, and cross keys, the symbols of the papacy. He receives them, and signs a parchment with blood drawn from his arm; at the cost of his soul he will be Pope Alexander VI. Act II includes a display of military power— drums, trumpets, ensigns and ‘Alexander upon the walls in his pontificals’ surrounded by princes of the world and of the church, one of whom bears a sword (II.i.959–62). At the end of the war sequence his reconciliation with King Charles produces the following spectacle: Drums and Trumpets:…Charles and his company make a guard; Gasper de Fois, Piccolominy, Caesar, Caraffa, Cardinals, a Friar with a holywater font casting water, the Duke of Candy with a sword, Astor Manfredi supporting Alexander’s train, all bow as the Pope marcheth solemnly through, who crosseth them with his fingers. Alex ander being set in state, Caesar Borgia and Caraffa advance to fetch King Charles, who being presented to the Pope, kisseth his foot, and then advancing two degrees higher, kisseth his cheek; then Charles bringeth [Cardinal] St. Peter ad Vincula, and Ascanio, which with all reverence kiss his feet, one of them humbly delivering up his Cross-keys with he receiveth, blessing them and the rest of Charles his company; the drum and fife still sounding. (II.ii.1201–15) Temporal, ecclesiastical and military might come together, and all centre on the Pope. But we have seen where his power comes from, and the last of the play’s many spectacles shows him encompassed with devils, who to the sound of ‘Thunder and lightning with fearful noise…thrust him down and go [off] triumphing’ (V.vi.3575–7). Martha Tuck Rozett has suggested that the drama of this period satisfied a need for pageantry and ceremony that the reformed church no longer fulfilled. 17 One can see the truth of this; yet the pageantry of a play like The Devil’s Charter has a double edge. It is exciting, and feasts the eye; but being popish it is also sinister. The spectacles of a court masque celebrated the monarchy seriously and without irony; but the theatre could reverse this effect, presenting spectacle that was turned against itself, demonstrating the evil and emptiness of the power it apparently celebrated. Shortly before the Civil War, the players at the Fortune got into trouble for setting up an altar, a basin, and two candlesticks, and bowing down before it upon the stage, and although they allege it was an old play revived, and an altar to the heathen gods, yet it was apparent that this play was revived on purpose in contempt of the ceremonies of the Church. 18


To many committed Protestants, Archbishop Laud’s High Church policies had revived the threat of popery in England, and the self-mocking papal spectacles of plays like The Devil’s Charter and The Whore of Babylon (Fortune, c. 1606) now embodied a satire that hit closer to home. The association of pagan and popish spectacle operates implicitly in The Virgin Martyr, where the Christians defying pagan Rome can be seen as Protestants defying Catholic Rome. Caliste and Christeta, daughters of Theophilus, a chief persecutor of Christians, enter following ‘A priest with the image of Jupiter, incense and Censers’ (III.ii.32SD). They pretend they are going to reverence the image; then in a startling reversal, ‘They both spit at the Image, throw it down and spurn it’ (III.ii.53SD). In a characteristic paradox, a spectacle that uses visual language to support the play’s argument reaches its climax in an act of iconoclasm. Yet Rozett’s point still holds: spectacle fulfils a need. Just as there is no reason why the devil should have the best tunes, there is no reason why the Pope should have the best pageants. In When You See Me You Know Me the first spectacle belongs, inauspiciously, to Cardinal Wolsey: ‘Enter the Cardinal with the Ambassadors of France, in all state and royalty, the purse and mace before him’ (A2r). But he is topped a few minutes later by the King, who gets not only more attendants but also music: ‘Sound trumpets. Enter King Harry the Eighth, Queen Jane big with child, the Cardinal, Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk, Dudley, Gray, Compton, the Lady Mary, the Countess of Salisbury attending on the Queen’ (A3v). At the end of the play, to mark the visit of the Emperor, waves of spectacle sweep over the stage. With trumpets sounding at intervals to build up excitement, the audience is treated to a series of processional entrances building to a stage-filling climax: ‘Enter the Heralds first, then the Trumpets, next the guard, then macebearer and swords, then the Cardinal, then Brandon, then the King, after him the Queen, Lady Mary and Ladies attending’ (L1r). With the stage thus packed, the audience is given two satisfying treats: Wolsey’s dismissal, and an elaborate comic routine by Will Sommers. The spectacle not only displays the majesty of England but also adds an extra charge of excitement to the discomfiture of the play’s villain and the celebration of its clown. Even the language of religious spectacle can be reappropriated. The martyr plays do not simply oppose icons to a faith embodied in words alone, as the religious controversies of the time tended to do. In The Virgin Martyr the final triumph of Dorothea is a spectacle as material as any of the spectacles of Rome. As Theophilus, now a Christian convert, is tortured to death on stage, he is sustained by a vision of those who have gone before him: ‘Enter Dorothea in a white robe,crowns upon her robe, a crown upon her bead, led in by [Angelo] the angel, Antoninus, Caliste and Christeta following all in white, butless glorious, the angel with a crown for him’ (V.ii.219SD). In The Two Noble Ladies the power of Heaven is represented by ‘an Angel shaped like a patriarch; upon his breast a blue table full of silver letters, in his right band a red crozier staff, on his shoulders large wings’ (III.iii.1101–3). Later in the play the conjurer Cyprian has the Christian heroine Justina apparently in his power: she is ‘discovered in a


chair asleep, in her bands a prayer book, devils about her’ (V.ii.1752–4). The power she wields is greater than his: when she holds up the book ‘the fiends roar and fly back’ (V.ii.1847). Cyprian himself is converted; the patriarch-angel reenters, ‘The devils sink roaring; a flame of fire riseth after them’ (V.ii.1860–1). The angel seals Cyprian’s conversion, not just by giving him a book and a brief sermon, but also by touching his breast with the crozier staff. In all these spectacles the power that is really being shown off—as in the opening of The Devil’s Charter—is the power of the theatre itself. The company is displaying its resources, showing what it can do. Nowhere are these resources more elaborately on show than in the ‘Four Ages’ cycle. The death of Semele in The Silver Age is characteristic: ‘Thunder, lightnings, Jupiter descends in his majesty, his thunderbolt burning…. As he toucheth the bed it fires, and all flies up; Jupiter from thence takes an abortive infant’ (pp. 154–5). In The Brazen Age the death of Hercules, tormented by the Shirt of Nessus, calls on the athletic prowess of the actor (‘Hercules swings Lychas about his head, and kills him’), but even more on the scenic artists: Hercules enters ‘from a rock above, tearing down trees’. He kills Omphale ‘with a piece of a rock.’ His pyre is prepared on stage: ‘ All the princes break down the trees, and make a fire, in which Hercules placeth himself’. He burns his club and his lion’s skin; finally ‘Jupiter above strikes him with a thunderbolt, his body sinks, and from the heavens descends a band in a cloud, that from the place where Hercules was burnt, brings up a star, and fixeth it in the firmament’ (pp. 252–4). There is room for doubt over whether such stage directions represent what was really done in the playhouse, or are just wishful thinking. George Fullmer Reynolds, in his study of staging at the Red Bull, concludes they are authentic. 19 In some cases where the difficulties were insurmountable, like Hercules’ fight with the Nemean lion, the action takes place offstage and is reported by observers; this suggests a practical theatre script. The elaborateness of the spectacle, including the fire effects, can be paralleled in the miracle plays and the civic pageants that succeeded them. 20 As the more spectacular effects in the miracle plays were a chance for the craft guilds to display their wealth and inventiveness, so the more elaborate effects of the civic pageants—at the end of The Triumphs of Truth (1613) ‘a flame shoots from the head of Zeal, which, fastening upon that chariot of Error, sets it on fire, and all the beasts that are joined to it’ 21 —celebrated the City not only in the action of the allegory but also by the display of wealth and craft that went into the pageant itself. Something of that spirit permeates the spectacle-drama of the public theatre, of which the Four Ages plays are the most remarkable example. There were more direct ways to evoke local pride through the use of spectacle. Not all the grand processions involve kings and cardinals; in Edward IV, Part One the authorities of London enter to put down a rebellion, and their entry is ceremonial: ‘Enter the Lord Mayor, M.Shore, and M.Josselin, in their velvet coats and gorgets, and leading staves’ (p. 11). A Shoemaker a Gentleman comes to an appropriate climax with a processional entry of shoemakers in their livery (V.i.K4r). Pageants of this sort were part of the daily life of London. Each


meeting of the Court of Aldermen ‘began and ended with a stately procession of aldermen, important civic officers, and clerks—all arranged in ranks and marching behind the mayoral sword, carried by the swordbearer’. 22 ThePrologueto The Four Prentices of London defends the exoticism of that play by asking, ‘Had ye not rather, for novelty’s sake, see Jerusalem ye never saw, than London you see hourly?’ (31–2). The answer, of course, is that the audience wanted both, and London no less than Jerusalem could have its pageantry. The scenic language of theatre included, as we have seen, ordinary tools and plain dress. The life these things evoked was often conjured up on stage with a care that matched the care taken with more elaborate spectacles. A recurring device in popular theatre is the shop scene, where one sees real goods on display, real work being done. While we do not know exactly what scenic conventions were used (and they may have varied), some plays seem to require a portable booth with a counter on which goods could be set out, not unlike a market stall. Greene’s Tu Quoque opens with a scene that in its own way is as carefully devised as the pageantry of state: ‘A mercer’s shop discovered, Gartred working in it, Spendall walking by the shop, Master Ballance walking over the stage’. Spendall, soliciting trade, asks, ‘What lack you, sir? fair stuffs or velvets?’ and shortly after ‘a wench with a basket of linen’ enters with a street cry, ‘buy some quaifes, handkerchers, or very good bonelace, mistress’ (i.1–17). The Roaring Girl (II.i) presents three shops in a row, with the action passing back and forth between them. Both scenes evoke not just the busyness of the shop but the busyness of the street and the surrounding city. There is more to these shop scenes than genre-painting. The class values we have seen elsewhere operate powerfully here. In Edward IV Shore’s goldsmith’s shop is brought before us with lively, seemingly incidental detail: Enter two prentices, preparing the goldsmith’s shop with plate. 1. PRENTICE: Sirrah Jack, come set out. 2. PRENTICE: You are the elder prentice! I pray you do it, lest my mistress talk with you when she comes down. What is a’clock? 1. PRENTICE: Six by All Hallows! 2. PRENTICE: Lying and stealing will bring ye to the gallows. Is here all the plate?... Enter Mistress Shore, with her work in her hand. (Part One, p. 63) The life of working people, like the life of the house evoked in A Woman Killed with Kindness, is set up to be disrupted. King Edward enters shortly to woo Jane Shore; the result is a prolonged tragedy for her and her husband. His intrusion is the more distasteful in that we have just seen Shore and his fellow citizens defeat a band of rebels, with no help from the King, who arrived just in time to dispense knighthoods after the fight was over. The situation of the woman courted in her shop by a wooer of a higher class is a recurring one in popular drama, and the


wooer hardly ever shows up well. The shop and its goods establish a visual setting in which the gentleman, if he has come as anything other than a customer, is out of place. DEVILS AND FIREWORKS Showing a familiar life is one way of forging bonds with the audience; playing on its loyalty by satisfying its taste for familiar stage devices is another. As contemporary accounts suggest, two specialities of the public theatre were devils and fight scenes. According to a 1620 account of Doctor Faustus at the Fortune, ‘There indeed a man may behold shag-haired devils run roaring over the stage with squibs in their mouths, while drummers make thunder in the tiring-house and the twelve-penny hirelings make artificial lightning in their Heavens’. 23 This evokes the explosive energy of devil scenes, and the sound-and-firework effects that so often accompanied them, all going back in an unbroken line to the miracle plays. It is also a clue about devil costumes (and if devils are shaggy, this may suggest something about the ‘shag-ear’d villain’ who kills young Macduff). Another clue appears in The Silver Age, when Proserpina tells Pluto, ‘Claws off, Devil!’ (p. 136). There is one hint that a play with a lot of devils in it was a play you took the children to. The prologue to Grim the Collier of Croydon, in which Robin Goodfellow is a devil-figure, does a bit of advertising for the food-sellers: ‘But if your children cry when Robin comes,/You may to still them here buy pears or plums’. The entrance of a devil, even so innocuous a one as the Robin of this play, brings an extra charge of energy on to the stage, changing the atmosphere, frightening the children. We sense this in a characteristic stage direction in The Seven Champions of Christendom: ‘Thunder and Lightning, devils run laughing over the stage’ (III.vii.H1r). Thunder—which may have been a drum or a bullet rolled on a sheet of metal 24 —is used for a variety of effects: it punctuates the opening revenge-speech in Hoffman, and, accompanying the entrance of an angel, it triggers a religious conversion in The Martyred Soldier (I.ii.C2v). Its most characteristic use, however, is as a kind of call-sign for the appearance of devils. The opening of Grim the Collier of Croydon adds to this a striking use of the discovery-space: as St Dunstan lies down to sleep, ‘Lightning and thunder; the curtains drawn, on a sudden Pluto, Minos, Aeacus, Rhadam antus set in Council, before them Malbecco his ghost guarded with Furies’ (I.i.p. 4). They do not stay confined in the discovery-space for long. At the end of the scene ‘It thunders and lightens; the Devils go forth,Dunstan rising, runneth about the stage, laying about him with his staff’ (p. 8). ‘Go forth’ implies that they invade the main stage, perhaps menacing the audience. The effect appears as far back as a twelfth-century play of the Fall, the Ordo Representationis Adae, where the devils, having shut Adam and Eve in Hell, suddenly explode over the whole acting area. The energy of the devils is something that can use the whole stage, as it does in The Brazen Age, where Hercules’ rescue of Proserpina seems a conscious


effort to ‘top’ the fiery death of Semele in The Silver Age: ‘Hercules sinks himself; flashes of fire; the devils appear at every corner of the stage with several fireworks. The Judges of Hell, and the three sisters, run over the stage, Hercules after them; fireworks all over the house. Enter Hercules’. In the end ‘Hercules fells Pluto, beats off the devils with all their fireworks, rescues Proserpina’ (pp. 159– 60). It was not just scholarly humanists who Christianized classical myth; the language of popular theatre makes it clear that Hercules’ rescue of Proserpina is also the Harrowing of Hell. The Virgin Martyr teases the audience by having the devil Harpax appear through most of the play in human shape, without the usual special effects. But one of the tricks of the theatre is to reward impatience, and at the end, as his victim Theophilus ponders his conversion to Christianity and eats the fruit that symbolizes heavenly joy, Harpax laughs off stage, each laugh coming’ from a different point: ‘Louder’, ‘At one end’, ‘At tother end’, ‘At the middle’. The laughter suggests an unseen force building up, and the climactic laugh at the middle is closest to the entry-point for the next effect: ‘Enter Harpax in a fearful shape, fire flashing out of the study’ (V.i.94–122SD). There is an equally teasing effect in Harpax’s descent into Hell: in the penultimate scene he ‘Sinks a little’ (V.i.152), but we have to wait for the end of the play before ‘The devil sinks with lightning’ (V.ii.238SD). An audience comes to a play like this not just to watch a story unfold but to see its favourite effects on display. In the devil-effects of The Virgin Martyr that expectation is frustrated, then teased, and finally satisfied. The most elaborate manipulation of the audience occurs in If This be not a Good Play, the Devil is in It (Red Bull, c. 1611). The play is full of satire on the wickedness of the court, religion and commerce; but its catchpenny title suggests that this was not what pulled the audience in. In the dedicatory epistle the author, Thomas Dekker, implies that the play was rejected by the Fortune, then accepted by the Red Bull—not only accepted but ‘a little more garnished’. It is not hard to imagine a script conference in which the company persuaded Dekker that what the play needed was more devil-effects. The opening strikes the ear as well as the eye: Enter, at the sound of hellish music, Pluto and Charon. PLUTO: Ha! CHARON: So. PLUTO: What so. CHARON: I’ll be thy slave no longer. (I.i.1) The music, presumably harsh and discordant, and the staccato dialogue, with the monosyllables snapping like small firecrackers, all catch the audience’s attention. Shortly afterwards four devils ‘come up’ through the trap in rapid succession; with a briskness that builds on the swift pace of the opening, Pluto despatches them into the world:


PLUTO:

…go: Ruffman, take instantly a courtier’s shape Of any country: choose thine own disguise And return quickly. RUFFMAN: Yes. PLUTO: Shacklesoul, wear thou A friar’s grave habit. SHACKLESOUL: Well. PLUTO: Grumball, walk thou In treble-ruffs like a merchant. LURCHALL: So: ’tis done. (I.i.77–82) A mere ten lines later the devils re-enter in their new costumes, showing off the performers’ ability as quick-change artists. (There can be something uncanny about actors too.) This opening, brisk and exciting, whets the audience’s appetite for devil scenes; but nothing more of the sort happens until Act II, where Ruffman presents a display of ‘Fireworks on lines’ (II.i.192SD) to entertain the court. This is a teasing effect; the audience has to wait again. Then, in Act IV, there is a conclave of devils, and the full theatrical language of devil scenes is used for the first time: ‘Rain, thunder and lightning. Enter Lucifer and Devils’. Shacklesoul, Ruffman and Lurchall enter ‘at several doors with other devils’ and shortly after there are more fireworks as Scumbroth the cook, who has been spying on the devils, falls in panic from a tree (IV.ii.33–125). At the end of the play the devils appear in the gallery with the wicked merchant Bartervile, representing their retreat to a priory, and giving them an alarmingly dominant position. The King orders the priory set on fire, but for a while nothing happens, as the devils boast of their achievements. Then, at last, they all cry ‘oooh’ a nd ‘sink down, above flames’ (V.iii.149). The audience has now had hellish music, fireworks, thunder, lightning, and a full use of the stage, including the trap and the gallery; it can go away satisfied. The King’s last speech draws the play to an edifying, upbeat conclusion: ‘Justice shallhenceforthsitupon our throne,/And virtue be your King’s companion’ (V.iii. 158–9). Then: ‘The play ending, as they go off, from under the ground in several places, rise up spirits, to them enter, leaping in great joy, Ruffman, Shacklesoul and Lurchall, discovering behind a curtain Ravillac, Guy Fawkes, Bartervile, a Prodigal, standing in their torments’ (V.iv.SD). ‘From under the ground in several places’ could be confirming evidence that there was more than one trap at the Red Bull. But if, as Andrew Gurr has suggested, what look like crudely drawn supports under the stage in the Swan drawing are really gaps in a set of hangings, 25 and if there were similar hangings under the stage at the Red Bull, then the devils can burst out from under the stage, into the yard, briefly menace the audience, then climb on to the stage and play the rest of the scene. Such a move would exemplify theatrically what has happened dramatically: the devils have broken out of the closure imposed by the play, and have taken over the playhouse on their own terms. The theatrical occasion includes both the telling


of a story and the display of theatrical effects; here the second factor almost literally drives out the first. The effects now include a use of the discovery-space to create surprise, a display of the victims of torture, cries of pain from unseen damned souls ‘ within’, and diabolical laughter ‘below’ (V.ii.68–70). 26 STAGE FIGHTING The other speciality of the popular houses was the fight scene—military or domestic, but mostly military. Fight scenes, like devil scenes, used the whole stage. Jasper Mayne congratulated Ben Jonson because ‘Thou laidst no seiges to the music-room’; 27 no such restraint is shown in The Brazen Age, where Hercules and his companions take Troy by storming the gallery (p. 224). Drums, trumpets, challenges and military entrances work up excitement before a major battle. Even the simple device of having combatants enter by different doors aids in the dynamics of confrontation: ‘Enter with drum Sir Robert Westford, Young Playnsey, Canbee and Hadland. At the other door old Momford, Captain Westford, Tom Stroud, and Old Stroud, and Bess’ (The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, V.i.I3v). These are the villains and heroes of the play respectively, lined up for our inspection before the fight begins. The heroes win. A Larum for London builds up a more fearful kind of suspense, as ‘two burghers running’ and ‘three or four citizens running’ are followed by calm, formidable entrances of the Spanish power ‘with a still march’ (B1r–2v), leading to a Spanish victory. The fight sequence itself must have hardened very quickly into a convention, and there are cases where playwrights seem to be trying novelties to keep it fresh. In The Travels of the Three English Brothers, Sir Thomas Sherley, weaponless, is set upon by four Turks and defends himself with stones (D4v). But the fight scene is, I think, truest to itself in a passage from A Shoemaker a Gentleman. Dioclesian, the Roman emperor, has just heard that the Goths have captured the Eagle; then he himself is taken prisoner by Huldrick, the King of the Goths. They have all reckoned without the heroic shoemaker Crispianus: Enter Crispianus, with Eagle and soldiers. CRISPIANUS: Base Goth look up, and see here hovers Eagle-winged victory, recovered from thy troops. HULDRICK: ’Sdeath, lost again! DIOCLESIAN: Fight, warlike Britons, Free your emperor. CRISPIANUS: We shall, or die; This holds the Goth’s death, this thy liberty. Alarum : Crispianus fights with his sword in one hand, and the Eagle in the other; he kills Huldrick, and frees Dioclesian. (III.iii.G1r)


While stage-keepers hacking away at each other were used to fill out battle scenes, the crucial fights are usually single combats involving leading actors, who presumably trained and rehearsed to show off their skills to best advantage. Some thought was obviously given to the stage picture: Crispianus, with the sword in one hand and the Eagle in the other, is a striking figure of a man fighting against odds for a cause. The excitement of the combat, on display for its own sake, is doubled by the way it builds on the developing narrative. As devil effects are carefully dispersed through If This be not a Good Play, the Devil is in It in order to work on the audience’s expectations, so in plays whose chief draw is stage fighting there is a certain craft involved in catching attention, holding back, and building to a climax. The Trial of Chivalry opens with massed military entrances from different doors as the powers of France and Navarre confront each other; the audience expects a fight straightaway. Instead a peace is arranged. The first actual fight, a single combat between Ferdinand and Pembroke, does not occur till nearly half-way through the play, and at first Pembroke is so reluctant that he allows himself to be wounded without drawing his sword. Eventually he makes a real fight of it, and each man thinks he has killed the other. Much later, Pembroke, guarding what he thinks is the tomb of Ferdinand, challenges all comers to fight him as they pass by. He fights six single combats in rapid succession, and wins the first five. The sixth is with Ferdinand, and the two heroes ‘Discover each other in fighting’ (H1r). The single combats, leading to the resolution of one plot strand, are followed by an elaborate full-stage battle sequence in which old scores are paid off, a love-rivalry is acted out—‘They fight, Bowyer hath the wench, rescued by France, recovered by Navarre’ (I2v)— and the chief villain is hemmed in and despatched: ‘Rodorick would scape, still kept in the midst, and kill’d by Philip’ (I3r). The battle is not just general ized swordplay; it tells a story, showing character in action through sharp images of loyalty and courtesy, cowardice and courage. Mounting physical excitement is also worked in with the narrative pattern in The Valiant Welshman (?Boar’s Head, c. 1613); this time the narrative centres on the exploits of the hero Caradoc, and the business of the drama is to display him in combat. The first battle, early in the play, takes place offstage; we hear drums and trumpets but we see only the aftermath as Caradoc’s father dies of his wounds. The first stage fight occurs a few minutes later, and shows Caradoc avenging his father by killing Monmouth in single combat (I.iii.B4r). The next fight raises the scale as Welsh and Roman soldiers fight each other; at the climax Caradoc engages Claudius Caesar in single combat and defeats him. To vary the mix, Caradoc defeats his next enemy Codigune in a hand-to-hand fight with poleaxes as a ring of soldiers surrounds them (III.iii.E3r). This feat makes him King of Wales. In his next battle he defends himself and his family against impossible odds, and suffers his first defeat: ‘They fight; sometimes Caradoc rescueth his wife, sometimes his daughter, and killeth many of the Romans; and at last they beat him in, and take his wife and daughter’ (IV.v.G4v). The final battle, between Caradoc’s forces and the Roman army, is the longest and most


elaborate; but Caradoc himself is not there. In the final scene his heroism is translated into a new dimension as, a prisoner in Rome, he refuses to kneel to Caesar when everyone else on stage does. This is the last, and theatrically the simplest, expression of the heroism he has shown throughout the play. Though all it takes is an actor standing still and delivering a speech of defiance, it builds on the mounting physical excitement of the battles that have gone before it. The excitement roused by a battle scene is heightened when the audience can identify directly with the heroes. This is the case in Edward IV, Part One, in which the defeat of the rebels early in the play is presented as an achievement of the citizens of London and their apprentices. One of the fights is ‘a very fiery assault on all sides, wherein the prentices do great service’ (p. 20). The prototypical apprentice-adventure play is The Four Prentices of London, in which audience identification is combined with a carefully worked out structure of action, and a full use of the stage and its resources. In the first scene three of the apprentices, Godfrey, Guy and Charles, deliver set speeches extolling their trades; but the fourth, Eustace, breaking the pattern like Berowne in the opening scene of Love’s Labour’s Lost, is restless and wishes there were more time for tilting and fencing. He stirs up in the others a longing for adventure; then, just as they are returning resignedly to their shops, ‘sound a drum within softly’ (196), a recruiting officer enters, and the adventures begin. The four heroes are separated, and each one’s individual story begins with a dumb show: of the four dumb shows, the first and third include stage fights. After a skirmish in which bandits under Charles’s command attack Eustace, and ‘He sets upon them all, and beats them’ (641.1) Charles and Eustace, not recognizing each other, square off: ‘They fight; as they are fightingy enter Bella Franca pursued by an outlaw; she runs betwixt them and parts them’ (685.1–3). The pattern of interruption continues: the next fight between Charles and Eustace is stopped when the Clown runs in with news that Tancred, prince of Italy, is approaching with an army; the brothers decide to unite against him. Then, with two armies assembled on stage, the audience is led to expect a pitched battle; instead the four brothers, representing opposing sides (and still not recognizing each other) fight in single combats, which in turn are interrupted by the commanders, who are reluctant to lose their champions (see Plate 4). Shortly after this, six characters draw their swords and do not fight at all. The audience must by now be breathing heavily. In the last third of the play fuller and more decisive fights break out, leading to a series of exciting climaxes at the seige of Jerusalem. The Soldan and Sophy plant their ensigns on the walls, challenging the Christians to try to capture them, and the whole stage comes to life: ‘Alarum. The Christians are repulst. Enter at two several doors, Guy and Eustace, climb up the walls, beat the pagans, take away the crowns on their heads, and in the stead bang up the contrary shields, and bring away the ensigns, flourishing them several ways’ (2010.1–6). After another battle the out-numbered Christians are defeated, and the Soldan and his soldiers go off in triumph. But the four apprentices, who have been meeting each other without realizing each other’s identities throughout the play, have


4 A fight scene from The Four Prentices of London, from the title page of the 1615 edition. (Photo: The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC 20003)


recognized each other at last (as in The Trial of Chivalry, the crucial experiences of battle and recognition are fused) and work together for the first time. The stage direction ‘Enter the four brethren’ (2377.1) tells us that the pagans are in trouble, and this expectation is fulfilled: ‘Alarum. The four brethren each of them kill a pagan king take off their crowns, and exeunt’ (2379.1–2). The victorious Christians re-enter with drum and colours. The Four Prentices of London is the sort of play Davenant had in mind, when in the Prologue to The Unfortunate Lovers (1638) he expressed condescending amusement about the popular audience: 28 Good easy judging souls, with what delight They would expect a jig or target fight, A furious tale of Troy, which they ne’er thought Was weakly written, so ‘twere strongly fought. A modern critic usually sympathetic to popular drama calls the fights in The Four Prentices of London ‘patently inserted for entertainment’ and goes on to a more general complaint that ‘in many cases’ the fight scenes ‘were extraneous, or, at best, much over-emphasized. Thus theatrical demands were responsible for a type of variety-show entertainment which strains or violates the principles of dramatic structure’. 29 On the contrary, the fights were essential to the dramatic structure. Plays of this sort were not interrupted by them but shaped around them. This is not a literary tradition but a theatrical one, and it has an ancestry of its own: as M.C. Bradbrook has pointed out, ‘The basis of folk plays, including many of the clowns’ acts, is most frequently a fight or a mock fight’. 30 It was part of a theatre that appealed to the audience’s taste for physical excitement: not just the fighting itself but the display of weapons, the banners, trumpets and drums, the full use of the stage, the sight of heroic character in action, and the mounting excitement of the story.

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ACTOR, ROLE AND AUDIENCE In his acid characterization of ‘A common player’ (1615), ‘J.Cocke’ complains, ‘When he doth hold conference upon the stage, and should look directly into his fellow’s face, he turneth about his voice into the assembly for applause-sake, like a trumpeter in the fields, that shifts places to get an echo’. 1 Behind the obvious satire on the actor’s ego there is a more fundamental question of the nature of performance. Do actors work together, ignoring the audience, to create the illusion of life? Or do they work side by side, relating directly to the audience, presenting characters and stories rather than creating them illusionistically, making no attempt to conceal their nature as performers? In the popular tradition the tendency was to work directly on the audience: ‘Cocke’, we note, is complaining of a ‘common’ player. This had its roots in the convention of direct address to the audience in mediaeval drama; and it continued to be a feature of popular theatre throughout its history. 2 We now think of ‘breaking the illusion’ as a sophisticated device, a challenge to naive absorption in the fiction. But if we apply this thinking to the seventeenth century we are getting things backwards. It was, if anything, the creation of illusion that marked the sophistication of drama; and the illusion was never so solidly established that there was any shock value in breaking it. The ‘fourth wall’ did not have to be torn down; it had not been erected. The natural condition of theatre was a direct relationship of performer and audience, working close to each other, in the same space and the same light, both parties (on a good day) excited by the work but always self-aware. Popular culture in general created, as we have seen, a sense of community, of shared values and shared experience. The actor-audience relationship encouraged a tendency to explain, to clarify, to generalize, that helped create this sense of community. There was of course the pretence of creating a life on stage, and we may call this ‘illusion’, provided we remember it was not intended to be seamless or complete. Running through it, always visible, was the theatrical occasion, whose fundamental condition was the self-awareness of performers and audience. This sense of occasion was always strong enough to allow free play between the two—

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as in A Woman Killed with Kindness (?Rose, 1603), when the servant Jenkin tells the audience, ‘You may see, my masters, though it be afternoon with you, ‘tis but early days with us, for we have not din’d yet. Stay but a little, I’ll but go in and help to bear up the first course and come to you again presently’ (iv. 106– 10). He works simultaneously in two time frames, that of the action, and that of the audience; and he has two jobs to do: one in the illusion, helping around the house as a servant, and one in the occasion, informing and entertaining the audience as a performer. In The Brazen Age (Red Bull, c. 1611), Gallus, about to neglect his sentry duty by falling asleep, tells the audience, ‘I must have a nod or two, God night to you all, for here I am fast till morning’ (IV.p. 228). He has only one time frame, which is different from the audience’s; but he has no difficulty coming out of the illusion for a moment. Robin Goodfellow ends his part in Grim the Collier of Croydon (playhouse unknown, 1600), ‘Robin bids his last adieu, / To Grim and all the rest of you’ (V.i.p. 70). In this case the performer addresses the audience with the sort of flourish we still encounter in pantomime. More revealing is a speech of exposition in The Fair Maid of the Exchange (playhouse unknown, c. 1602), when the Cripple tells the audience, This Phyllis bears me true affection, But I detest the humour of fond love: Yet I am hourly solicited As now you see, and fain she would make known The true perplexion of her wounded heart. (vi.886–90) The sheer casualness of ‘As now you see’ tells us that all along he has been talking directly to the audience. No special effort is needed to make the relationship explicit. When in The Roaring Girl (Fortune, 1611) Moll Frith exposes a gallant-looking gentleman as a cutpurse—‘I took him once i‘the twopenny gallery at the Fortune’ (V.i.257–8); or when in The Late Lancashire Witches (Globe, 1634) the company musicians ‘show themselves above’ (III.i.p. 216) to deal with a character’s complaints about their music, we might say that the invisible becomes visible: the occasion breaks into the illusion, rather selfconsciously. The Cripple’s soliloquy lets us glimpse something that may have been more normal, something we are not often aware of in playtexts because it was taken for granted—the constant, unselfconscious presence of the occasion. We have seen that the scenic elements like props and furniture were functional rather than decorative. The same is true of moments when the relation between performer and audience is not just assumed but activated. When a character’s feelings are not what they appear to be, and it is important for the audience to know this, there is no need for them to tease this information out by picking up clues the other characters have not noticed. Simply and without fuss, the character can tell them. Castiliano in Grim the Collier of Croydon is quite direct: ‘Well, I have promis’d her to kill the Earl,/And yet, I hope ye will not think I’ll


do it’ (IV.iii. p. 64). In Patient Grissil (Rose, 1600) Furio, put in charge of banishing Grissil’s family, follows his orders but tells the audience, ‘I must obey my master, though indeed/My heart (that seems hard) at their wrongs doth bleed’ (III.i.64–5). Brutus in The Rape of Lucrece (Red Bull, c. 1606) is equally helpful about his mad behaviour: ‘What I seem to be,/Brutus is not, but born great Rome to free’ (p. 170). Here the character tells us not only his true nature but also his role in the rest of the story. This is not just an inbred sense of destiny, belonging to the illusion; it is also a self-awareness about the rest of his part in the play, belonging to the occasion. Characters can converse alternately with their fellows and with the audience. Eleazar, the hero-villain of Lust’s Dominion (Rose or Fortune, ?1600), uses one of Richard of Gloucester’s favourite tricks, the aside that takes the audience into his confidence even as he fools the other characters: The King? He loves my wife, and should he die, I know none else would love her; let him live (In heaven). Aside. (II.ii.18–20) Both parts of the speech are cynical jokes, but they are aimed in different directions, and the one aimed at the audience is more telling. There is so much double-dealing in Lust’s Dominion that the audience needs regular help keeping abreast of the story. At one point two characters who are apparently working together to get Eleazar out of the court reveal that they both have private motives, and these motives are at odds: FERNANDO: (Aside) Why, this sorts right; he gone, his beauteous wife Shall sail into the naked arms of love. QUEEN MOTHER: (Aside) Why, this is as it should be, he once gone, His wife, that keeps me from his marriage bed, Shall by this hand of mine be murthered. (II.iii.130–4) A passage like this, impossible in the theatre of illusion, shows the characters playing a scene simultaneously with each other and with the audience. This constant sharing of information with the audience creates a sense of community at a basic level. At the end of Act IV of The Honest Lawyer (Red Bull, c. 1614) Benjamin calls attention to the increasing complexity of the plot, and virtually asks the audience, ‘Are you still with us?’: ‘Much villainy is now together pack’t./The scene grows full; your patience this last act’ (IV.ii.I1r). Often the audience is called upon not just for patient attention, but for judgement, sympathy and participation. In Grim the Collier of Croydon Musgrave directly enlists the audience’s sympathy for his disappointment in love: ‘All that ye, as I do, have felt this smart,/ Ye know how burdensome ’tis at my heart’ (IV.iii.p. 60). In The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (Globe, 1607)

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Clare asks the women in the audience to judge her impending suicide, and appeals as Musgrave does to the sympathy of shared experience: be judge, you maids, Have trusted the false promises of men. Be judge, you wives, the which have been inforc’d From the white sheets you loved, to them ye loathed, Whether this axiom may not be assured, Better one sin, than many be endured. (D1r) Her private grief is generalized, and on those terms she invites the audience to participate in it. Other characters issue warnings. The Husband of A Yorkshire Tragedy (Globe, c. 1606), repentant for having murdered his children, urges, ‘Let every father look into my deeds,/And then their heirs may prosper while mine bleeds’ (x.62–3). The adulterous Anne Frankford singles out her fellow wives in the audience for the same purpose: O women, women, you that have yet kept Your holy matrimomal vow unstain’d, Make me your instance when you tread awry, Your sins like mine will on your conscience lie. (A Woman Killed with Kindness, xiii.141–4) Arthur in How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad (?Rose, c. 1602), who thinks he has killed his wife and now regrets it, appeals to his fellow husbands: ‘In life she lov’d me dearer than her life,/What husband here, but would wish such a wife?’ (K2r). It is remarkable how often wives, husbands and fathers are singled out for direct address: popular drama’s concern with marriage and the family means it constantly urges audience members to think of their own family roles as they watch the story. It is part of the generalization of experience, the sharing of feelings between stage and audience. This is bound up with an awareness that both sexes are present in the audience, and that their interests may not be identical. Early in The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, Scarborow and Ilford debate the nature of women, and Ilford mocks Scarborow’s romantic idealism: ‘There’s ne’er a wanton wench that hears thee, but thinks thee a coxcomb for saying so’ (A4r). Since the two are alone onstage, the wanton wenches who are listening must be in the audience. Ilford’s joke ironically attempts to enlist the women spectators in support of his own misogyny. The prologue to Swetnam the Woman- hater, Arraigned by Women (Red Bull, 1618) makes a more straightforward appeal: ‘The women are all welcome; for the men,/They will be welcome; our care’s not for them’ (1–2). It is good to know that Ben Jonson’s custom of addressing the audience as ‘Gentlemen’ was not universal.


The awareness of the audience, explicit in passages such as these, is implicit throughout. We have seen that significant properties (for example) are held up for inspection. With equal self-consciousness important characters are put on display. A good example is Moll Frith in The Roaring Girl, a cleaned-up version of an actual London character, a woman who dressed in men’s clothing. On one occasion the real Moll appeared on the Fortune stage in her own person, playing a lute, singing, and indulging in bawdy chat with the audience. 3 The character created by the authors and played by the boy actor is likewise put on display. The play consciously manipulates the audience’s interest in her. The first appearance is held back until Act II, and throughout Act I other characters work up expectation: ’Tis woman more than man, Man more than woman, and (which to none can hap) The sun gives her two shadows to one shape. Nay more, let this strange thing walk, stand or sit, No blazing star shall draw more eyes after it. (I.ii.133–7) At her first entrance all eyes are indeed drawn to her, and the energy level suddenly rises: GOSHAWK: Life, yonder’s Moll. LAXTON: Moll, which Moll? GOSHAWK: Honest Moll. LAXTON: Prithee, let’s call her—Moll! ALL: Moll, Moll, pist, Moll! (II.i.155–9) For the rest of the play, she is put through her paces: fighting, joking, lecturing, singing, expounding thieves’ cant. The role builds to a final, ringing self-defence —‘Perhaps for my mad going some reprove me,/I please myself, and care not else who love me’.—which draws a chorus of approval from the other characters: ‘A brave mind, Moll, i’faith’ (V.i.318–20). All of this seems designed to be played consciously to the audience, stirring their interest, holding their attention, guiding their final judgment. This relation between actor and audience has important implications for the relation between actor and character. There is no question of getting ‘inside’ the role; rather the actor stands as it were beside the character, showing it off, commenting on it, explaining it. 4 In The Silver Age (Red Bull, c. 1611) Hercules, having killed the Nemean lion, enters with the lion’s head and skin and makes a formal announcement: ‘Thus Hercules begins his Jovial tasks’ (III. p. 131). This heroic self-awareness is matched on the domestic level by the principal characters in The Fair Maid of Bristow (Globe, c. 1604). The heroine Annabell orders herself, ‘Now show thy ready and thy woman’s wit’ (E2v);

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Sentloe enters disguised, with the helpful announcement, ‘Thus like a friar I have disguis’d myself,/To see my dear friend’ (E3r). In all these cases the performer is, in effect, telling us what his character is going to do next, formally introducing the role rather than being fully absorbed in it. In Edward IV, Part One (?Boar’s Head, c. 1599) the Lord Mayor comes on stage alone ‘in his scarlet gown, with a gilded rapier by his side’ and proceeds not only to justify his appearance but also to tell his life story: Ay, marry, Crosby, this befits thee well. But some will marvel that with scarlet gown I wear a gilded rapier by my side. Why, let them know, I was knighted in the field For my good service to my lord the King, And therefore I may wear it lawfully In court, in city, or at any royal banquet. But soft, John Crosby, thou forget’st thyself, And dost not mind thy birth and parentage; Where thou wast born, and whence thou art derived. I do not shame to say the Hospital Of London was my chiefest fostering place… He goes on to explain that he was found by Cow Cross, near Islington, hence his name Crosby; and that he has given his name to his house. By the time he announces, ‘And when as God shall take me from this life,/ In little St. Helen’s will I be buried’ (p. 57), he seems to be not so much predicting the future as announcing a fait accompli. He comes before us as a finished historical character, able to narrate his life for us, up to and including his death. The tendency of popular art to stereotype comes into play here, In The Wisewoman of Hogsdon (?Curtain, c. 1604) Luce, having declared she is uncomfortable sitting in public view in her father’s shop, goes on to exploit the fact that she is on display by characterizing herself: I see my father is not jealous of me, That trusts me to the open view of all. The reason is, he knows my thoughts are chaste, And my care such, as that it needs the awe Of no strict overseer. (I.ii.202–6) She goes on to display this type-character of the chaste maid in action, rebuffing suitors who come to the shop to woo her, holding out for the one who offers marriage. She is indeed on ‘open view’, goods in her father’s shop; but she is also on display as a type-figure of chastity, who formally announces her own role. The heroine of The Rape of Lucrece is equally formal and exemplary as a


Roman matron: her values—‘With no unkindness we should our lords upbraid,/ Husbands and kings must always be obeyed’—are buttressed by a sense that she is on display as an example to all Roman wives: ‘thus wives should do’ (pp. 214, 210). Her suicide is equally exemplary: ‘Let all the world learn of a Roman dame/To prize her life less than her honoured fame’ (p. 238). The actor’s task here is not to play the self-centred pride that such speeches, taken literally, would suggest; it is rather to set the character up as a type-figure for the audience to admire. How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad presents three stock types at the centre of its action: the chaste, patient wife, the whore, and the wastrel husband who makes the wrong choice but repents in the end. All these characters describe themselves self-conciously. Young Arthur expounds the unreasonableness of his behaviour, not so much explaining it as describing it: Never allege her virtues nor her beauty, My settled unkindness hath begot A resolution to be unkind still; My ranging pleasures love variety. (A3v) His wife, told to welcome her rival Mary to the house, is caught between two roles, but asserts her choice simply: Though as I am a woman, I could well Thrust such a lewd companion out of doors, Yet as I am a true obedient wife, I’d kiss her feet to do my husband’s will. (G1r) Mary’s self-description is tricky and paradoxical, as befits her role as deceiver, but it has the same fundamental quality—the conscious display of a typecharacter: She that with kisses can both kill and cure, That lives by love, that swears by nothing else But by a kiss, which is no common oath, That lives by lying, and yet oft tells truth, That takes most pleasure where she takes most pains, She’s a good wench, my boy, and such am I. (D3r) Early in the play, a secondary character, Anselm, asks, ‘What am I then? Let me define myself’ (A3r). This procedure goes on all through the play.

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Villains are equally self-conscious. They do not allow us to wonder what drives them; they tell us. Thus, Antipater in Herod and Antipater (Red Bull, c. 1621): and howe’er By birth I am a bastard, yet my wit Shall bear me ‘bove the true-born; for ’tis found Power makes all things lawful, all things sound. (I.ii.32–5) Codigune, the villain of The Valiant Welshman (?Boar’s Head, c. 1613), presents himself through stereotype: my brain Italianates my barren faculties To Machiavellian blackness. (I.iv.C1v) Eleazar in Lust’s Dominion puts on his role like a garment: ‘now purple villainy,/ Sit like a robe imperial on my back’ (I.i.172–3). In his death-speech he promises the devils he imagines coming for him that when they have shut him in Hell he will ‘Out-act you all in perfect villainy’ (V.iii.166). Eleazar presents himself quite self-consciously as a character playing the theatrical role of villain. On the other hand, Scarborow, the hero of The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, finds himself compelled to evil against his better knowledge, and wonders why this should be. He answers his own question: Who once doth cherish sin, begets his shame, For vice being foster’d once, comes impudence, Which makes men count sin custom, not offence: When all like me, their reputation blot Pursuing evil, while the good’s forgot. (D4v) While Eleazar gloats, Sca rborow generalizes and draws a moral; both see themselves as it were from outside, telling us what they are rather than letting us find out for ourselves by watching them. More surprising to the modern imagination is the tendency of characters to stand outside their own emotions, describing them as they experience them—at times, making description do the work of experience. 5 Benjamin in The Honest Lawyer tells what it is like to fall in love with the daughter of a man his father ruined:


A strange new influence runs through my affections, Into my panting heart… I am flam’d With pity and affection. (I.ii.C1r) Eleazar describes the physical symptoms of his frenzy: See my veins, Stuck’t out, being overheated with my blood, Boiling in wrath. (Lust’s Dominion, V.ii.112–14) Frankford describes the shock of discovering his wife’s adultery: Drops of cold sweat sit dangling on my hairs Like morning’s dew upon the golden flowers, And I am plung’d into a strange agony. (A Woman Killed with Kindness, viii.58–60) If this were a realistic agony it would allow no scope for that cool, decorative image of dew on flowers. It is a passion described from outside. Sometimes characters describe, in a speculative way, what they know they ought to be feeling. Old Forrest, in Fortune by Land and Sea (?Red Bull, c. 1608), says of the wounds of his dead son, ‘Will they not hale mine eyeballs from their rounds,/ And with an everlasting blindness strike’em’ (I.ii.206–7). Bess, in The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green (Rose, 1600), meets an old blind man who reminds her of her father (and who really is her father in disguise): Shed but one tear for him, and I for thee Will weep, till from the moisture of mine eyes A little font of crystal tears shall rise To bathe thine eyelids in. (II.iii.E1r) In both cases the character is allowed extravagance of feeling, but in the future tense. It is impossible to enact literally, but quite possible to talk about, and the performer’s task is defined accordingly. Death can have a similar quality. In Hoffman (Fortune, 1602) Otho gives a clinical account of his own death-agony: ‘My sinews shrink like leaves parch’t with the sun,/My blood dissolves, my nerves and tendons fail’ (I.i.231–2). A character dying is also a performer telling the audience what it feels like for that character to die.

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While the performer’s task is often to stay outside the character, describ ing and presenting rather than impersonating, this does not mean that the performer’s own private identity emerges. The actor never names himself on stage. (The exceptions, as we shall see, involve clowns, whose personal identities are also public roles.) A popular actor, then as now, would be a presence in his own right; the impact of such actors is suggested in a contemporary ‘character’ of ‘An Excellent Actor’: ‘When he dies, we cannot be persuaded that any man can do his parts like him’. 6 Since the descriptions we have of even the most famous actors of the period are very few and very general, we can only remind ourselves that this factor operated; we cannot give a specific account of it in particular instances. What we can see in the texts is something built into the theatrical occasion itself, not dependent on individual actors: a self-awareness within the characters, not because this is their nature as individuals but because this is the nature of the theatre in which they function. It is a quality shared by lurid tyrants and chaste maids, by self-confident characters and confused ones, by the happy and the suffering. It allows the performer to communicate both with his fellow actors and with the audience; and it gives the audience a double awareness of the character as a figure in a story, and as a commentator reporting directly to them. This doubleness is most creatively used in A Woman Killed with Kind ness, where the mixed ontological status of the characters is bound up with their increasing confusion about themselves and their feelings within the story. The play has opened with the wedding of Frankford and Anne, publicly celebrated as an ideal couple; the sequence that leads to Anne’s adultery with Frankford’s friend Wendoll begins with Frankford alone on stage, describing himself and his happy state in a narrative as straight-forward as the Lord Mayor’s selfdescription in Edward IV: How happy am I amongst other men, That in my mean estate embrace content. I am a gentleman, and by my birth Companion with a king; a king’s no more. I am possess’d of many fair revenues, Sufficient to maintain a gentleman… But the chief Of all the sweet felicities on earth, I have a fair, a chaste, and loving wife, Perfection all, all truth, all ornament. If man on earth may truly happy be, Of these at once possess’d, sure I am he. (iv.1–14) Seen realistically, this is the smug complacency of a self-absorbed personality. Seen in the theatrical idiom we have been examining, it is a piece of exposition in which the performer describes the happiness of his charac ter as though from


outside. What matters is not that it is smug (though it may be that too) but that it is clear and straightforward. The relation of performer to role is fixed; the descriptive manner is maintained steadily, with no break or confusion, throughout the speech. His entrance ‘in a study’ may suggest introspection, but the clear flow of information suggests he is talking to the audience. Two scenes later, Wendoll enters alone, ‘melancholy’ as Frankford had entered ‘in a study’. He tells us he is troubled, but does not at first tell us why: ‘I am a villain if I apprehend/But such a thought; then, to attempt the deed—’. The exposition is no longer straightforward; part of the character’s trouble is that he cannot at first name his desire. When he does, the admission slips into the speech almost by accident. He has tried prayer, but ‘when I meditate—Oh God, forgive me—/It is on her divine perfections’. As his exposition is ragged, so his will is broken: he feels himself trapped in the action, its victim rather than its instigator: ‘O God! O God! with what a violence/I am hurry’d to my own destruction’ (vi.1– 18). The character’s ability to stand back and comment on himself is bound up with his inability to rescue himself; it is as though he is watching, helplessly, another man’s ruin. In the acting, his manner will be as uneasy as Frankford’s is confident. The dramatic idiom becomes increasingly refracted as Wendoll’s servant Jenkin comes on stage, and the two men, side by side, address the audience directly, unable to have a conversation. Jenkin can hear Wendoll, but Wendoll cannot hear Jenkin: JENKIN: Did your worship call? WENDOLL: [not noticing Jenkin] He doth maintain me, he allows me largely Money to spend— JENKIN: [Aside] By my faith, so do not you me; I cannot get a cross of you. WENDOLL: My gelding and my man. JENKIN: [Aside] That’s Sorrel and I. (II.iii.26–32) Jenkin is the clown-servant, typically preoccupied with his own concerns; while Wendoll is expounding his own moral crisis, Jenkin assumes the audience will want to know the name of the horse. As Wendoll’s feelings are split, so is the audience’s attention. When Wendoll’s next long speech returns the focus to him (though Jenkin is still on stage) we find his sense of himself has shattered: And shall I wrong this man? Base man! ingrate! Hast thou the power straight with thy gory hands To rip thy image from his bleeding heart? And yet I must. Then, Wendoll, be content; Thus villains, when they would, cannot repent. (vi.44–6, 51–2)

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He is, variously, ‘I’, ‘Base man’, ‘thou’, ‘Wendoll’ and ‘villains’. The convention of having a character describe himself breaks down into confusion, as Wendoll’s relationship to himself becomes unstable. When Anne appears he is split again, calmly discussing Frankford’s friendship in conversation with her, while denouncing his own ingratitude in a long, passionate aside (vi.81–7). He declares his feelings, and Anne falls almost at once, revealing an equivalent split in her own being: what shall I say? My soul is wand’ring and hath lost her way. O Master Wendoll, O. (vi.150–2) The last cry is from the character within the illusion, speaking to another character; it is realistic. But the line before it is the character standing back and describing what is happening to her. She goes on shifting, from generalization to self-description to enactment: Women that fall not quite bereft of grace Have their offences noted in their face. I blush and am asham’d. O Master Wendoll. (vi.156–8) Nicholas watches them go off together, and declares bluntly, ‘I’ll kill the rogue’ (vi.164). He is left alone with the audience to denounce the adultery and declare his own feelings, in a manner that seems to restore the straight-forward expository idiom: ‘I love my master, and I hate that slave; /I love my mistress, but these tricks I like not’ (vi.168–9). But his own consciousness, like those of the lovers, is split: once, like Wendoll, he addresses himself by name (‘Ay, Nick, was it thy chance to come just in the nick?’) and he directs part of the soliloquy to his dagger: ‘What say’st thou, metal?’ (vi.167, 171). The division may well reflect the divided feelings about Anne which he declares so plainly. In the end, he transfers that division to the audience. The soliloquy ends with an uncompleted rhyme: ‘If they proceed as they have done before,/Wendoll’s a knave, my mistress is a…’ (vi.182–3). Normally there was no shyness about speaking or printing the word ‘whore’. Nicholas’ refusal to say the word is a refusal to pass a final judgement on Anne, whom he will later come to pity. But the rhyme is so obvious that the audience will find itself pronouncing the word in its own collective mind, and then being perturbed at making, if only silently, a judgement the character has refused to make. Elsewhere, the audience is called on for judgement, sympathy or participation; it is regularly given information. Here, its special, intimate relation with the characters is used to make it share their confusion.


ACTORS AT WORK I have admitted that we cannot recover the impact of particular actors’ performances. But the actors of the period are not totally invisible to us. We can see from the scripts what they were asked to do; and we can infer that with varying degrees of success they did it. The actor’s relation to the character was, as we have seen, something other than complete absorption. The pattern of doubling, which included both different parts by one actor and different actors in one part, would have worked against complete identification. According to David Mayer, in popular drama generally ‘plot, character and theme may be subordinated to the performers’ skills’, and Peter Thomson has warned us that we will not understand the acting of this period ‘if we think in terms of whole plays’. 7 Putting these two points together, we may say that the actor’s work consisted of a display of effects, ad hoc and discontinuous, more than of a sustained commitment to a single part. There is evidence that at this period playwrights took rehearsals. 8 We do not know exactly what they were expected to do, but the demands of a large and constantly changing repertoire would not have allowed the prolonged exploratory rehearsals modern productions get. The scripts occasionally give us evidence of playwrights as directors, and what they ask for is particular, momentary effects. Many of these are entrances; it is remarkable how often actors are told how to come on. The entrance door in the back of the wall of the stage would propel the actor straight at the audience, and actors are regularly asked to use this moment to make a strong effect, to come on ‘chafing’, ‘sneaking’, ‘as affrighted and amazed’, ‘very humorously’. 9 They can raise the level of excitement by entering ‘running’, ‘hastily’, or ‘blowing’. 10 At least two plays have characters enter ‘sweating’. 11 Some stage directions seem more intended to inform the reader than instruct the actor: ‘Enter the King in prison’ (When You See Me You Know Me [Fortune, c. 1604], E2v); ‘Enter upon the Exchange, young Master Arthur and Master Lusam’ (How A Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad, A2r). There may be a recognized visual code in cases like this, but we can only guess at it. Possibly there was no such thing, but there is one hint that there may have been. ‘Enter the Knights and Gentlemen from breakfast again’ (The Merry Devil of Edmonton [Globe, c. 1603], II.ii.SD) sounds unhelpful; how can the actors show they have been at breakfast? But A Woman Killed with Kindness suggests one answer: ‘Enter Frankford, as it were brushing the crumbs from his clothes with a napkin, and newly risen from supper’ (viii.21.1–2). 12 At moments like this, the actor’s job is to send a quick, efficient visual signal to the audience. In the last chapter we looked at the visual language embodied in production effects. Actors had their own visual language, a language of gesture, and once again the scripts suggest that it was not a sustained body language developed to express a character’s personality (Laurence Olivier once asked a young actor rehearsing a major Shakespearean role, ‘Have you got your walk yet?’) but a

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collection of coded gestures, transferable, discontinuous, each one held up for inspection as it was used at a particular moment: 13 falling to the ground in misery (The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, I.i.B2v); staring and holding up the hands in fear (The Merry Devil of Edmonton, Induction, SD); tearing the hair in frenzy (A Yorkshire Tragedy, iv.82–3). When the villain of The Travels of the Three English Brothers (Curtain, 1607) is exposed, another character remarks, ‘His silence and his looks approves his guilt’ (H3r), suggesting a standardized guilty look. Such gestures can be prolonged, as in The Devil’s Charter (Globe, 1607), when the villain-pope Alexander approaches his end: Pause yet a little, let me meditate. (Alexander holdeth up his hands, wringing [them] and softly crying.) Mercy, mercy, mercy; arise, arise, up, up, up; fie, fie; no, no? stir, stubborn, stony, stiff, indurate heart; not yet? up; why? what? wilt thou not, foul traitor to my soul? not yet? The Devil laugheth. (V.vi.3472–9) Moments later the devil responds with an unnerving gesture of his own: ‘He seizeth on his face’ (3499). Characters can describe their gestures as they describe their emotions: ‘Our son slain? Bellamira poisoned? /Navarre, tear off these hairs, and raging die’ (The Trial of Chivalry [?Boar’s Head, c. 1600], F1v). There are moments when the spectator with no English whom we imagined in the previous chapter can follow the story in the language of gesture. In Edward IV, Part Two the Queen confronts her husband’s mistress Jane Shore and expresses her feelings in mime, commenting as she goes: She draws forth a knife, and making as though she meant to spoil her face, runs to her, and falling on her knees, embraces and kisses her, casting away the knife. Thus, then, I’ll do. Alas, poor soul! Shall I weep with thee? In faith, poor heart, I will. Be of good comfort: thou shalt have no harm; But if that kisses have the power to kill thee, Thus, thus, and thus, a thousand times I’ll stab thee. (p. 129)

If each ‘thus’ represents a kiss, then each kiss is quickly highlighted. Occasionally body language is a function of character, as in The Iron Age, Part Two (Red Bull, c. 1612), when Cressida says of Sinon, ‘His eyes down looking, you shall hardly see/One in whose shape appears more treachery’ (I. p. 367). But even this is coded; and for the most part the visual language of the actors, like


the visual language of furniture, props and costumes, fixes on a relationship, a moment of feeling, a point in the story. With a little imagination we can watch the actors at work as we read the plays. We can also hear them. Playwrights give their actors, both the adults and the boys, chances for striking vocal effects. We know when we have come to a big speech: it rises out of the surrounding text, held up for our attention as the striking visual moments are. Rhyme, strong rhythm and deliberate patterning are among the clues to the performer to isolate the speech as a moment important for the play and a chance to take centre stage with a piece of declamation. One such moment is Lucrece’s plea with Tarquin: Oh Prince of Princes, do but weigh your sin, Think how much I shall lose, how small you win. I lose the honour of my name and blood, Loss Rome’s imperial crown cannot make good. You win the world’s shame and all good men’s hate; Oh, who would pleasure buy at such dear rate? Nor can you term it pleasure, for what is sweet Where force and hate, jar and contention meet? (The Rape of Lucrece, pp. 224–5) In the story, Lucrece’s plight is desperate; in the performance the boy actor is formal, secure and in command. There is no sense that the speech builds to a climax; it maintains the same level of intensity throughout. But an equally formal passage of declamation in Herod and Antipater, in which Antipater displays his murderous ambition, not only builds to a climax but also seems designed to get the performer an exit round: Close fountains, rivers dry, pluck up the roots, boughs perish, Banish the sun, the moon and stars do vanish; And, were it to obscure the world and spoil Both man and beast, Nature and everything; Yet would I do’t; and why? I must, and will be king. Kingly Antipater. Exit. (II.i.624–9) This is the classic technique of the clap-trap, as described by Leigh Hunt: the steady rise, the climax, the unexpected twist at the end followed by a quick exit. 14

More specific skills on display include putting on accents: Welsh, Dutch and Devonshire are among the favourites. In at least one case an assumed voice forms part of a disguise: ‘His hair sheds off, and yet he speaks not so much in the nose as he did before’ (The Roaring Girl, IV.ii.260–1). Disguise is of course another chance for the performer to show off, acting two roles in one character.

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Some plays allow the actors to display their skills as quick-change artists. At one point Momford, the protean hero of The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, does two changes in quick succession, the second faster than the first: he has fifteen lines to change from the beggar to a serving man, but only eight lines to change back again (IV.ii. G4v–H1v). There is a similar effect of increasing speed in The Fair Maid of Bristow, where Herbert, disguised as Blunt, has sixteen lines to change back to himself and only three lines to change back to Blunt (D2v–3r). The effect seems designed to win applause on his second entrance. In The Honest Lawyer Vaster wears two layers of disguise, and in the last scene strips them off in rapid succession: ‘My lord, thus I prevent this fear’d disaster:/My second case pull’d off, I am plain Vaster’ (V.i.K2r). At the end of Swetnam the Woman-hater, Arraigned by Women Lorenzo appears as an old shepherd; he removes that disguise to appear as an Amazon; he removes that disguise to appear as himself (V.iii.176, 184). These are all scripted displays of skill; actors could also be called upon to improvise: ‘Enter Forester, … speaks anything, and exit’ (The Trial of Chivalry, E4r). A mysterious stage direction in The Fair Maid of Bristow, ‘The drunken mirth’ (C3r), may indicate that a whole scene has been lost, or that a whole scene was improvised. Improvisation allows the actor to take off on his own, free of the script; but even the scripts put a strong focus on the actor’s own skill, making the audience aware not just of the character but of the performer. In displaying his skill, the actor is working directly on the audience, as he does when the character comments on his own role. The closeness of actor to spectator would aid the effect. If we could see a Jacobean performer at work he might seem to be blending what we would think of as a regular performance with a nightclub act. That is putting it in terms of the entertainment of our own time, and of course no such analogy can be pushed very far. We would also find the performance strange in ways that we can only speculate about. There is at least one clue: recurring evidence that speeches intended to be spoken by ‘Omnes’—that is, all the actors on stage—were not always simple group cries like ‘God save the king!’ or an invitation to generalized muttering. In some cases the playwright seems to require all the actors on stage to speak at once, quite articulately. In The Roaring Girl the group speech ‘Thanks, good Sir Alexander, for our bounteous cheer’ has to set up a rhyme with the following line, ‘Fie, fie, in giving thanks you pay too dear’ (I.ii.1– 2). Generalized murmurs of gratitude will not do. Sometimes the group speech itself is rhymed: ‘And on our knees we must this duty tender,/To you our Patron, and our Fame’s Defender’ (Swetnam the Woman-hater, V.iii.197–8). Again, this is not an invitation to scattered cries of loyalty; it is a group thought that must be clearly and firmly uttered. Examples could be multiplied, but it will be enough to make two points: the ability of the actors to coalesce into a single speaking group shows again how far they were from the notion that an actor sinks into his character and stays there; and the sheer strangeness (to us) of the device is a salutary reminder of how much historical distance there is between us and the Jacobean theatre, how much we can never really know.


BOY ACTORS The use of boys in women’s roles is the most often debated of the factors that separate our theatre from the theatre of Renaissance England. It is hard to recover the effect of this convention. The all-male theatre of the Orient is some help, but that is an all-adult theatre; we still need to understand the effect of boys. An added complication is that some of the ‘boys’ were by our standards young men in their late teens and early twenties. 15 There were younger boys and older boys, and we can only speculate about how important this distinction was. I have argued that the audience would be aware of the performers as performers: how aware would they be of the boys as boys? It could be said that the convention was invisible simply because it was universal. But it is made visible at particular moments: Rosalind’s ‘if I were a woman’ in the epilogue to As You Like It, and the trick ending of Epicoene, come to mind. In The Hector of Germany (c. 1615), written for performance by middle-class amateurs at the Curtain and the Red Bull, two comic figures, a Frenchman and an Englishman, blunder on to the stage drunk in the middle of a serious scene. Thinking they are watching a play (as of course they are) they sit on the rails and comment. The Englishman declares, ‘That’s a brave boy that plays the Queen’s part’, and the Frenchman replies, ‘He shall be my juggler’ (H4r). The bawdy overtones of ‘juggling’—as in 1 Henry VI, ‘She and the Dauphin have been juggling’ (V.iv. 68)—mean that the Frenchman has sexual designs on the boy, and wants to make a date with him after the performance. Lisa Jardine’s account of the erotic interest created in this culture by boys dressed as women 16 suggests that the Frenchman’s reaction is not just a foreigner’s peculiarity. Though plays regularly preached sexual probity, the preachers and moralists who denounced them saw them as encouragements to licentiousness. Their tone is usually hysterical, but the passage from The Hector of Germany suggests that they may not have been altogether wrong. In this characteristic paradox, there is again a distinction between the illusion and the occasion: the play may preach morality, but the performance is an erotic turn-on. Not only that, but also there are prostitutes plying their trade in the auditorium. If scenes of eating and drinking encouraged the refreshment business, there were other scenes that may have helped the prostitutes. The notion that all-male theatre was sexless needs to be re-examined. Kissing, embracing and bawdy innuendo are common enough; The Golden Age (Red Bull, c. 1610) goes much further. Jupiter, in female disguise, prepares for the rape of Calisto by some graphic onstage petting: JUPITER: Sweet, sit still, Lend me thy lips, that I may taste my fill. CALISTO: You kiss too wantonly. JUPITER: Thy bosom lend, And by thy soft paps let my hand descend. CALISTO: Nay, fie, what mean you?

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JUPITER:

CALISTO: JUPITER:

CALISTO: JUPITER:

Prithee let me toy; I would the gods would shape thee to a boy, Or me into a man. A man, how then? Nay, sweet, lie still, for we are far from men; Lie down again. Your foot I oft have prais’d, Aye, and your leg (nay, let your skirt be rais’d). I’ll measure for the wager of a fall, Who hath the greatest great, or smallest small. You are too wanton, and your hand too free. You need not blush to let a woman see. (II. pp. 33–4)

Both actors are dressed as women, and both are really male, as the innuendo of ‘greatest great, or smallest small’ reminds us. When Jupiter says, ‘Lend me your hand,/And freely taste me, note how I will stand’ (p. 34), there is no doubt about his own sex. Calisto’s is more equivocal. In the Restoration theatre actresses were sometimes fondled on stage: this happens to Margery in The Country Wife and Fidelia in The Plain Dealer; in both cases they are dressed as boys, but they rouse erotic feeling as women (both parts were played by the popular and attractive Mrs Boutell). In The Golden Age, here and in the equally titillating seduction of Danae, the boy is a sex object, both as a woman and as a boy. But primarily, I think as a boy: in The Four Prentices of London (?Rose, c. 1594) as Guy kisses the French lady, who has appeared in a dress after spending much of the play in male disguise, his brother Eustace (who has not quite caught up with the plot) asks, ‘Fie, are you not asham’d to kiss a boy,/And in your arms to grasp him with such joy?’ (2533–4). In The Roaring Girl, when Sebastian kisses Mary Fitz-allard, who is dressed as a boy, Moll comments, ‘How strange this shows, one man to kiss another’ (IV.i.44). Moments like this activate an awareness that must have been present to some degree all the time; all those heterosexual love scenes are not what they appear to be. The erotic interest of boys as boys is evident in The Devil’s Charter, where Pope Alexander poisons two youths, Astor (on whom he had sexual designs earlier in the play) and his brother Philippo, by applying asps to their breasts. They enter ‘in their waistcoats with [tennis] rackets’, and two barbers trim and massage them. ‘After the barbers hath trimmed and rubbed their bodies a little’ they fall asleep and Alexander enters with two boxes of asps. ‘He stirreth and moveth them, opening both their bosoms’. As he applies the asps—‘Take your repast upon these princely paps’—he draws the obvious parallel: ‘And you, my lovely boys competitors,/With Cleopatra share in death and fate’ (IV.v.2652– 777). The whole sequence makes the boys’ bodies the objects of dark erotic interest. In the play’s overt morality this eroticizing of murder is a sign of Alexander’s wickedness; but we may wonder if the effect on the audience was confined to that. Just as startling in its own way is the effect of the boy-angel


Angelo in The Virgin Martyr. For most of the play he serves the heroine Dorothea in mortal form; she calls him This little pretty boy’ (II.i.194). In the last act he converts Theophilus to Christianity. Theologically, this may ‘dramatize the Calvinist doctrine of irresistible grace’, 17 but theatrically the effect is rather more sensuous. Theophilus is converted not only by a basket of fruit and flowers symbolizing the joys of heaven, but also by the physical appeal of Angelo. His language for the boy-angel intensifies from ‘pretty sweet boy’ and ‘My delicate boy’ to ‘ravishing boy’ (V.i.63, 65, 166). It may be relevant to note that in post-Restoration revivals of The Virgin Martyr the part of Angelo was played by Nell Gwynn. The physical effect of the boy actors could be pathetic as well as erotic, as in A Yorkshire Tragedy, where the bodies of two murdered children are laid out as objects of pity (x.34–6). In Edward IV, Part Two, the princes—who in Shakespeare vanish into the Tower and are never seen again—appear ‘in their gowns and caps, unbuttoned and untrussed’, figures at once domestic and pathetically vulnerable. Richard complains of fever, and Edward lays his hands on his head; as in the massaging of the boys in The Devil’s Charter, we are made aware of their bodies. They express tender concern for each other, and kneel and pray together, to ‘solemn music the while within’. The actual murder takes place offstage, but the corpses are brought on in a way that emphasizes their pathetic smallness: ‘Enter at one door Dighton, with Edward under his arm; at the other door, Forrest, with Richard’. After an exchange of mutual recrimination, Forrest cries, ‘Oh, I am damned indeed!’ and ‘looks down at the boy under his arm’ (pp. 153–5). This emphasis on the pathos of the dead boy probably informs those scenes where the boy is playing a woman. In The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, Harcop’s attempt to see life in his dead daughter Clare focuses attenion on the corpse, as he addresses her directly: Why speak’st thou not? Some help, my servants there! What hand hath made thee pale?… I prithee speak to me! Thou art not ripe for death, come back again, Clare, my Clare…. (D1v) As in erotic scenes, so in scenes of pathos, it matters that the woman is really a boy. The pathos of the young body that is directly expressed in Edward IV is implicit whenever we see an actor cradling a smaller, lighter actor who is wearing a dress and pretending to be dead. THE CLOWN Of all the actors in a Jacobean company, the one most strongly present in his own person, and by the same token most closely bonded with the audience, was

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the clown. Clownage, like devil scenes and fight scenes, was a hallmark of the popular theatre and an easy target for the condescension of the sophisticated. In the Praeludium to The Careless Shepherdess Landlord, a country gentleman, declares, 18 Why, I would have the Fool in every act, Be’t comedy or tragedy, I’ave laugh’d Until I cried again, to see what faces The rogue will make! Oh, it does me good To see him hold out’s chin, hang down his hands And twirl his bauble. Thrift the citizen agrees: ‘I never saw Reed peering through the curtain,/ But ravishing joy enter’d into my heart’. Much of the clown’s effect as described here is visual—the face, the gestures, the head peering through the curtain—and he goes by his proper name, not by the part he plays. Like devils and fighting, this was an old-fashioned taste; Sparke, the Innsof-Court man, accuses Thrift and Landlord of being ghosts from the past. The tradition they value goes back to the most famous clown of the 1580s, Richard Tarlton: 19 Tarlton when his head was only seen The tire-house door and tapestry between Set all the multitude in such a laughter They could not hold for scarce an hour after. As Tarlton had been considered the leading actor of his company, the Queen’s Men, so Thomas Greene (see Plate 5) was the leading actor of Queen Anne’s Men, and Andrew Cane had a similar prominence in Prince Charles’s (II) Men. All three were clowns. Greene’s popularity was such that one play in which he appeared continued to bear his name after his death: Greene’s Tu Quoque (Red Bull, 1611). Indeed, it may have been renamed to commemorate him: the play was produced at court in 1611 under its alternate title, The City Gallant; Greene died the following year. The intrusion of his personal identity—the occasion breaking into the illusion— becomes at one point so overt as to be a joke in itself: SCATTERGOOD: … let’s go see a play at the Globe. BUBBLE: I care not; any whither, so the Clown have a part; for i’faith I am nobody without a Fool. GERVASE: Why, then, we’ll go to the Red Bull; they say Greene’s a good clown. BUBBLE: Greene? Greene’s an ass. SCATTERGOOD: Wherefore do you say so? BUBBLE: Indeed, I ha’ no reason, for they say, he is as like me as ever he can look.


5 Thomas Greene, the clown of queen Anne's company, from the title page of Greene's Tu Quoque (1914). (Photo: The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC 20003)

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(xii.1567–76) The effect is slightly more subtle in The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, where the comic servant, who would have been played by the Globe clown Robert Armin, is named Robin. 20 David Wiles has noted, of Armin’s predecessor Will Kemp, ‘When the play has a notional foreign setting, Kemp’s name is always English’. 21 In Romeo and Juliet, for example, he is Peter. Kemp appears as a character in The Travels of the Three English Brothers. (The clown himself may have been dead by this time; like the title of Greene’s Tu Quoque, this may be an act of commemoration.) He declares he is ‘somewhat hard of study’ and prefers ‘extemporal merriment’ (E4r). He prefers, in other words, a chance to take off on his own. All of this confirms Edward Berry’s view: ‘Though in the play, the clown is often not truly of it; his reality lies elsewhere, in an independent tradition and personal relation to the audience’. 22 This must have been the usual effect of the clown as part of the theatrical occasion; and there are times when we can see it written into the script, in a paradoxical attempt to bring the clown under control by making his disruptions part of the play text. Babulo in Patient Grissil, in his role in the play, is a workman employed by a basket maker; his real function is not to make baskets but to make jokes: ‘I’ll hamper somebody if I die, because I am a basket maker’ (I.ii.21). At his first entrance the Clown in The Trial of Chivalry has been arrested by soldiers for not knowing the password: ‘Without the word! O pernicious Frenchman! Without the word! Why, I have call’d thee villain, him, rascal, this, slave, that, rogue, and am I still without the word?’ (E1r). As a character in the play he is nominally French himself. As a clown he is an Englishman hurling comic abuse at a group of foreigners. The clown of The Golden Age interprets the classical myth ology of the action in terms of contemporary English law. Referring to Jupiter’s mysterious parentage, he tells him: ‘because I would loath to have this parish troubled with you, I bring you news where you were born…and if you will not go home quietly, you shall be sent from Constable to Constable, till you come to the place where you were begot’ (III, pp. 45–6). The clown often has an onstage claque who work up the audience’s appreciation of him. In The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green Swash, advising young Stroud on the art of courtship, bursts into rhyme: SWASH: … thus you must come upon her, oh lady bright, pity this knight that in this plight is tormented, if you be willing, to be billing, I dare hold a shilling you shall be contented. YOUNG STROUD: Ay, marry, Swash, this is excellent i’faith, couldst not thou ha’ taught me this? (IV.iii.H3r)


In The Two Merry Milkmaids (Red Bull, c.1619) Smirk indulges in a comic display of grief for the Duchess’s banishment from court; he is egged on by the Duchess’s brother Frederic: SMIRK: Oh, Oh. Strikes his breast. FREDERIC: With that the moody squire thumpt his breast, And rais’d his eyes to heaven for revenge. Speak, sweet Hieronimo. SMIRK: First take my tongue, and afterward my heart. FREDERIC: Good, both being out now let us have the story. SMIRK: Kickt with disgrace, and turn’d out of the Court, Both to the guard and blackguard made a sport. FREDERIC: Excellent Smirk. (III.i.H4r) The Duchess’s banishment is both a necessary question of the play and the occasion for a clown’s routine; and a character who might have been seriously concerned with it acts as Smirk’s feed, leading the applause for him as Jaques does for Touchstone in the last scene of As You Like It. The play texts that survive do not of course preserve the visual impact of the clown, the gestures that so delighted Landlord and Thrift, much less his improvised additions to the performance. What we have is scripted clowning. It probably reflects a compromise: allowing the clown to do what he would do anyway, but making him do it in ways set by the playwright. On those terms, the plays are usable evidence for recovering the effect of the clown, provided we remember that more would likely have been added in performance. Many of the effects are familiar and recurring. Like the refrain of a ballad, they create that sense of reassuring predictability so basic to popular culture. The clown’s name within the play is usually a comic one, designed to trigger puns. Bubble in Greene’s Tu Quoque is ‘blown up’ with good news (ii.213–15); Pipkin in How a Man may Choose a Good Wife from a Bad treads softly ‘For fear of breaking’ (A4r); Swash in Swetnam the Woman-hater announces he is ‘At your buckler, sir’ (IV.iii.2). The recurring catch-phrase is another reliable device. In Greene’s Tu Quoque it gives the play its title; like Lavatch’s ‘O lord, sir’ in All’s Well that Ends Well, ‘tu quoque’ (‘the same to you’) can be adapted to a variety of situations. Bubble introduces it with a flourish, as part of his new role as a gentleman who has come into money: ‘In black carnation velvet I will cloak me,/ And when men bid God save me, cry Tu quoque’ (vii.735–6). The phrase can return a compliment or an insult. It can be bawdy, as when Bubble tells his prospective bride the time has come ‘For me to tickle thy Tu quoque’ (xvi.2409). In the end the prodigal Scattergood, who has operated with Bubble as part of a comic team, goes off with the words, ‘so, vale, vale; et tu quoque’ (xix.2913). (The last twist anticipates the ending of My Little Chickadee, whereW. C.Fields appropriates Mae West’s catch-phrase, ‘Come on up and see me some time’.) The recurring popularity of this phrase can be seen in a much-reproduced

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engraving of 1662, used as the title page to Kirkman’s The Wits, where a clownfigure peeps through the curtain at the back of the stage, with the words, ‘Tu quoque’. Repetition is one key to the popularity of the catch-phrase. The same quality informs another recurring device, rapid-fire cross-talk dialogue: 23 CLOWN: I am no fool, I am a fencer, sir. AURELIA: A fencer, sirrah? Ha, what countryman? CLOWN: This countryman, forsooth, but yet born in England. AURELIA: How? Born in England, and this countryman? CLOWN: I have been born [borne] in many countries, madam, But I think I am best to be this countryman, For many take me for a silly one. AURELIA: For a silly one? CLOWN: Ay, a silly one. (Swetnam the Woman-Hater, IV.v.127–35) (The play is set in Sicily.) In passages like this, the clown is in control, stringing the other characters along and saving the last word for himself: ILFORD: What am I the better for thy answer? CLOWN: What am I the better for thy question? ILFORD: Why, nothing. CLOWN: Why, then, of nothing comes nothing. WENTLOE: ’Sblood, this is a philosophical fool. CLOWN: Then I that am a fool by art am better than you that are fools by nature. Exit. (The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, A2r) These small local victories are signs of the clown’s determination to work in the play on his own terms. The sheer speed of these passages also raises the energy level of the performance. John Singer, the clown of the Admiral’s Men, achieved the same effect by the boisterousness of his acting: ‘inarticulate roaring’ 24 was one of his specialities: SWASH: Slain a man! Oh, oh, oh, oh! YOUNG STROUD: Peace, Swash, do not cry so. SWASH: No, I do not cry, I do but roar. (The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, II.v.E2v) (The last line shows the clown standing back from his own part, as he sometimes stands back from the play.) We see the same voluble quality in Pipkin’s reaction to Mistress Arthur’s apparent death in How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad: ‘Oh Mistress, Oh Hugh, Oh Hugh, Oh Mistress…. Oh Hugh, I am mad, bear with me, I cannot choose, Oh death, Oh mistress, Oh mistress, Oh death’ (G4v– H1r). 25 The burst of energy can work in the service of the story, as it does in


Edward IV, Part Two, when Jockey, ‘running and crying’, bursts into a sombre execution scene: ‘untie, untruss, pull down, pull off! God save the king! Off with the halters! Hence with the prisoners! A pardon, a pardon!’ (p. 138). The energy is also connected with the clown’s strongly physical nature, which emerges in his preoccupation with food, drink and sex. Rice, the second clown of Patient Grissil, declares, ‘My teeth water till I be munching’ (II.i.2–3) and later gets a laugh by ‘eating secretly’ and spitting out a mouthful of meat (II.i.76SD, 84SD). Swash, in Swetnam the Woman-hater, declares he loves women ‘with all my heart’ and another character comments, ‘He looks as if he did’ (V.ii.213). The clue to the joke is probably the erect codpiece we see Greene wearing on the title page of Greene’s Tu Quoque (see Plate 5); the heart has nothing to do with it. Swash, in The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, addresses the Lord Protector Gloucester as the ‘Lord Erector’ (III.iii.F2v); more startlingly, the Clown in The Rape of Lucrece says of Lucrece, The way into her were a way worth following’ (p. 184). As the last joke indicates, the clown can not only disrupt the serious business of the play but also subvert it. In that way he reflects the paradoxical doubleness of popular theatre, supporting traditional values in the context of a disreputable entertainment. (The clown in The Rape of Lucrece is definitely part of the disreputable entertainment.) The Martyred Soldier (?Red Bull, c. 1618) is normally quite serious on the subject of martyrdom, but not when the Clown compares the properties of different martyrs: Methinks Christians make the bravest bonefires of any people in the universe; as a Jew burns pretty well, but if you mark him he burns upward; the fire takes him by the nose first…. Your Frenchman burns downward like a candle and commonly goes out with a stink like a snuff. (IV.ii.p. 228) For the most part, however—perhaps because this is scripted clowning -the clown’s subversiveness is either contained or directed in ways that correspond to the sympathies of the play. In The Trial of Chivalry the Clown greets Katherine’s grief over the apparent deaths of Ferdinand and Pembroke with ‘O Lord, then let me turn myself into a ballad, and mourn for them’. She retorts sharply: ‘Thou angrest me with jesting at my sorrow’. After a bit more banter, in which the Clown offers to ‘weep out mine eyes, and fill the holes with salt water’, she settles on a compromise that still puts him in his place: ‘I prithee leave me, I am not displeased,/ But fain would vent my sorrow from my heart’ (E4r). Here the comedy is contained; elsewhere it is used in the service of the play. In The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, Swash deflates the apparent seriousness of Old Stroud’s impending execution—‘Master, here’s a blind man come to see your father hang’d’ (III.iii.F2v)—but the intrusion of comedy actually signals that the old man is about to be rescued.

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One of the clown’s most frequently recurring routines is his noisy participation in the grief of the serious characters. In The Miseries of Enforced Marriage the Clown not only brings Clare the news that Scarborow has been forced to break off his engagement with her, but also laments along with her: ‘all the rain that fell at Noah’s flood had not the discretion that my eyes have; that drunk but up the whole world, and I ha’ drowned all the way betwixt this and London (C3v). The effect of this is equivocal, balanced between sympathy and comic exaggeration. In performance, the latter may have won out. The Clown of Fortune by Land and Sea has a similar reaction when Philip and Susan are reduced to poverty by Philip’s hard-hearted father: ‘My heart begins to condole, and my conduit pipes to open, we shall have a shower presently’ (II.i.689–90). But he quickly comes down to a plainly expressed sympathy—‘Kind young man; hold good heart’ (II.i.695)—and he offers to help Philip in his new work by teaching him how to handle a team of horses. For the rest of the play he operates as loyal servant to the lovers, even his occasional chicanery being directed to this end. Bubble in Greene’s Tu Quoque is equally loyal to his master Staines, weeping over the breakup of his household, and offering to help him restore his fortunes by robbery: ‘if we ’scape, we’ll domineer together; if we be taken, we’ll be hanged together at Tyburn, that’s the warmer gallows of the two’ (ii.193–4). Robert Armin’s survey of actual fools includes Jack Oates, who often lost his temper with his master, but pined away and died after his death. 26 Even the Clown’s bawdry can be turned to sympathetic account, as in A Shoemaker a Gentleman, where Barnaby’s bawdy jokes about fitting shoes on ladies while not letting one’s hands stray too high provide a friendly context for the play’s lovers, Crispianus and Leodice: as he fits a shoe on her, they start to share Barnaby’s humour: LEODICE: Come hither, view my foot well, you must be better acquainted with it. CRISPIANUS: Is it not here they pinch you, madam? LEODICE: No, ’tis a little higher. BARNABY: Away, away, for shame, did I teach you that carriage? … [Barnaby takes over.] I have found the fault now, you are pinched in the very cranny. LEODICE: You have hit it, Sir. BARNABY: I told you so, a man of a longer standing will do. (D1V–2r) One of the features of popular art is clearly directed sympathies. Whether crying or making bawdy jokes, the clown, more often than not, lines up with the play’s sympathetic characters. But one cannot say ‘always’. The demonic clown Suckabus, in The Seven Champions of Christendom (Red Bull, c. 1635), swears allegiance to George of England, but in comically inverted terms:


I’ll be as firm to you As fire in water, as tender as the fox o’er the goose, Or the wolf o’er the lamb…. (I.ii.C3r) The scrambled language is both a conventional clown-routine and an accurate prediction of Suckabus’ later treachery, as though there is something fundamentally unreliable in comedy itself. We have seen that fights and devils are carefully dispersed through some plays, in order to manipulate the audience’s expectations; the same can be true of clowns. The Four Prentices of London makes us wait for its main battle scenes; it also makes us wait for its clown, who does not appear until nearly five hundred lines into the play, just when the audience may begin to wonder if he is coming at all. Smirk, the clown of The Two Merry Milkmaids, appears briefly in the first act but does not really get down to work until the third act, with his comic routine of grief for the Duchess’s banishment. Then, just as the battles of Four Prentices and the devils of If This be not a Good Play, the Devil is in It find their fullest development at the end, so Smirk dominates the last scene, playing a comic routine based on a ring of invisibility and taking part in a courtship contest that involves the extempore composition of letters and poems. The other characters egg him on; the display of the Clown’s talent becomes virtually the climax of the play. The same pattern is more elaborately developed in When You See Me You Know Me. Will Sommers’ first entrance, booted and spurred and blowing his horn (A4v), is a foretaste of the comic energy he will bring to the whole play. His bawdry is a way of celebrating Henry VIII’s sexuality: when the King tells his pregnant wife, ‘th’hast an angry soldier’s frown,’ Will retorts, ‘I think so, Harry, thou has prest her often; I am sure these two years she has serv’d under thy standard’ (B1v). This is friendly joking. Will is not so impressed when the Pope gives Henry the title Defender of the Faith: ‘I am sure the true faith is able to defend itself without thee, and as for the Pope’s faith, good faith’s not worth a farthing, therefore give him not a penny’ (D2v). 27 He greets the news of the Pope’s death with glee: ‘last Friday all the bells in Rome rang backward, there was a thousand dirges sung, six hundred Ave-Maries said, every man washed his face in holy-water, the people crossing and blessing themselves to send them a new Pope for the old is gone to Purgatory’ (B1r). His persistent mockery of Wolsey is part of the Protestant stance he takes throughout the play, lining up with the expected sympathies of the audience. In the end it is Will who reveals Wolsey’s immense private wealth, causing the King to move against him. His comedy is not anarchic but directed to the establishment of proper order. In one of his more serious moments he advises Henry not to pardon a murderer who has been pardoned twice before: ‘he ne’er kill’d but one, thou kildst the tother; for

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and thou hadst hang’d him for the first, the two last had been alive still’ (F3r). The King agrees. One of Will’s practical functions in the play is to cheer up the King when he is in a black mood; he also contributes to the manipulation of the play’s moods. Early in the play the King’s sister Lady Mary orders Will off stage; he goes complaining, and in the sequence that follows there is a sharp change of tone as the King learns the Queen is undergoing a dangerous labour, and he has to choose between her life and the child’s. Will’s comedy, and the painful emotion of this scene, set each other off by contrast. The effect is repeated later in the play, in the scene in which the future Edward VI is put on display as an exemplary prince, his virtues demonstrated in a dialogue with Cranmer. Will at first interrupts the scene with jokes; the Prince warns him to be quiet, and eventually orders him off. After his departure, the scene settles down to a solemn discussion of Purgatory. From this point, in fact, the whole play goes sombre as a papist conspiracy tightens around the King: the Queen is accused of treason, and Cranmer is removed as the Prince’s tutor. Henry himself starts to feel his age, and becomes a prey to fears. Through all this action Will is absent. Comedy and serious concern no longer play off against each other; the tone is simply serious. But the Queen wins Henry over, and when Bonner and Gardiner enter with an armed guard to arrest her he turns on them, his old manner restored: ‘Y’are a couple of drunken knaves and varlets’ (K2v). As if to signal that England is safe again, Will returns. Throughout the play Will is not just a character engaged in the drama but an entertainer put on display for the pleasure of the audience. Challenging Will to a rhyming contest, Wolsey finds himself acting as straight man: WOLSEY: Well, Will, I’ll try your rhyming wits once more. What say you to this? The bells hang high, and loud they cry, what do they speak? WILL: If you should die, there’s none would cry, though your neck should break. WOLSEY: You are something bitter, William. But come on, once more I am for ye. A rod in school, a whip for a fool, is always in season. WILL: A halter and a rope, for him that would be Pope, against all right and reason. WOLSEY: He’s too hard for me still, I’ll give him over. (F1v) The comic routine is part of the play’s Protestant polemic, but it is also part of its entertainment; and Wolsey, taking his defeat with surprising good temper, functions both as the butt of satire and as Will’s assistant in entertaining the audience. The spectacle that concludes Henry VIII (or All Is True) is there to buttress Cranmer’s prophecy of the golden reign of Elizabeth. The equally elaborate spectacle that concludes When You See Me You Know Me, designed to welcome the Emperor to the English court, buttresses the last and most elaborate of Will’s


routines—as though this were the climax to which the play has been building, as in a sense it is. The Emperor builds up Will’s credit by his own interest in seeing the famous clown: ‘Is this Will Sommers? I have heard of him in all the princes’ courts in Christendom’ (L2v). Thus introduced, Will takes on the King, the Queen and the Emperor in a rhyming contest, and beats them all: KING: Answer this, sir: the bud is spread, the rose is red, the leaf is green. WILL: A wench, ‘tis said, was found in your bed, besides the Queen. QUEEN: Godamercy for that, Will; there’s two angels for thee; I’faith, my lord, I am glad I know it. KING: God’s mother, Kate, wilt thou believe the fool? He lies, he lies. Ah, Sirrah William, I perceive an’t had been so you would have shamed me before the Emperor. Yet William, have at you once more. In yonder tower there’s a flower that hath my heart. WILL: Within this hour she piss’d full sour and let a fart. (L3r) He goes on in a similar fashion to dispose of the Emperor and the Queen. Bawdy, scatological and profoundly disrespectful, Will is none the less an essential part of the occasion, and the royal characters who challenge him accept his victories cheerfully: ‘Enough, good William, y’are too hard for all’ (L3v). Their appreciation is also designed to prompt the appreciation of the audience; they are Will’s onstage claque. As a story, the play dramatizes (not very accurately) an important stretch of English history. As a theatrical occasion, however, it puts on display a famous English fool, embodied in the company clown who plays him. Giving him this climactic position is like bringing the jig into the play proper. Will’s triumph is a way of giving the popular audience, cheerfully and ungrudgingly, exactly what it wants.

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THE ECLECTIC OCCASION A theatre that allowed the clown the kind of role we looked at in the last chapter was not a’theatre that worried much about tonal consistency. This was not just a matter of sending in the clowns from time to time; the whole occasion was eclectic. As we turn from acting and production values to the scripts themselves, this eclecticism is the first thing we need to confront. The prologue to Herod and Antipater (Red Bull, c. 1621), having asserted the dignity of the historical material, then appeals for the favour of the audience, To gain which though her [History’s] scenes seem grave and high, She here and there with a loose wing doth fly, Striving to make you merry. (19–21) The promise is fulfilled in a series of scenes with a comic mountebank. More disconcerting to modern expectations is the ending of A Woman Killed with Kindness (Rose, 1603). After the sombre conclusion to the play proper, with Anne Frankford’s death and her husband’s epitaph for her, the epilogue begins, ‘An honest crew, disposed to be merry,/Came to a tavern by and call’d for wine’, and goes on to a jocular comparison of play-judging and wine-tasting. Far from ensuring that the audience leaves the theatre clinging to the mood of the last scene, the epilogue is jarringly cheerful; and of course there was the jig to come. The title page of the two-part Edward IV (?Boar’s Head, c. 1599) is an advertisement for prospective book-buyers, not for audiences; but it is also a fair (if incomplete) account of what the play offers its spectators: [King Edward’s] merry pastime with the Tanner of Tamworth, as also his Jove to the fair Mistress Shore, her great promotion, fall and misery, and lastly the lamentable death of both her and her husband. Likewise the beseiging of London by the bastard Falconbridge, and the valiant defence of the same by the Lord Mayor and the Citizens.

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This scrambles the order in which these elements actually appear in the plays, but it hardly seems to matter: in the plays, as on the title page, all these stories lie side by side, with no attempt to draw them together into a single coherent package. Part Two begins with a political and military action, King Edward’s expedition into France. Then the Chorus declares, ‘Now do we draw the curtain of our scene,/To speak of Shore and his fair wife again’ (p. 119). That is all the transition we get. The image is that of the discovery-space, with the curtain drawn to reveal a new picture to the audience; the spirit is that of a performer announcing, ‘For my next number…’. Homer, acting as chorus to The Brazen Age (Red Bull, c. 1611), covers an equally arbitrary switch, from military action at Troy to the story of Venus and Adonis, with the words, ‘Loath are we, courteous auditors, to cloy/Your appetites with viands of one taste’ (IV. pp. 225– 6). The principle at work is not the needs of the story but the needs of the audience—in this case, its need for variety. The episodes themselves are selfcontained. Even when one of the characters rather than a chorus figure is in command of a change in the action, the effect can be arbitrary. In When You See Me You Know Me (Fortune, c. 1604) Henry VIII suddenly announces that he is going to journey through London at night to check on law enforcement. When the episode, which includes his tangling with the watch and ending up in prison, is over, his return to normal political business is equally arbitrary: ‘Your counter was one night King Henry’s court./Away, and leave us; Brandon, what further news?’ (E4v). The episode of the king disguised—this king especially—was popular chapbook material, 1 and it is more important to get it in than to relate it to the rest of the action. Even in less purely episodic plays, different value systems operate in different scenes. A Shoemaker a Gentleman (Red Bull, c. 1608) is set in Roman-occupied Britain. In the scenes concerning Christian martyrdom Rome is an evil power; in the scenes in which the hero Crispianus fights for Rome against the Goths, Rome is a proper object of his loyalty. There is no attempt to modulate between one system and the other. The method of narration could be varied in a similarly ad hoc way. The ‘inexplicable dumb shows’ Hamlet complains of as a feature of the popular drama he dislikes are sometimes presented as though they were just a practical way of summarizing the story, but their effect goes beyond that. The Presenter of The Four Prentices of London (Rose, c. 1594) introduces dumb shows as a way of narrating events ‘which were they writ at large,/Would ask a long and tedious circumstance’ (257–8). But if speed is the aim, we may wonder if the dumb show is really the way to achieve it: Enter with a drum on one side certain Spaniards; on the other side certain citizens of Bullen [Boulogne]; the Spaniards insult upon them and make them do them homage; to the citizens enter Godfrey as newly landed and half naked, confers with the citizens, and by his instigation they set upon the Spaniards, and beat them away; they come to honour him, and he


discloseth himself unto them, which done, they crown him, and accept him for their prince, and so exeunt. (273.1–9) This would take some time in the acting; less than a full dramatization, and to that extent the claim that the players are avoiding tediousness is justified; but the Presenter goes on to explain what the audience has just seen, and if speed were the only consideration, his narrative summary, just by itself, would give the audience the story information it needs, much more quickly than the dumb show. Dieter Mehl regards the dumb shows of this play as an expedient to present more action than a play of normal length could contain; 2 but it may be that the real purpose is signalled in the Presenter’s promise to ‘feast your eye, and starve your ear’ (256). As in The Brazen Age, the audience is assumed to have a variety of appetites, each one of which must be appealed to. The dumb show calls on a different type of attention. It may even make the audience work harder, since it would be natural for them not to relax and wait for the narrative summary (it is not always forthcoming) but to try to read the pictures themselves, puzzling out the story as a normal dramatization does not require them to do. What Hamlet found inexplicable, others more tuned to the idiom may have taken as a challenging game to play. The end is not just narrative speed but a varied mix of narrative methods. SHAPING THE ACTION Variety in itself, however, will not hold an audience. The material has to be shaped and controlled in a way that captures attention—particularly when the audience is as voluble and potentially restless as the audience of the Jacobean public playhouses. In the second scene of Fortune by Land and Sea (?Red Bull, c. 1608) the internal variety of the sequence is shaped into a pattern of sharp, quickly alternating contrasts. A fight breaks out in a tavern, and Frank Forrest is killed. This is a shock for the audience, but the drawers’ reaction is unconcerned comedy: ‘Had not we drawers enough in the house, but they must needs draw too?’ (I.ii.180). This is followed by straightforward pathos as Frank’s father and sister lament his death; and immediately after this a wedding procession enters, with the groom declaring, ‘So things are as they should be, we have attained/The height of solace and true joy’ (I.iii.278–9). These mood swings are not just erratic; they have a sharp, pulsing rhythm. The sequence that leads up to the attempted murder of Mistress Arthur in How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad (?Rose, c. 1602) has a similar rhythm. The occasion is dinner at the Arthurs’ house, and the opening note is comic: the bustling preparations of the servants, and the mechanical comedy of Old Arthur and Old Lusam (Old Arthur keeps contradicting himself, and Old Lusam automatically agrees with everything he says). Then there is a serious, painful moment as Arthur humiliates his wife by making her greet her rival Mary and


give Mary her place at the table. The pedant Aminadab then recites a comic grace, the servant-clown Pipkin goes through a comic Latin lesson, and one of the guests, Fuller, tells a long improper story in rhyme. The other guests greet every turn in the story with noisy appreciation but when he comes to the punch line they don’t get it. As the joke falls flat, Arthur enters with a poisoned cup (or so he thinks; the poison is really a sleeping potion) and makes his wife drink to their reconciliation. The guests disperse and shortly afterward Pipkin comes running on, noisily announcing his mistress’ death. The alternating moods create tension and irony; but the comedy is extended enough that it is clearly meant to be entertaining in its own right, not just prolonging the suspense but contributing to a strongly alternating pull on the audience’s feelings. No play of the period uses such contrasts more daringly than The Rape of Lucrece (Red Bull, c. 1606). The play as a whole is part serious drama, part cabaret, the latter element being controlled by Valerius (played, the final note to the Reader mysteriously tells us, by a ‘stranger’). Throughout the play Valerius bursts into song—it is practically all he does—and his songs are frequently incongruous with the surrounding action. Lucrece’s first appearance, on display as the sober Roman matron, is followed by Valerius singing a song of the taverns of Rome, which sound very like the taverns of London (p. 198). His equally jocular song about the way different nationalities dress (Spanish, French, Irish and so on) is followed immediately by the beginning of Sextus Tarquin’s assault on Lucrece’s chastity. The rape itself is juxtaposed with the household staff going about its business: LUCRECE: Jove guard my innocence! SEXTUS: Lucrece, th’art mine In spite of Jove and all the powers divine. He bears her out. Enter a serving man. SERVINGMAN: What’s a clock, trow? My lord bade me be early ready with my gelding, for he would ride betimes in the morning; now I had rather be up an hour before my time than a minute after, for my lord will be so infinitely angry if I oversleep myself a moment, that I had better be out of my life than in his displeasure. (p. 225) The servant chats amiably with the audience, totally unaware that he is on the sidelines of one of the great tragedies of literature (though in theatrical terms it is taking place on the sidelines of his performance). The Clown then enters, and he and the servingman go off to the stables to look to the horses, as Sextus and Lucrece re-enter ‘unready’, their state of undress an eloquent image of what has happened. He tells her, ‘Nay, weep not, sweet, what’s done is past recall’ and she flings herself away, crying, ‘Oh!’ in a stark expression of her pain. Almost at once, the scene returns to the Roman camp, where Valerius sings a jolly song beginning, ‘Pack clouds away, and welcome day,/With night we banish sorrow’ (pp. 226–7), following it with another song in praise of Lucrece’s beauty, combining lyricism and sexual innuendo.


Up to a point, we can recognize this dramaturgy as logical, even conventional: the tragedy is surrounded, and set off, by scenes of ordinary life going on unconcerned. The contrasts are sharp but not damaging. Even the song in praise of Lucrece has a certain poignant irony. What follows is more startling., The Clown brings a letter from Lucrece to her husband Collatine, intimating her approaching suicide, and the Clown, Horatius and Valerius join in singing what the text calls ‘their catch’: VALERIUS: Did he take fair Lucrece by the toe man? HORATIUS: Toe man? VALERIUS: Aye man. CLOWN: Ha ha ha ha ha man. HORATIUS: And further did he strive to go man? CLOWN: Go man? HORATIUS: Aye man. CLOWN: Ha ha ha ha man, fa derry derry down ha fa derry dino …. and so on through the heel, shin and knee, ending: VALERIUS: Did he take the lady by the thigh man? CLOWN: Thigh man? VALERIUS: Aye man. CLOWN: Ha ha ha ha man. HORATIUS: And now he came it somewhat nigh man. CLOWN: Nigh man? HORATIUS: Aye man. CLOWN: Ha ha ha ha man, hey fa derry, etc. VALERIUS: But did he do the tother thing man? CLOWN: Thing man? VALERIUS: Aye man. CLOWN: Ha ha ha ha man. HORATIUS: And at the same had he a fling man? CLOWN: Fling man? HORATIUS: Aye man. CLOWN: Hay ha ha man, hey fa derry, etc. Exeunt. A Table and a chair covered with black. Lucrece and her maid. (pp. 232–4) The way the catch trivializes the rape seems purely destructive. Yet in the scene that follows Lucrece’s grief is as serious as ever, and leads directly to her suicide. The dissonance, which in a modern play would have a critical effect, reducing the whole action to blank absurdity, here seems rather an experiment in telling the same story in radically contrasting ways, playing them off against each other, not so much detaching the audience as pulling at them from opposite directions. The fascination with opposites set against each other, so basic to popular culture, 3 appears in the content of popular drama as well as its manner. The opposition declared in the title of How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a


Bad is enacted on stage at the end of the play. Arthur, who has tried both, commands, My first wife stand you here, my second there, And in the midst myself. He that will choose A good wife from a bad, come learn of me That have tried both, in wealth and misery. He goes on to enumerate the virtues and vices of the two women, ending with a direct appeal to the audience: On this hand virtue, and on this hand sin; This who would strive to lose, or this to win? Here lives perpetual joy, here burning woe; Now husbands, choose on which hand you will go. (L2r) Less rigorously patterned, but just as clear, is the contrast of good counsellor and evil flatterer in The Two Noble Ladies (Red Bull, c. 1621). As the Soldan begins an incestuous courtship of his daughter Miranda, the sycophant Colactus eggs him on, while the honest soldier Lysander protests: COLACTUS: See, he bears the gods upon his brows. All things are lawful that a prince allows. LYSANDER: False flattery makes a foul gloss on the text. And through such purchase favour from ill men, The good gods store them vengeance. COLACTUS: Lysander, this is worse than sacrilege. LYSANDER: Better, Colactus, than thy flattery. (I.iii.187–93) In Edward IV, Part Two, as the penitent and destitute Jane Shore ‘sits weeping and praying, enters at one door young M. Aire, and M. Rufford at another’ (p. 167). Aire expresses sympathy and determines to relieve her, Rufford gloats over her fall. In scenes like this the dramaturgy seems to have been generated by the existence of two doors at opposite sides of the tiring-house facade (with or without a third door in the middle), encouraging symmetrical entrances and opposed behaviour. Even when characters are not actually opposed to each other, we often find a matched pair working together in lock-step. This device is pervasive in The Trial of Chivalry (?Boar’s Head, c. 1600). It begins in the first scene, where the powers of France and Navarre enter at different doors, and the rulers defy each other and prepare for war. Their two sons, backed by their two daughters, plead for peace: LEWIS: Show me some reason, son, for this demand.


NAVARRE: Show me some reason, children, for this prayer. FERDINAND: I love the daughter of thine enemy. Fair Katherina hath inthrall’d my heart. PHILIP: I love the daughter of thine enemy, Fair Bellamira hath inthralld my heart. (A3r) Drama seems to be aspiring to the condition of ballad, and it goes on from there. In The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green (Rose, 1600) Gloucester and Winchester similarly operate in parallel, each entering disguised as his own servant, each bearing a letter from himself, each seeing through the other’s disguise almost at once. In Edward IV, Part Two, the following stage direction introduces an equally symmetrical action: ‘Enter at one door Burgundy, chafing, with him Sellinger disguised like a soldier; at another, the Constable of France, with him Howard, in the like disguise’ (p. 110). The two spies work in parallel for the rest of the scene. In The Fair Maid of Bristow (Globe, c. 1604) the King declares that Vallenger must die unless someone appears who is willing to die for him. Godfrey comments that ‘to find one that will die for a friend,/This age we live in doth not now afford’. This sets up the response: Enter at one door Annabell disguised like a man, and at another Challener. ANNABELL: Stay: here is one will die for Vallenger. CHALLENER: Nay, here is one will die for Vallenger. (E4r–v) The repetition confirms that we are dealing with an action as stripped-down and idealized as that of a ballad or a chapbook story. Modern critics coming across this sort of patterning sometimes take it as a sign of the playwright’s immaturity; 4 it is rather a sign that the playwright is working within the conventions of popular culture. Symmetry was one value of that culture; clarity was another. The stage pictures clarify the issues in spatial terms; but drama is also an art that moves through time, and popular plays are full of speeches of anticipation telling the audience where the story is going, telling them what to look for, and giving them a rapport with the characters on stage who are helping them out. Banished on a false accusation of treason, Momford, the hero of The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, announces his programme: I am exil’d, yet I will England see, And live in England ’spite of infamy. In some disguise I’ll live, perhaps I’ll turn A beggar, for a beggar’s life is best. (I.i.B4r)


He goes on anticipating in this manner through the rest of the play, even when things look blackest: ‘We have been clouded long, but maugre hate/ Truth will advance desert to honour’s state’ (IV.ii.H2r). This is overtly spoken to Momford’s daughter Bess, but it is also directed at the audience, using the easy actor-audience relationship we looked at in the last chapter. Villains, like Eleazar in Lust’s Dominion (Rose or Fortune, ?1600), are equally helpful in telling us where they (and we) are going: Cardinal you die, if the king bid me live; Philip you die for railing at me; proud lords you die That with Mendoza cried, banish the Moor. And you my loving liege, you’re best sit fast; If all these live not, you must die at last. (I.ii.240–4) Anticipating in this way, without giving away the details, not only tightens the tension but also gives Eleazar a double role as character and narrator. The same storytelling function is served by the laments of characters who have suffered. Bess, in The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, utters such a lament just at the point where it is useful for the audience to have a summary of the story so far: Oh hapless, hapless, miserable wretch! To lose my wealth and all my father’s lands Did never move me; but to see my uncle Cheat me of all my jewels, and in spite Even to my face marry my troth-plight husband To his own daughter, and to see young Playnsey Embrace another in my promis’d bed, And I thrust out upon my wedding day; Oh this it is that drives me full of woe Into this sad and solitary green! (II.iii.D4v) The character is not just describing her emotions but helping the audience bring the story into focus by listing all the wrongs that by the end of the play have to be put right. At a pivotal moment in Edward IV, Part Two Shore not only summarizes the action in which he and his wife Jane have been involved but also sees its inner design—‘First have I seen desert of wantonness/And breach of wedlock’—and anticipates his own ensuing role: ‘And in this furnace of adversity/The world shall see a husband’s loyalty’ (p. 162). Shore is saying, in effect, ‘Look at this’, freezing the action, both past and future, and holding it steady for the audience’s contemplation. This is one of the strongest tendencies in popular dramaturgy: to


hold a moment, an actibn, a character, a stage picture, and say to the audience, ‘Look at this’. The story of the Shores ends with their dying together on stage, held for display by Shore’s words, ‘Ah, Jane! He that the depth of woe will see,/ Let him but now behold our misery!’ (p. 183). The action is reduced to its simplest essence, ‘the depth of woe’, and becomes a picture to be looked at. The action of The Fair Maid of Bristow is reduced in the end to an equally simple moral essence, as the treacherous whore Florence is moved by the unselfishness of the principal characters to comment, ‘Here is a glass for such as lives by lust,/See what ’tis to be honest, what ’tis to be just’ (F1v). Even when the invitation to ‘see’ is not explicit, the moral pointing makes it implicit—as in Herod and Antipater, where Salumin, having hired two workmen to commit a murder, comments as they go off, ‘Thus catch we hearts with gold; thus spiders can/ Poison poor flies, and kill the innocent man’ (III.i.46–7). Thus’ has the same force as ‘see’. This is a character commenting on his own action; comments from other characters on the sidelines can have the same effect of highlighting and displaying. In The Trial of Chivalry, Ferdinand insists on marrying Bellamira, though she has been disfigured by a poison that covers her face with leprous spots: NAVARRE: Oh admirable love! LEWIS: Oh, my dear son, Thou makest me famous by thy loyalty. RODORICK: I never heard the like. PEMBROKE: Pen never writ A worthier story to posterity. (D3v–4r) The audience, we might think, could admire Ferdinand’s gesture without all this help; but the onstage admiration is in its own way part of the drama, virtually an action in itself. Ferdinand’s act is not theatrically complete until it has been admired. Spectators can also express indignation, disbelief, or pity—‘O ruthful spectacle!’ ‘What heart not pities this?’ (The Miseries of Enforced Marriage [Globe, 1607], D1v, I3v)—not just underlining what the audience already feels but completing the experience by commenting on it. In one striking scene in A Larum for London (?Globe, c. 1600) the commentary that puts the action on display seems not only to be an action in itself but also to introduce a different dramatic mode. Two ‘rascal soldiers’ have captured the wife of the Governor of Antwerp, and begin to strip her in preparation for rape. The lame soldier Stump, the hero of the play, comes across them and cries, ‘How now, two soldiers ransacking a woman?’ Before coming to her rescue, he delivers a thirteen-line speech in which he comments on the significance of what he sees, concluding:


’Sblood, I have seen her, where I have passed by her In the streets, to stop her nose with her sweet gloves, For fear my smell should have infected her; And now I live to see her lugg’d, and torn By lousy tatter’d rogues; Oh Antwerp, Antwerp, Now Madam Marchpane, minx, your blows And you are one. (C4v–D1r) He seems to be in a different dramatic world from the woman and her attackers. While he is there, the rape is suspended for as long as he needs to comment on it; once he is finished, he re-enters the action proper and rescues the woman. His speech has been in its own way an action: action in the sense of something that needs to be done before the story is complete. It is not enough to act out the atrocity; it must be put on display, and a moral must be drawn. GENERALIZING THE EXPERIENCE In popular storytelling, as I argued earlier, an action is not complete until it has been generalized. The essential actions of these plays are not just the stories of particular characters; they embody general principles, operative outside the mimetic world of the stories themselves. As the title of A Larum for London declares, its catalogue of Spanish atrocities in Antwerp is not just a tale of what happened in Antwerp; Antwerp is also an image of London. (There is precedent for this in an earlier Elizabethan play, ostensibly the story of God’s anger with Nineveh: A Looking-Glass for London and England.) This generalizing of the story’s significance sometimes entails a blurring of locations and of time periods, related to what Margaret Spufford calls the ‘curious, muddled timelessness’ of the chapbooks. 5 The Fair Maid of Bristow unfolds in an England that for all we know is contemporary—until King Richard returns from the Holy Land. This does not so much impose a sense of historical period as bring the historical figure into a timeless world where periods are meaningless. The Honest Lawyer (Red Bull, c. 1614) apparently shows an ordinary contemporary setting; and then an abbot appears. In these cases a figure from the past catches us by surprise; more typically, a literal past is established, only to be shot through with contemporary references, like Thersites’ allusion in The Iron Age, Part One (Red Bull, c. 1612) to Sneak’s Noise (p. 312; this is the group that plays at the Boar’s Head tavern in 2 Henry IV); or the persistent anachronisms in Valerius’ songs in The Rape of Lucrece. This device is not always put to explicit moral use, but we can see its potential in the curious play of Nobody and Somebody (playhouse unknown, c. 1603), ostensibly set in a remote Geoffrey of Monmouth past, but full of satire that is clearly meant to have a contemporary application. The hero, Nobody, is an exemplary character:


come poor soldiers, Sick, maimed, and shot, from any foreign wars; Nobody takes them in, provides them harbour, Maintains their ruined fortunes at his charge. (ii.318–21) Coming through Paul’s, There Nobody kneeled down to say his prayers, And was devout, I wis. (viii.1185–7) With characteristic symmetry, Nobody is opposed to Somebody, who is responsible for the ills of England, such as high rents, high prices and monopolies. Somebody gets away with it by saying it’s Nobody’s fault; but we know it’s Somebody’s. The joke is not so innocent or unsophisticated as it looks, and it reaches clearly from the alleged historical setting of the play to the abuses of contemporary England. More directly useful than anachronism, for the purpose of moral commentary, is the move to abstraction. Nobody and Somebody harks back to the late social morality plays; more common is the tendency to deal in characters who have proper names but are really stereotypes. Many of the villains are driven not by particular psychological or social motives but simply by villainy. In The Duchess of Suffolk (Fortune, c. 1623) Gardiner and Bonner, the recurring villains of the ‘Elect Nation’ plays, go over the latest list of Protestant martyrs, and Bonner complains, ‘Tut, this is nothing, every town should blaze’ (G3r). He wants burning for the sake of burning; his only concern is that there should be as much as possible. Bagot, in Thomas Lord Cromwell (Globe, c. 1602), having reduced a family to beggary, gloats: It glads my heart to think upon the slave; I hope to have his body rot in prison, And after hear his wife to hang herself, And all his children die for want of food. (II.ii.4–7) He is not a motivated character but a principle of villainy in action. In both cases the character’s real function is to rouse the audience’s indignation, involving them emotionally in the story. Figures of virtue are equally arbitrary. In The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, Butler (this is both his name and his office) explains why he has undertaken some dubious actions to help the family he serves:


In troth I know not if it be good or ill, That with this endless toil I labour thus: ’Tis but the old time’s ancient conscience That would do no man hurt, that makes me do’t. (K1r) In other words, he is the type-figure of the loyal servant. The Marquess in Patient Grissil (Rose, 1600) has such a servant in Frion; when he sends him to Grissil to take her children away, he plans to spy on them in disguise to see if ‘I have found two wonders that are seldom rife,/A trusty servant and a patient wife’ (IV.i.239–40). Patient Grissil is one of a number of plays (How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad is another) in which the point of the action is to test the stereotypes, not to watch human reality emerge from them, but simply to confirm the stereotype. In How a Man May Choose, Fuller and Anselm put pressure on Mistress Arthur to betray her husband by cataloguing all the ways he has abused her, persistently demanding, ‘And can you love him yet?’ The repetition of the question finally goads her into replying: And yet, and yet, and still, and even whilst I breathe this air; Nay, after death my unsubstantial soul Like a good angel shall attend on him, And keep him from all harm. (I1v) Fuller’s response, ‘Art sure she is a woman? If she be,/She is create of Nature’s purity’ (I2r), locks the stereotype in place. The next scene begins with Arthur brawling with his new wife Mary, who insists, ‘Not have my will, yes, I will have my will’ (I2r). She is the opposite stereotype. The particular is always shading into the general Many different devices are used to achieve this effect, but one common factor is that the transition is nearly always easy. When the particular and the general lie so close together, it is no strain to move from one to another. When Florence, the whore of The Fair Maid of Bristow, turns to murder, Blunt makes an example of her by commenting to the audience: ‘Here is a true pattern of a common whore’ (C2v). Her behaviour is so stereotyped throughout that to turn her into a pattern of all whores is an easy step. With equal ease, the villains of The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green provoke laments not just about their own wickedness but about the wickedness of the world: MOMFORD: Oh miserable age! BESS: Oh wretched youth! MOMFORD: Oh times corrupt by men for want of truth! (III.iii.G1r)


This was a culture in which proverbs came naturally. In The London Prodigal (Globe, c. 1604) existing proverbs are paraded rather self-consciously: ‘But ’tis an old proverb, and you know it well,/That women dying maids lead apes in hell’ (I.ii.28–9). It is more typical for characters to coin their own proverbs as it were, to speak in aphorisms that sound as though we’ve heard them before even if we haven’t. Many of these are warnings. Spendall, the fallen prodigal of Greene’s Tu Quoque (Red Bull, c. 1611), urges the audience to learn from his example: ‘Let all avoid false strumpets, dice and drink;/For he that leaps in mud shall quickly sink’ (xv.2159–60). In Edward IV, Part Two, Shore tells the audience to take warning from his wife’s ruin: ‘See what dishonour breach of wedlock brings,/Which is not safe, even in the arms of kings’ (p. 126). The generalization can be satiric: in The Honest Lawyer three thieves tie up the corrupt lawyer Griffin, and one of them comments, ‘How happy were this commonwealth! how sound!/If every corrupt lawyer’s fingers were thus bound’ (II.i.D1r). The stage picture of the bound lawyer becomes an emblem with a motto. The note of satisfaction in the example from The Honest Lawyer is, in a way, the note that is struck throughout. Even when the generalization is a warning or a lament, it moves from the character’s individual grief to a general view of life that puts everything in perspective. The effect, like the effect of proverbs, is ultimately reassuring, evoking a world of secure and predictable truth. We can see this in A Yorkshire Tragedy (Globe, c. 1606), a bleak one-act play whose central character, known only as the Husband, goes on a destructive rampage, wasting his estate, abusing his wife and family, and finally killing his children. The Wife comments on what his prodigality will lead to: ‘And ’tis set down by Heaven’s just decree/That riot’s child must needs be beggary’ (ii.4–5). A Gentleman warns him, ‘that man spends with shame/That with his riches doth consume his name’ (ii.143–4). These aphorisms are, in a way, a relief; they allow us to look beyond the madness of the Husband to the sanity and common sense of the community. The play’s last couplet has a different effect. The Husband’s brother is in prison for his debts; he himself has been arrested for murder. The Master of the brother’s college concludes: ‘Two brothers—one in bond lies overthrown,/This on a deadlier execution’ (x.78–9). The play snaps shut like a trap. There is no generalization, no appeal to a larger reality, and therefore no relief. We are left with the stark facts of the story itself, for which there is no consolation. The ending is as disquieting as it is unusual. Normally the generalizations evoke for the audience what it would perceive as the shared values of the community. As many of the examples have already indicated, female chastity was such a value. The chaste maid, the chaste wife and the treacherous whore are among the most reliable stereotypes and the most frequent subjects of aphorisms. This value is central to the structure of the patriarchal family which, as Kathleen McLuskie has argued, ‘provided a locus in which women could not only lead their lives but also sustain the definitions which made those lives meaningful’. In the theatre, those definitions were


reflected in the stereotypes. Whether they matched reality was another matter. As McLuskie goes on to point out, Evidence that the patriarchal family was not, in the end, effective in these functions was dealt with by the structures of popular culture which either mocked or warned against challenges to this central institution and provided the compensatory pleasures of communal laughter or pathos. 6 We hear the laughter in The Late Lancashire Witches (Globe, 1634), where the Selby household is turned upside-down: The good man In all obedience kneels unto his son, He with an austere brow commands his father. The wife presumes not in the daughter’s sight Without a prepared courtesy…. All in such rare disorder, that in some As it breeds pity, and in others wonder, So in the most part laughter. (I.i.p. 179) The explanation is witchcraft, as though only supernatural power could make a family so unnatural. By the same token, when the Husband of A Yorkshire Tragedy abuses his power by destroying his family, there is a strong suggestion that he is possessed by a devil. Patriotism is an equally fundamental value. In The Honest Lawyer the abbot, returning from a pilgrimage abroad, finds it has given him a greater appreciation of his own country: ‘Oh happy Englishmen, if your sore eyes/Did not look squint on your felicities!’ (V.i.I1v). England, he goes on, is the envy of other countries; only the English fail to appreciate it. This charge could not be levelled at the authors of popular plays. The Virgin Martyr (Red Bull, c. 1620) introduces a British slave who claims he will do anything for liberty; but when ordered to violate the heroine Dorothea, he refuses. His virtue and his nationality are bound together. The hero of Thomas Lord Cromwell, who early in the play has an itch for adventure, draws this conclusion from his travels: My lord, no court with England may compare, Neither for state nor civil government. Lust dwells in France, in Italy and Spain, From the poor peasant to the Prince’s train; In Germany and Holland riot serves, And he that most can drink, most he deserves. England I praise not for I here was born,


But that she laugheth the others unto scorn. (III.iii.77–85) The patriotism that defines itself by hostility toward the foreigner is most frequently directed against the national enemy of the late Elizabethan period, Spain. A Larum for London chronicles Spanish atrocities in Antwerp. Individual Spanish officers are allowed some magnanimity, but the common soldiers are brutes: we see them, for example, butchering a blind man, his wife and their two small children, despite their pathetic pleas for mercy (E2r–3r). The Weakest Goeth to the Wall (?Curtain, c. 1598) also dramatizes Spanish cruelty: the Spanish commander orders, ‘Stoop and kiss our feet;/Bring forth your daughters, and your fairest wives’ (v.48–9). This leads to a wish-fulfilment ending when two lost princes return from obscurity and beat the Spaniards. The title character of Sir Thomas Wyatt (?Rose, 1602) is sympathetic to Queen Mary until she announces her decision to marry Philip of Spain. His principled objection is echoed at the popular level: BRET: …There came but one Dundego into England, and he made all Paul’s stink again; what shall a whole army of Dundegoes do, my sweet countrymen? CLOWN: Marry, they will make us all smell abominably, he comes not here, that’s flat. BRET: A Spaniard is call’d so, because he is a Spaniard; his yard is but a span. CLOWN: That’s the reason our Englishwomen love them not. (IV.ii.56–63) Anti-Spanish feeling is bound up with anti-Catholic feeling, as in the‘Elect Nation’ plays. This too ranges from the serious to the comic. Theparish priest in The Weakest Goeth to the Wall who declares— I never could abide this Romish tongue; ’Tis harsh, ’tis harsh, and we, I tell thee true, Do eat and drink in our plain mother phrase. (viii.39–41) —touches on one of the key issues of the Reformation. The sight-gag of the pregnant nun in The Devil’s Law-Case (Red Bull, c. 1619) taps a much older vein of comedy. Tied in with the Spanish threat is the need for military preparedness. The key lesson of A Larum for London is that ‘these villainous burghers have by their own security been the destruction of the city’ (F1v). Stump the lame soldier, having rescued a fat burgher from the Spaniards, refers to him with contempt: ‘It is the tallow-cake, the rammish fat,/That would not give a penny to a soldier’ (F3v). The epistle to the reader prefixed to The Valiant Welshman (?Boar’s Head,


c. 1613) declares that the purpose of military plays like this one is, by showing ‘conquests and victories’, to encourage the young ‘to follow the steps of their ancestors’ (A3r). The epistle to the 1615 first edition of The Four Prentices of London justifies printing an old play at a time when ‘to the glory of our nation, the security of the kingdom, and the honour of the City, they have begun again the commendable practice of long forgotten arms’ (p. 2). (After a break of several years, military drills had resumed in the Artillery Yard.) 7 In The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, when Momford draws to defend ‘the honour of a soldier’s name’, Old Stroud declares, ‘By th’mass, I like thee, th’art a tough old lad’ (D1v). The blunt, plain-spoken soldier is a recurring and popular character type. Dick Bowyer, in The Trial of Chiv alry, is another lame soldier with a salty tongue. Finding Peter de Lions courting a girl he wants himself, he explodes: ‘heart, his tongue crawls as fast as the cheese doth in Germany. I’ll pierce you for this, you lobster’ (C2v). Audiences evidently enjoyed this sort of thing: though he is a relatively minor character, Dick Bowyer is named on the title page of the 1605 edition. While the fat burghers of Antwerp draw contempt and ridicule, the citizens of London, who probably made up a significant part of the audience, come out rather well. In Edward IV they defend London from rebels with no help from the absent King; in Satiromastix (Globe, 1601) one of the charges levelled against ‘Horace’ (Ben Jonson) is ‘thou criest ptrooh at worshipful citizens, and call’st them flat-caps, cuckolds, and bankrupts, and modest and virtuous wives punks and cockatrices’ (IV.iii. 194–6). In the dedicatory epistle to The Hector of Gemany (c. 1615), acted by citizen amateurs at the Red Bull and the Curtain, the author Wentworth Smith refers to anther play of his (now lost), ‘The Freeman’s Honour, acted by the now-servants of the King’s Majesty, to dignify the worthy company of the Merchant Tailors’ (A2r). We can guess what it was like by the celebration of shoemakers in The Shoemakers’ Holiday (Rose, 1599) and A Shoemaker a Gentleman. In the latter play the praise of shoemakers—‘you are a trade/Of fellowship’s best mixture, nobly made’ (I1v)—is connected with praise of the working life as a whole: ‘The world treads not upright, methinks/It had need of a good workman to mend it’ (C2r). The same note is struck in one of the songs in Patient Grissil: ‘Work apace, apace, apace, apace:/Honest labour bears a lovely face’ (I.ii.101–2). Honest labour and that other key virtue, female chastity, are linked in The Weakest Goeth to the Wall, where Oriana and her daughter save their chastity by taking to work: ‘We have not fall’n, though want did wrestle hard;/Our fingers’ ends, our honours have sustained’ (xi.14–15). The blunt, honest soldier has his equivalents in working life, notably Hobson the Tanner of Tamworth, who enlivens the first part of Edward IV with his practical good sense. When the disguised Edward asks him if the people love their king, he replies, ‘Faith, as poor folks love holidays, glad to have them now and then; but to have them come too often will undo them. So, to see the King now and then ‘tis comfort; but every day would beggar us’ (p. 45). The King comments:


I see plain men, by observation Of things that alter in the change of times Do gather knowledge. (p. 47) This vision of the king taking good advice from a common man is as much a fantasy as the extravagant military and romantic adventures of the apprentices in The Four Prentices of London and A Shoemaker a Gentle man; but it is a fantasy with deep roots in the popular imagination. So is the image of the disadvantaged asserting themselves. The title character of The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green is a noble in disguise, but when he resists his lordly oppressors (whose notion of how to treat the poor is, ‘Knock out his brains with his crutches’ [H2r]) the stage image is of the weak resisting the powerful. For the most part, however, the conservatism of popular drama finds the answer to poverty not in resistance but in charity. Over and over, the moral test on characters is whether or not zthey are kind to the poor. In Edward IV, Part One Mistress Blage, who has betrayed Jane Shore, enters ‘very poorly, a-begging with her basket and clap-dish’ (p. 169). Aire, who has given Jane his purse (Jane has also fallen to poverty) refuses to give anything to Blage, saying she deserves her fate; but Jane shares the fruits of her begging with her old enemy. In a later scene, officers stand guard over Jane to make sure no one relieves her, but two comic figures come to her aid, at risk to themselves: Enter Jockey and Jeffrey, with a bottle of ale, cheese, and halfpenny loaves to play at bowls. Mistress Shore enters and sits where she was wont…. They play still towards her, Jockey often breaks bread and cheese, and gives her, till Jeffrey being called away, he then gives her all, and is apprehended. (p. 173) Equally exemplary is Friskaball in Thomas Lord Cromwell: he forgives the debt owning to him by the citizen Banister, who has fallen into poverty through no fault of his own: Here, take my hand; if e’er God make you able, And place you in your former state again, Pay me; but if still your fortune frown, Upon my faith, I’ll never ask you crown. I never yet did wrong to men in thrall, For God doth know what to myself may fall. (I.iii.82–7)


As the last line anticipates, Friskaball appears later in the play ‘very poor’ (IV.ii.SD) and Banister and his wife, restored to their fortune, relieve him in turn by repaying the original debt. The episode is in many ways characteristic of popular drama; it shows an exemplary test-case, in which a general principle of life is acted out and commented on, and the action of type-characters is held up for the audience’s admiration. It also implies an acceptance of a social order that, whatever temporary problems it may create, can be kept going by acts of kindness. THE FAILURE OF THE WHITE DEVIL The ultimate complacency of plays like Thomas Lord Cromwell is one reason why their standing in modern criticism is not very high, and the more complex, ironic work of writers associated with the indoor playhouses is more often studied, more often performed. But while the popular tradition may have been unsophisticated it was not random or casual; it had its own imperatives. The White Devil, a play now generally admired, failed at its first per formance at the Red Bull, 8 and a look at the reasons for this failure may prove a useful way of testing the distinctiveness of popular theatre. In the light of the material surveyed in the last three chapters, what went wrong? In the first edition (1612) the author, John Webster, comments on the failure. He specifically absolves the actors, not only singling out Richard Perkins (who likely played Flamineo) for special praise but saying of the acting as a whole,‘’twas generally well, and I dare affirm, with the joint testimony of some of their own quality, (for the true imitation of life, without striving to make nature a monster) the best that ever became them’. Actors evidently found time to watch and criticize each other’s work, and it was the judgement of people in the profession that this play showed Queen Anne’s Men at their best. Nor could the play be called inherently unworkable, since it evidently reentered the repertoire; according to the 1631 title page, it was acted by Queen Henrietta’s Men at the Phoenix-Cockpit. Webster blames its initial failure on the season, the playhouse and the audience: ‘it was acted, in so dull a time of winter, presented in so open and black a theatre, that it wanted (that which is the only grace and setting out of a tragedy) a full and understanding auditory’. He adds bitterly that ‘should a man present to such an auditory, the most sententious tragedy that ever was written, observing all the critical laws… the breath that comes from the uncapable multitude is able to poison it’. 9 Webster is our only witness in this matter, and can hardly be called unprejudiced; a look at the play itself may help us understand why the audience rejected it. First, however, we should consider the question of why Webster offered the play to the Red Bull company, and why they accepted it. Complex, sophisticated and satiric, it seems an incongruous fit with the rest of the repertoire. Yet there are aspects of it that might at first glance have made it seem suitable, or at least worth risking. Its combination of spectacle and lurid violence would align it with


plays like Lust’s Dominion and The Devil’s Charter; the popular tradition was not all chaste wives and jolly shoemakers. The audience was treated to a trial, a papal election and a display of knights-ambassadors in the robes of their various orders (IV.iii.51–4). Even in small details the visual language is expressive: Bracciano sitting on the floor at Vittoria’s trial, with a rich cloak under him; Cornelia displaying a crucifix that Flamineo broke as a child, and Flamineo entering moments later to kill his brother. The discovery-space is used for a striking tableau of Cornelia winding Marcello’s corpse, a sight by which even the cynical Flamineo is moved against his will: I have a strange thing in me, to th’which I cannot give a name, without it be Compassion,— (V.iv.113–15) The visual language includes that favourite device the dumb show, used here to dramatize the murders of Isabella and Camillo. The murder of Isabella, who is poisoned by kissing a picture of her husband Bracciano, may also satirize the superstitious rituals of Rome. The poisoners ‘burn perfumes afore the picture’, suggesting incense; Isabella enters ‘with lights after her…she kneels down as to prayers, then draws the curtain of the picture, does three reverences to it, and kisses it thrice, she faints and will not suffer them to come near it, dies’ (II.ii.23. 3, 6–10). She treats the picture as an idolatrous worshipper might treat the statue of a saint, and she suffers for it. This is linked with low-level anti-Spanish joking; one of the poisoners ‘was once minded, for his master-piece, because Ireland breeds no poison, to have prepared a deadly vapour in a Spaniard’s fart that should have poison’d all Dublin’ (II.i.301–4). Late in the play there is a display of stage fighting, which seems to go on for some time: ‘Charges and shouts. They fight at barriers, first single pairs, then three to three’ (V.iii.0.1–2). The moment when Lodovico commands a triple killing with the words, ‘Strike, strike/With a joint motion’ (V.vi.231–2) finds its parallel in The Iron Age, Part Two when Pyrrhus commands the slaughter of Priam and his family—‘at once strike all’—and the stage direction reads ‘They are all slain at once’ (p. 393). There is also plenty of commentary, much of it aphoristic and generalizing. Francisco puts the boy Giovanni on display as an ideal young prince: ‘See a good habit makes a child a man,/Whereas a bad one makes a man a beast’ (II.i.137–8). Bracciano complains that Vittoria has destroyed him, and goes from this to a comment on all women: ‘Woman to man/ Is either a god or a wolf’ (IV.ii.91–2). Marcello generalizes his own death: This it is to rise By all dishonest means. Let all men know That tree shall long time keep a steady foot


Whose branches spread no wider than the root. (V.ii.21–4) Yet the action that has led to Marcello’s death is more devious than his last speech suggests; he is not just being punished in a straighforward way for ambition. Bracciano’s attack on Vittoria is only one moment in a volatile and rapidly shifting relationship. In the scene that leads to Francisco’s compliment, Giovanni has shown playful wit, but nothing like the sustained display of princely virtue we see in, for example, the young Edward of When You See Me You Know Me. Each passage sounds clear out of context; but in context, each is problematic. The story itself keeps cheating expectation. Francisco is deeply involved in the plot against Bracciano towards the end of the play; he has instigated it, and theatrically he seems to control it. Yet just before it comes to fruition Lodovico sends him away. It is one thing to construct a play, like the two-part Edward IV, out of loosely arranged episodes; it is something else to anticipate a story development and not carry it through. The popular plays, as we have seen, regularly provided handy summaries to keep the audience abreast of the action; The White Devil keeps catching its audience off guard. Values that are clear in popular plays become problematic here. The fighting at the barriers does not give Bracciano a chance to show off his heroic prowess; he dies grotesquely and unheroically, poisoned by his own helmet. The value of charity, so essential in popular drama, appears here in twisted, ironic forms. Bracciano defends his illicit relationship with Vittoria as motivated by my charity, my charity, which would flow From every generous and noble spirit, To orphans and to widows. (III.ii.161–3) The reason she is a widow is that Bracciano, at her instigation, has had her husband murdered. In the trial scene, Monticelso tries to stereotype Vittoria as a whore: VITTORIA: Ha? Whore—what’s that? MONTICELSO: Shall I expound whore to you? Sure I shall; I’ll give you their perfect character. (III.ii.77–9) Her response to his attempt to impose the stereotype on her goes from refusal —‘this character scapes me’ (III.ii.101)—to defiance: For your names Of whore and murd’ress they proceed from you,


As if a man should spit against the wind, The filth returns in’s face. (III.ii. 148–51) From the point of view of dramatic stereotyping, the trial scene is profoundly confusing. Vittoria defends herself with such wit and panache that she can be said to win the scene and break Monticelso’s attempt to typecast her. Yet she is not a chaste woman defending herself from slander; she is an unchaste woman defending herself with clever rhetorical tricks, and getting away with it. The commentary from the sidelines does not guide the audience’s response in one clear direction, but confirms the scene’s doubleness. The French Ambassador says, ‘She hath lived ill’, and the objective facts of the play confirm this; but the English ambassador - the audience’s national representative?—replies, ‘True, but the cardinal’s too bitter’ (III.ii. 106–7). Monticelso and Francisco, agents and spokesmen of conventional morality in the early scenes, become increasingly disturbing in those roles as the play goes on. Monticelso, though not openly corrupt, has a ‘black book’ with the names of all the criminals in Rome, and we wonder why. Francisco plots to avenge his sister’s murder with all the devious cunning of a stage Machiavel. Yet neither character satisfies the audience by becoming a clear villain; they remain equivocal. Stereotyping is one guide the popular audience can usually count on; explicit commentary from the stage is another. Much of the commentary in The White Devil, as I have noted, is problematic. Some of it, at points where the audience most needs help, is stubbornly unhelpful. Flamineo seemingly has a close relationship with the audience, keeping in touchthrough a constant flow of asides and soliloquies. During the trial of hissister he puts on an antic disposition, he tells us, ‘To gull suspicion’ andto ‘keep off idle questions’ (III.i.31, III.ii.306). But these explanations do not really explain: his behaviour, if anything, seems designed to call attention to himself, and to create suspicion. A later, fuller aside is equallyunhelpful: It may appear to some ridiculous Thus to talk knave and madman; and sometimes Come in with a dried sentence, stuff’d with sage. But this allows my varying of shapes,— Knaves do grow great by being great men’s apes. (IV.ii.243–7) Probably they do; but the aphorism does not really connect with Flamineo’s own behaviour, which does not particularly imitate the behaviour of the great, and seems designed as a tactic more for survival than for advancement. It does not tell us why this particular character, in this particular scene, behaves as he does.


The generalizing direct address to the audience, normally used to clarify action or character, here becomes a way of stonewalling. Sometimes the commentary pulls in two directions. In I.ii, when Flamineo and Cornelia eavesdrop on the meeting of Bracciano and Vittoria, they both comment aside on what they are seeing; but her moral outrage and his cynicism pull against each other, leaving the audience with no clear guide. (This is not like the alternating cynicism and pathos of The Rape of Lucrece; there the contrary impulses are separated, and we take each as it comes; here they struggle together in a single scene.) Frequently the aphorisms themselves pull in two directions. While a play like How a Man May Choose a Good Wife From a Bad offers pragmatic and clearly directed advice about marriage, we learn from The White Devil that marriage is ‘just like a summer bird-cage in a garden,—the birds that are without, despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out’ (I.ii.43–6). This leaves us not so much instructed as stymied. The aphorisms usually have a difficult relation to the scenes in which they appear. It may be significant that the first generalizing comment comes right at the beginning, before there is an action to comment on: Fortune’s a right whore. If she give aught, she deals it in small parcels That she may take away all at one swoop. This ’tis to have great enemies, God quite them: Your wolf no longer seems to be a wolf Than when she’s hungry. (I.i.4–9) We know from the play’s first word that the speaker, Lodovico, has been banished. But we know nothing of the circumstances, and we cannot judge whether his commentary is fair or not. Nor can we pass judgement on the internal confusion of the speech, which shifts from blaming Fortune to blaming particular (unnamed) enemies. Instead of being linked to an action, the generalizations float free. Later, when he comments on an action we have seen, Lodovico gets it wrong. He says of Monticelso, ‘There’s but three Furies found in spacious hell,/But in a great man’s breast three thousand dwell’ (IV.iii.152–3). He thinks Monticelso, having denounced his plan to avenge Isabella’s death, has then secretly bribed him to do it; in fact the bribe came from Francisco. Whatever the general truth of the aphorism, it does not fit the character at whom it is directed. In popular plays a dramatic situation generates good moral advice. Flamineo is regularly the target of such advice, and its function is not to comment on the drama, but to create drama by provoking his resistance: CORNELIA: The lives of princes should like dials move, Whose regular example is so strong, They make the times by them go right or wrong.


FLAMINEO:

So, have you done? (I.ii.287–90)

Later he confronts Cornelia’s moral lectures with the practical realites of the family budget. He may be living off immoral earnings, but ‘Pray what means have you/To keep me from the galleys, or the gallows?’ (I.ii.315–16) The White Devil, in short, is a play that leaves its audience ‘directionless’. 10 It was probably this more than anything else that led the Red Bull audience to reject the play. If this was the case, then the moral generalizing we have been looking at in this chapter is not just a sign of the thematic content of popular drama; it is a sign of its theatrical method. The story was not properly told until it was generalized in a clear and satisfying way, creating a sense of community between stage and audience, relating the story to a world of agreed truth. This, no less than visual effects or clownage, was a production value, part of the theatrical life of the plays, made possible by the close, easy relation between actor and audience. In describing Webster’s refusal to work this way, I may seem to have been describing the virtues of The White Devil; by the standards of much modern criticism I have. But they were not the virtues its first audience wanted. Webster may have been right to blame the audience for the play’s failure; but it could be said that he misjudged their taste and their needs. It was a failure on both sides. It is tempting to say that his taste was better, but that may only be saying that it was closer to the taste of our time. It may even be that Webster learned something from the failure. His next tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, was played by the King’s Men, and evidently succeeded. At the crudest level, he learned not to offer a play to the wrong playhouse; but it is worth noting that the action of The Duchess of Malfi is more concentrated and easier to follow than that of The White Devil, and its moral sympathies are clearer. Moreover, while The White Devil has a respectable track record in the modern theatre, The Duchess of Malfi has a much better one. It may be that after all the popular audience knew something worth learning.

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Part III PLAYS

128

6 THE FAIR MAID OF THE WEST

Having looked at a significant play that failed in the popular theatre (The White Devil), I would now like to look at three plays that succeeded, in order to watch how the features of popular dramaturgy we have been examining combine in individual scripts. One evidence of success that all three plays have in common is the existence of a sequel. The case of The Fair Maid of the West, or a Girl Worth Gold, however, is somewhat peculiar. The two parts were printed together in 1631, and this was the play’s first printing; but Part Two seems to be later than Part One by a generation. Part One is hard to date, but appears to belong around the turn of the century. The date of Part Two is also uncertain, but around 1630 is a reasonable guess. The two plays are quite different from each other. Part One is a breezy, episodic tale of adventure, rooted in common life, with lots of physical action and a very active role for Bess Bridges, the heroine who gives the play its title. Part Two has none of the demotic, swashbuckling qualities of its predecessor: it is a tragicomedy of courtly intrigue, centred on gentlemanly gestures by its male characters, with Bess reduced to a largely passive role. Written in the manner of John Fletcher, it is very much a private-theatre play. The two parts were performed together for the King and Queen at Hampton Court in 1630, and the 1631 edition is presented as a souvenir of that performance, with the court prologue and epilogue attached. We do not know the original provenance of Part One. The author, Thomas Heywood, was associated with the Admiral’s Men in the late 1590s and with Worcester’s-Queen Anne’s Men from the turn of the century. The Fair Maid of the West could have been performed at any or all of the Rose, the Boar’s Head, the Curtain and the Red Bull. If it had the sort of long life in the repertoire that its later performance with a sequel suggests, it probably moved from playhouse to playhouse. What matters is that it comes, unlike Part Two, from the life and interests of a popular audience; and it is only Part One that concerns us here. The opening is theatrically simple: just three actors talking. The characters, Carrol and two Captains, fill in the setting—Plymouth in 1597, full of preparations for the English expedition against the Spanish fleet at the Azores, a follow-up to the 1596 raid on Cadiz. That raid, according to Carrol,


hath put heart Into the English; they are all on fire To purchase from the Spaniard. (I.i.6–8) This immediately catches the sympathy of the audience by striking a note of English patriotism, to which the First Captain adds local excitement: ‘How Plymouth swells with gallants! How the streets/Glister with gold!’ (I.i.11–12). This national pride will be played on later, in scenes of military action; but its immediate effect is to create the ambience from which Bess emerges. The Captain’s tribute to the wealth and energy that fill the streets of Plymouth leads directly to the men’s decision to dine at the Castle tavern, where there is not only the best wine but also the best wench, Bess Bridges; she’s the flower Of Plymouth held. The Castle needs no bush; Her beauty draws to them more gallant customers Than all the signs i’th’ town else. (I.i.19–22) Already the central character is displayed for admiration; and this will be the chief business of the play. The action will be episodic; but all the episodes, different as they are from each other, will share this common purpose. This is the theatrical equivalent of popular fiction like Long Meg of Westminster, or the jestbooks that trace the exploits of a single hero. The lead-in to Bess’s first entrance also anticipates that she will be a character under pressure, always having to prove herself: CAPTAIN: 1 Now, in troth, I think she’s honest. CARROL: Honest, and live there? What, in a public tavern, where’s such confluence Of lusty and brave gallants? Honest, said you? (I.i.23–6) She comes from the world of labour, and for her lover Spencer and his friend Goodlack this in itself is a problem. Goodlack protests: One of your birth and breeding thus to dote Upon a tanner’s daughter! Why, her father Sold hides in Somersetshire and being trade-fall’n Sent her to service. (I.ii.16–19)

THE FAIR MAID OF THE WEST 131

Spencer is embarrassed—‘Thou tell’st me that which I would fain forget/ Or wish I had not known’—and tries to cut through the class issue by insisting that Bess is ‘fair and honest’ (I.ii.20–2). For a large part of the audience, however, this exchange will identify Bess as one of them; and when she later rises to wealth, takes on the Spaniards, and has adventures in foreign lands, she will be acting out fantasies on their behalf, like the fantasies that fed the imagination of the apprentice subculture. Theatrically, she is placed in a world of work by the very precise way the tavern is created: drawers running about, customers shouting for attendance, tables and stools brought on. If the play was performed at the Boar’s Head or the Red Bull, both converted inns, the tavern ambience created on stage would pick up something from the playhouse itself. And at any playhouse drink would be sold offstage as well as on, linking the atmosphere onstage with the atmosphere in the auditorium. There is more to the tavern setting than atmosphere or even audience sympathy. Its furniture has a very specific dramatic function: the tension of the first tavern sequence comes from Spencer’s insistence that Bess should sit with him and his friend Goodlack. Bess is reluctant: ‘My fellows love me not and will complain/Of such a saucy boldness’ (I.ii.68–9). She is right; the drawers are jealous of her popularity, and one of them, seeing her seated, complains, ‘Must you be set and we wait, with a—’ (I.ii.76). When Carrol and his friends come on, he raises the tension by a jealous innuendo about her relations with Spencer —‘Perhaps she keeps a rundlet for your taste,/Which none but you must pierce’ (I.ii.118–19). In this touchy atmosphere, the fact that Bess is seated with the gentlemen is enough to start a fight: CARROL: Though you may be companion with a drudge It is not fit she should have place by us.— About your business, housewife. SPENCER: She is worthy The place as the best here, and she shall keep’t. CARROL: You lie. They bustle. Carrol slain. (I.ii.127–31) The brawl flares up with startling abruptness, and placed as it is early in the play, it whets the audience’s appetite for stage fighting. When Carrol and his friends enter, Spencer calls for more stools, and this may mean more furniture to fling about to make the fight exciting. But the real purpose of the furniture has been to create a tense situation. Whether characters sit or stand is not just a question of convenience; it carries social and dramatic significance. The drawers have their own perspective on the fight: ‘How, a man kill’d, say’st thou? Is all paid?’ (I.ii.145). Throughout the first tavern sequence they have been running about, preoccupied with their own con cerns, muttering complaints aside and covering up with the traditional cry, ‘Anon, anon, sir’ (I.ii. 34–44, 76–8). Their reaction to the death of Carrol, which forces Bess and


Spencer apart since he has to leave the country, is ‘’Tis not so much for the death of the man, but how shall we come by our reckoning?’ (I.ii.147–8). Their detachment has something like the occasional subversiveness of the clown. As we shall see, the play’s real clown is not so detached; but he too will take from time to time his own angle on the action. 1 Carrol’s death precipitates a scene in which Spencer and Bess, having to part, declare their love. Their relations at this point form in effect a new episode, whose function is to put the heroine to the test. The class problem, which Spencer acknowledges, and which Bess herself has worried about (I.ii.80–4), is apparently swept aside; but it lingers in Goodlack’s advice to his friend, ‘Try her before you trust her’, and Spencer’s reply, ‘I’ll put her to the test and utmost trial/Before I trust her further’ (I.iii.11, 16–17). This, despite his earlier statement, ‘I have proved her/ Unto the utmost test’ (I.ii.57–8). We can find social explanations, as I have suggested, or psychological ones; but the main factor may be theatrical: Bess is a character whose function it is to be tested. She challenges Spencer’s loyalty, giving him a ring: ‘When I see this next/And not my Spencer, I shall think thee dead’ (I.iii.68–9); her way of putting it shows an extradramatic awareness of the later action, making her a character who can tell her own story. He in turn challenges her chastity: Thou art fair; Join to thy beauty virtue. Many suitors I know will tempt thee; beauty’s a shrewd bait, But unto that if thou add’st chastity, Thou shalt o’ercome all scandal. (I.iii.55–9) Bess takes a moment to fix this lesson in her mind, and in the audience’s: ‘Let me recollect myself/And what he left in charge, virtue and chastity’ (I.iii.85–6). This is a self-conscious moment in which the character defines her own key trait, reducing herself to a principle. The issue of loyalty is fixed in the audience’s mind by the use of significant props. Bess tries to return a bag of gold Spencer had left with her, and he refuses; instead he gives her the keys to the trunk that holds his possessions (I.iii.30–6). The ring she gives him could belong in any love story; the gold and the keys evoke more specifically a world of business and ownership, a world where possession matters. Most important, however, he gives her his picture—presumably not a miniature, since it hangs on his chamber wall —as the equivalent of the ring she gives him: ‘For when thou part’st with that, thou losest me’ (I.iii.46). The largest and most unusual of the props that express their loyalty to each other, the picture does not appear till later. in the play; when it does it will be the centre of the most painful trial Bess faces. We have to wait for it. A play with a tightly logical plot would follow Spencer’s challenge by having Bess’s chastity tried by unwanted suitors. Eclectic and episodic, The Fair Maid of the West does not work that way. In the sequence


that follows it allows Bess to show a new face to us, and display a new set of qualities. She has appeared in the Plymouth scenes dressed as a barmaid (there are no explicit costume directions, but what she wears is probably a recognizable sign of her job); she now appears at Foy ‘like a mistress’ (II.i.17.1), in a dress rich enough that Goodlack can later cast suspicion on her: ‘A trade-fall’n tanner’s daughter so brave?/ Oh, you have tricks to compass these gay clothes’ (III.iii.64–5). The real explanation is that she has made her new tavern, the Windmill, the most successful in town. Once again she is the centre of attraction, watched and commented on. The Foy sequence begins with Forset’s tribute, ‘In your time have you seen a sweeter creature?’ (II.i.1). He greets her entrance ‘like a mistress’, ‘Here she comes. Observe how modestly she bears herself’ (II.i.18). The direction seems half to the audience. This time, however, the tone is different. Her new adversary is Roughman, whose name makes him a type-figure, and who announces his character quite self-consciously: I am Roughman, The only approved gallant of these parts, A man of whom the roarers stand in awe, And must not be put off. (II.i.76–9) Just as self-consciously, he announces when alone that his bluster masks an inner cowardice: ‘How many times brave words bear out a man!/For if he can but make a noise, he’s fear’d’ (II.iii.43–4). He makes this a general statement of principle, linking his own type-character to the stock of proverbial wisdom his audience bring with them to the playhouse. He announces his intentions on Bess quite bluntly: ‘I’ll have her’ (II.i.6). This sounds like the expected test on Bess’s chastity, but the episode turns out quite differently. Bess threatens to report him to the magistrate for his bullying, but when alone with the audience she announces her real intention, drawing again on the stock of predictable wisdom about blustering cowards: My mind suggests me that this prating fellow Is some notorious coward. If he persist, I have a trick to try what mettle’s in him. (II.i.108–10) She continues in this vein, building up expectation by working directly on the audience: ‘But to my Roughman next./I have a trick to try what spirit’s in him’; ‘I’ll venture fair/But I will try what’s in him’ (II.i.149–50, II.iii.34–5). It is Roughman, not Bess, who will be tested, and the object of the test will be to confirm the stereotype he represents.


Bess herself displays not her chastity but her fighting ability. She is a little defensive with the audience: ‘Let none condemn me of immodesty’ (II.iii.27). This sounds like a token attempt to modulate between her role as virtuous woman and her place in the Long Meg tradition, of which she is equally conscious: ‘I could do all that I have heard discours’d/Of Mary Ambree or Westminster’s Long Meg’ (II.iii.12–13). But no modulation is really necessary. Roughman is simply, as she puts it, ‘my next business’ (II.i.151), a chance for Bess to show not just her virtue but her variety. Even to put it that way may imply too much continuity; it is a chance for the actor playing Bess to try a different kind of part. Dressed as a page and pretending to be her own brother, Bess not only beats Roughman and takes his sword, but also makes him tie her shoe, untruss her point, and finally lie down while she strides over him. In a medium in which significant gesture counts for so much, Roughman’s humiliation is visual. When he later takes comfort from the fact that no one saw his disgrace, and ‘a disgrace not seen is held no shame’ (II.iii.104), he implicitly reminds us that we have seen it and marked its significance. 2 The episode has a satisfying pay-off when Roughman, back in the tavern, boasts how he fought with a young fellow in the fields and Bess, producing the costume she wore, reveals (again, visually) that she was the young fellow. There is a selfawareness, a flourish about her own identity, as she threatens to beat him again in her ‘woman shape’ if he does not redeem himself: ‘As I am Bess, I’ll do’t’ (III.i.124–6). She goes off with a tag-line: ‘That shame redeem; perhaps we’ll do thee grace./I love the valiant, but despise the base’ (III.i.129–30). Roughman announces his reform as self-consciously as he had announced his cowardice: ‘She hath waken’d me/And kindled that dead fire of courage in me’ (III.i.131–2). For the rest of the play he is comically eager to fight anybody, with or without provocation. The episode has a jestbook quality, and the jest is complete with a moral, which Bess delivers: ‘How shame, base imputation, and disgrace/Can make a coward valiant!’ (III.iii.7–8). Bess’s male disguise also activates the audience’s awareness of the boy actor who is playing her. It is the play’s clown, Bess’s servant Clem, who makes the point when he sees her in male attire: BESS: Methinks I have a manly spirit in me In this man’s habit. CLEM: Now am not I of many men’s minds, for if you should do me wrong, I should not kill you, though I took you pissing against a wall. (II.iii.5–9) Pissing against a wall is something Bess, the character, would find rather awkward; but the boy actor could do it easily. Clem takes the clown’s prerogative to step outside the play, giving an extra comic twist to Bess’s proclamation of her masculinity. Clem himself is linked to the audience not just as a clown but as a character. His role in the play is that of an apprentice with


eleven years to serve; this makes him the onstage representative of what may have been a conspicuous group in the audience. His clown-routines include the usual puns—his father, he says, was a baker, ‘an honest neighbour and one that never lov’d to be meal-mouth’d’ (II.i.48–9)—but they also evoke the practical work of the inn, as when he tells Bess how to inflate the reckonings: CLEM: Then put six pence more to it and make it four shillings wine, though you bate it them in their meat. BESS: Why so, I prithee? CLEM: Because of the old proverb What they want in meat, let them take out in drink. Then for twelve pennyworth of anchovies—eighteen pence. BESS: How can that be? CLEM: Marry, very well, mistress: twelve pence anchovies and sixpence oil and vinegar. Nay, they shall have a saucy reckoning. (II.i.128–37) This gives Bess yet another role: Clem’s ‘feed’ in a cross-talk routine. She does not respond to his advice as such, indicating that it is not really part of the inn’s business but part of the play’s business, a clown-routine to amuse the audience. Clem, unlike the drawers, is mostly on Bess’s side. But the fact that his first appearance accompanies her entrance dressed ‘like a mistress’ has a double effect: not only are they partners who work together, but also her new dignity requires a counterbalance, an undignified character who can play off against her. Bess, in her dealings with Roughman, shows how a hero treats a bully. Clem is much more practical: CLEM: If you were twenty Roughmans, if you lug me by the ears again I’ll draw. ROUGHMAN: Ha, what will you draw? CLEM: The best wine in the house for your worship…. (III.i.29–32) Clem also contributes to the trick of sharp alternation that keeps the audience alert and interested. His clown-routines with Bess frame the scene in which Roughman threatens her, menace and comedy heightening each other by contrast. As Bess’s determination to counterattack turns the Roughman sequence itself into comedy, she plays this off against her other role as a woman pining for her lost lover: ‘’Mongst many sorrows some mirth’s not amiss’ (II.i.153). She is virtually calling attention to the play’s own eclectic method, and moments after she says this Spencer, in exile, elevates the play’s eclecticism into a general philosophy: As one goes to the church to be married, another is hurried to the gallows to be hang’d, the last having no feeling of the first man’s joy nor the first of the last man’s misery. At the same time that one lies tortured upon the


rack, another lies tumbling with his mistress head and ears in down and feathers. He draws a generalizing moral with a practical application: ‘These are my maxims, and were they as faithfully practiced by others as truly apprehended by me, we should have less oppression and more charity’ (II.ii.6–17). This is more oblique than the lessons of a play like How a Man May Choose a Good Wife From a Bad; but it shows the same tendency. Just as the play itself is becoming noticeably eclectic, it pauses to analyse the way its own eclecticism reflects the mixture of human life, and to issue a call for charity. Spencer’s philosophical speech introduces a scene in which the play’s eclecticism takes a new turn, presenting Bess with a more painful challenge than the Roughman sequence. In a series of scenes that alternate with the Roughman scenes, Spencer is dangerously wounded in a fight; thinking he is dying, he gives his ring to Goodlack and instructs him to seek out Bess and tell her she will receive £500 a year from his will, provided she is free of scandal; otherwise, Goodlack will get the money himself. Goodlack then learns that Spencer is dead; we learn, immediately afterwards, that it’s another man of the same name; then the real Spencer appears, restored to health and anticipating Bess’s reaction to his death as a test on her: How Bess will take it is to me unknown. On her behaviour I will build my fate, There raise my love or thence erect my hate. (II.v.33–5) The episode is also a test on Goodlack, who will profit if Bess’s honour is stained. Spencer warns him, ‘as thou lov’st thy soul/Deal faithfully betwixt my Bess and me’ and he replies, ‘Else let me die a prodigy’ (II.ii.87–9). But £500 a year is a lot of money. For a while Goodlack behaves as the type-figure his name suggests. In III.ii, as the Mayor and Alderman discuss Bess’s wealth and good reputation, an offstage shot announces the arrival of Goodlack’s ship, making an ominous and dramatic lead-in to his entrance. Hearing of Spencer’s death, Bess proclaims her grief; but Goodlack tries to break her with insults—whore, baggage, strumpet (III.iii.68, 75, 76). When she sees he is wearing Spencer’s ring, he declares, ‘It was never made/To grace a strumpet’s finger’ (III.iii.75–6); at which point, unable to take any more, she walks out. The prop that dominates this section, however, is Spencer’s picture, which now appears for the first time. Bess’s entrance with it is set off and highlighted by two starkly opposing effects, Clem cheerfully going about his business in the tavern, and the brutality of Goodlack:


CLEM: Score a pint of sack in the Crown, and see at the bar for some rotten eggs to burn it. We must have one trick or another to vent away our bad commodities. Exit . Enter Bess with Spencer’s picture. BESS: To die and not vouchsafe some few commends Before his death was most unkindly done. This picture is more courteous. ’Twill not shrink For twenty thousand kisses; no, nor blush. Then thou shalt be my husband, and I vow Never to marry other. Enter Goodlack GOODLACK: Where’s this harlot? (III.iii.105–III. iv.6) He demands that she give him the picture, claiming he is following Spencer’s orders; reluctantly agreeing, she asks only for time to take her leave of it. Throughout the sequence both characters have spoken directly to the audience, Bess about her grief and her struggle to accept it stoically, Goodlack about his intention to cheat her of her inheritance. We watch to see which one will crack first. Bess’s long meditation on the picture, making it the sign of her devotion to Spencer, is punctuated by asides from Goodlack, in which he admits he is softening: Oh thou, the perfect semblance of my love And all that’s left of him, take one sweet kiss As my last farewell. Thou resemblest him For whose sweet safety I was every morning Down on my knees, and with the lark’s sweet tunes I did begin my prayers…. GOODLACK

[aside]: Sure, most sure, this cannot be dissembled. (III.iv.43–52)

He breaks, revealing his change of heart first to the audience, and then to Bess: Had I a heart of flint or adamant, It would melt at this.—My Mistress Bess, I have better tidings for you. (III.iv.77–9) Goodlack’s growing sympathy is also a way of fixing the sympathy of the audience, of saying ‘look at this’ as Bess displays her feelings for Spencer. The tonal contrast with the Roughman episode is striking and deliberate; the common factor is that Bess is held up for admiration.


The play now takes another sharp change in direction. Bess determines to leave England. She delivers her will to the Mayor and an Alderman, and the Mayor reads aloud the list of her bequests to the citizens of Foy: the beneficiaries include young beginners in trade, merchants who have had losses at sea, soldiers, and maidens named Elizabeth who are to be married—all causes that play on the audience’s natural sympathies. The Mayor’s comment, ‘you want a precedent, you so abound/In charity and goodness’ (IV.ii.45–6) confirms that she is as exemplary in the public sphere as she has been in the private one. In this scene Bess and the civic authorities are sitting on stools around a table; the stage picture recalls the opening sequence in Plymouth, where the mere sight of Bess sitting down was enough to start a fight. Though Clem has a clown’s disrespectful comment—‘Here’s even Susanna betwixt two wicked elders’ (IV.ii. 20)—the joke honours Bess, and the new stage picture confers on her a settled respectability. But the main function of this effect is to set up a sharp change in manner, as Bess turns suddenly to the next stage in her story: ALDERMAN: Let never such despair, As, dying rich, shall make the poor their heir. Exit [with Mayor] . BESS: Why, what is all the wealth the world contains, Without my Spencer? Enter Roughman and Forset . ROUGHMAN: Where’s my sweet Bess? Shall I become a welcome suitor now That I have chang’d my copy? BESS: I joy to hear it. I’ll find employment for you. Enter Goodlack, Sailors and Clem . GOODLACK: A gallant ship and wondrous proudly trimm’d; Well caulk’d, well tackled, every way prepared. BESS: Here then our mourning for a season end. (IV.ii.52–61) The swift entrances of Bess’s new allies—including the sailors, who must be instantly recognizable for what they are—raise the energy level, and Bess’s last line is virtually an announcement to the audience that the play is changing its tone. The focus is not on Bess’s reasons for going to sea, but on the play’s own purpose of giving the audience variety. Or, as Bess puts it, ‘Then, casting up our caps in sign of joy, /Our purpose is to bid farewell to Foy’ (IV.ii.112–13). Up to this point the play has drawn a tight circle of attention around Bess. She is under pressure, tested, subject to envy, threats and admiration. Now there is a more open manner, and a freer role for her; she takes her own initiatives instead of reacting to pressure. Her adversaries Roughman and Goodlack are now her loyal followers. She still has the air of being looked at: This voyage I intend;/ Though some may blame, all lovers will commend’ (III.iv.112–13). She still


presents herself as ‘a pattern to all maids hereafter/Of constancy in love’ (III.iv. 93–4); the literal purpose of the voyage is to recover Spencer’s body. But the real emphasis is on free-wheeling adventure, which includes Bess’s freedom to improvise her sex: ‘I have rich apparel,/For man or woman as occasion serves’ (IV.ii.87–8). In the scenes of military adventure that follow she is in male dress ‘like a sea captain’ (IV.iv.SD). When this sequence is over the Chorus announces she is ‘wearied of the habit of a man’ (IV.v.12), an arbitrary excuse to get her back into a dress for the very different action of the final scenes. The sheer casualness of the explanations conveys an air of free improvisation. Bess’s freedom also expresses the freedom of the boy actor to be ‘man or woman, as occasion serves’. Visually, the Bess of the shipboard scenes is a boy having the sort of adventures that would appeal to the apprentices in the audience. Hugh Clark, who played Bess in the 1630 court revival, had evidently been married for several years at the time; 3 but the character gives her age as ‘Not fully yet seventeen’ (V.i.74). Even Clark must have retained some of his youthful appearance. Nor would Bess simply revert to the boy actor’s own sex in these scenes. When she and her crew take on the Spaniards, she puts Goodlack in charge of the fight. She insists on joining in the fray herself, and when he is wounded she takes command; but her initial deference to Goodlack, as a brief concession to conventional notions of the feminine, adds piquancy to her final achievement as a military commander. Her enemy is nothing less than the Spanish Menace. Between her conversion of Goodlack and her farewell to Foy, the play introduces its first military scene: ‘After an alarum, enter a Spanish Captain with sailors, bringing in a Merchant, Spencer, and the Surgeon prisoners’ (IV.i.SD). In the mutual defiance of the Captain and his prisoners the words ‘Spaniard’ and ‘Englishman’ figure prominently: SPENCER: Spaniard, do thy worst. Thou canst not act more tortures than my courage Is able to endure. SPANISH CAPTAIN: These Englishmen! Nothing can daunt them. Even in misery They’ll not regard their masters. (IV.i.24–8) This works directly on the audience’s patriotism and xenophobia, and leads to a satisfying turnaround when after another ‘alarum’ the English, led by Bess, ‘Enter with victory’ with the same Captain and other Spaniards held prisoner (IV.iv.105.1–2). Her magnanimity contrasts with the Captain’s arrogance, and he underlines the point for the audience’s benefit: BESS: …Give him his long boat; him and his Set safe ashore.—And pray for English Bess. SPANISH CAPTAIN: I know not whom you mean, but be’t your queen, Famous Elizabeth, I shall report


She and her subjects both are merciful. (IV.iv.119–23) This time, however, her virtue is both displayed and questioned. Though the reunion of the lovers is held back for the end of the play, Bess sees Spencer among the prisoners, and fears it’s his ghost come to haunt her for being too merciful to the Spaniards. The Chorus, describing her later career, announces what we might call the play’s foreign policy: ‘The French and Dutch she spares, only makes spoil/Of the rich Spaniard and the barbarous Turk’ (IV.v.7–8). If the play were performed, or revived, around the time of James’s peace with Spain, these scenes would have had an extra political edge, appealing to the part of the audience that would rather beat the Spaniards than sign treaties with them. Even Clem contributes. He has shown a clown’s loyalty by signing on with Bess’s expedition, and a clown’s independence when he makes a stumbling entrance, frightened by the sound of gunfire and complaining that he was asleep in the topmast (IV.iv.65–75). But on the question of Spaniards he is firm: ‘now, you Don Diegos, you that made Paul’s to stink-’ (IV.iv.110–11). The popular audience never tired of hearing about the legendary Spaniard who farted in St Paul’s Cathedral. 4 It is not clear from the 1631 edition how much onstage fighting there was in this sequence, if any. But it is full of fast action and noise, alarums and gunshots. The trumpets make a contrast with the ‘hautboys’ (equivalent to the modern oboe) that introduce Mullisheg, the King of Fez, who dominates the final sequence. According to Peter Thomson, ‘The Elizabethans readily associated the “loud and shrill” oboe with the gruesome and the ominous’, 5 and while this association is not always consistent, it would set an apporpriate atmosphere, exotic and sinister, for Mullisheg’s court. His entrance music, in both IV.iii and IV.v, is ‘long’; Robert K.Turner, Jr, has suggested that extra time was needed to set up ‘elaborate props’ for the court of Fez; 6 but apart from Mullisheg’s throne there is no indication in the text of what those props might have been, and perhaps the intention was to have an extended passage of atmospheric music. (Admittedly, since the text is a late one, this may tell us more about Caroline performances than about the first production.) The black faces and exotic robes of Mullisheg and his attendants, and—in a winter performance—the gathering darkness, possibly accompanied by the lurid glow of cresset lights, would add to the exoticism. By the end of the play, Mullisheg will be a sympathetic figure; but when he first appears he declares a policy of confiscating the ships and goods of Christian merchants (IV.iii.15–19) and in a later scene, wanting to add to his harem, he takes an ominous interest in Bess. The first two Mullisheg scenes frame the sea-adventure sequence; the last act concerns Bess’s visit to his court, and the main function of the Chorus, who appears for the first time late in the play, is to hurry the story along to that point. Mullisheg is such a striking figure that he might upstage the heroine. To counter this, her entrance into his court is carefully built up: a Moor enters and


announces Goodlack; with a ‘Flourish’ Goodlack and Roughman enter to announce Bess; she herself enters veiled, to the sound of hautboys (V.i.15.1–31. 1). There is a strong physical tension between her and Mullisheg: MULLISHEG: That English earth may well be term’d a heaven, That breeds such divine beauties. Make me sure That thou art mortal by one friendly touch. BESS: Keep off; for till thou swear’st to my demands, I will have no commerce with Mullisheg, But leave thee as I came. (V.i.43–7) He agrees to her demands for safe conduct and freedom from violence; in return he gets more than a touch. Goodlack, referring to the English custom of the social kiss, advises, ‘Our first greeting/Begins still on the lips’ and Bess defends herself for allowing Mullisheg to take the liberty: ‘’Tis no immodest thing/You ask, nor shame for Bess to kiss a king’ (V.i.62–6). This is not the first time Bess, with one eye on the audience, has defended her behaviour. But Mullisheg’s reaction, ‘This kiss hath all my vitals ecstasied’ (V.i.67), makes us wonder if she has taken a dangerous risk. The simple gesture generates considerable tension; as in her treatment of the Spaniards, Bess’s courtesy rouses both admiration and concern. In the following scene, Bess kneels to Mullisheg to beg freedom for a Christian prisoner, and gets it in return for another kiss. Clem speaks frankly for the prejudices of the audience: CLEM [aside]: Must your black face be smooching my mistress’s white lips with a Moorain? I would you had kiss’d her a— ALCADE: Ha, how is that, sir? CLEM: I know what I say, sir; I would he had kiss’d her a— ALCADE: A—what? CLEM: A thousand times to have done him a pleasure. (V.ii.80–5) The echo of the earlier scene in which Clem backed away from a confron tation with Roughman gives this the effect of a running gag. The clown both contributes to the tension of the scene, pointing at a disturbing stage picture, and defuses it by making it the occasion for his own independent comedy. Like Will Sommers in When You See Me You Know Me, Clem has a prominent role in the play’s finale. Episodic for much of its length, The Fair Maid of the West builds finally to a climax not only by reuniting Bess and Spencer but also by saving to the end the most exotic scenes and the most fully developed clown routines. Disrespectful of Mullisheg though he is, Clem becomes a Moorish courtier, building up (and mocking) his new dignity with theatrical jokes. At his first entrance he raises an easy laugh by quoting The Spanish Tragedy (the repetition of the joke in Part Two [IV.ii.13] is evidence of its success):


‘lt is not now as when Andrea liv’d,’—or rather Andrew, our elder journeyman. What, drawers become courtiers? Now may I speak with the old ghost in Jeronimo: When this eternal substance of my soul Did live imprisoned in this wanton flesh, I was a courtier in the court of Fez. (V.i.110–15) In the process he parodies Mullisheg’s own dignity—‘Where be my bashaws?— Usher us in state’ (V.i.154)—and gets in a few cracks at real courtiers: when French and Italian merchants start buying his favour, he tells the audience, ‘You may see what it is to be a sudden courtier: I no sooner thrust my nose into the court, but my hand itches for a bribe already’ (V.i.139–41). His most startling contribution is to the reunion of Bess and Spencer. The lovers have been on stage together in the sea-fight sequence, when he is among the prisoners she frees, but they are held back from full recognition by the fact that she is in male disguise and he is supposed to be dead. Even in the last scene, when they meet at Mullisheg’s court and recognize each other at last, the tension is maintained for a while; Mullisheg is demanding Bess’s love, and she and Spencer hold off a public acknowledgement of each other. Bess finally introduces him to Mullisheg as A gentleman of England and my friend. Do him some grace for my sake. MULLISHEG: For thy sake what would not I perform? He shall have grace and honour.—Joffer, go And see him gelded to attend on us. He shall be our chief eunuch. BESS: Not for ten worlds! (V.ii.88–94) The startling comedy of the moment not only gives the reunion of the lovers a quality we had not expected but also sets up Clem’s last routine. He insists on taking the honour Spencer refused, and goes off to receive it as the lovers finally have the reunion we have been waiting for: BESS:…And lives my Spencer? In troth I thought thee dead. SPENCER: In hope of thee, I liv’d to gain both life and liberty. Enter Clem running. CLEM: No more of your honour, if you love me! Is this your Moorish preferment, to rob a man of his best jewels? (V.ii.123–7)


Clem’s explosive re-entry not only interrupts the happiness of the lovers but also in a curious way reinforces it by adding to the audience’s satisfaction what may well be the biggest laugh of the afternoon. (Since Clem can run so soon after the operation, we don’t have to take his misfortune too literally.) The popularity of the joke is suggested by the fact that it becomes a recurring gag all through Part Two: ‘A murrain of these barbers of Barbary! They have given me a receipt, that, ‘scape the colic as well as I can, I shall be sure never to be troubled with the stone’ (Part Two, I.i.49–52). The crucial business of the last scene, however, is the celebration of Bess. Pleading with Mullisheg to allow her to have the man she wants, Spencer and Goodlack, who have earlier conspired to test her, join in her praises: ‘She is a precendent of all true love/And shall be register’d to after times’ (V.ii.110–11). Mullisheg, relenting, strikes the same note: Till this hour We grac’d thee for thy beauty, Englishwoman, But now we wonder at thy constancy. (V.ii.119–21) He concludes the play by applying to Bess the catch-phrase that the Chorus has already used for her (IV.v.18–19), and that gives the play its subtitle: ‘Wheresoe’er thy fame shall be enroll’d/The world report thou art a girl worth gold’ (V.ii. 152–3). The effect is reinforced by the explicit association of Bess with another famous Elizabeth, The virgin queen, so famous through the world’, whom Bess calls ‘the only phoenix of her age,/The pride and glory of the Western Isles’ (V.i.89, 99–100). In performances before the Queen’s death in 1603 this would add to the celebration of Bess Bridges the sort of compliment to the Queen that was pervasive in Elizabethan culture; after that, the effect would be nostalgia. This would also add a layer of historical allegory to Bess’s defeat of the Spaniards. Yet this is only one aspect of a multi-faceted character. We may think of Bess as the centre of a series of stage pictures: sitting with the gentlemen in the tavern, striding over Roughman, contemplating Spencer’s picture, handing her will to the Mayor of Foy, entering with a train of Spanish captives, kissing Mullisheg. The theatrical language of the play as a whole proceeds from the everyday atmosphere of the early scenes, whose tavern ambience is so close to that of the playhouse itself, to the noisy sea fights and Moorish exoticism of the conclusion. In the process Bess keeps changing costume: she is a barmaid, a successful businesswoman, a page, a sea-captain, and finally a richly dressed lady. In the last role she becomes the image of her own queen and rouses the wondering, dangerous admiration of a Moorish prince. But his final tribute to her takes the play back to its origins, as the picturesque King of Fez calls her, in plain down-to-earth English, ‘a girl worth gold’.

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7 THE HONEST WHORE

The popularity of the first part of The Honest Whore (Fortune, 1604) is suggested not only by the production of a sequel the following year but also by the printing history: two printings in 1604, one in 1605, and further reprints in 1615 and 1635. By the same evidence Part Two was not so popular, being published only once, in 1630. It appears to have been the unaided work of Thomas Dekker, while Part One was a collaboration of Dekker with Thomas Middleton. 1 Despite this change in authorship, the two parts, unlike the two parts of The Fair Maid of the West, are closely linked and can reasonably be discussed together. Part Two is clearly an attempt (successful or not) to cash in on the popularity of Part One by providing the mixture as before, and we can gauge from this what the audiences of Part One particularly liked. While The Fair Maid of the West ranges over England and finally abroad, The Honest Whore ranges over London, thinly disguised as Milan. Part One ends with a scene in Bedlam, Part Two with a scene in Bridewell; these scenes are the clearest evidence of the real identity of the city, and their self-conscious local colour plays on the audience’s interest in ‘London ye see hourly’. While The Fair Maid of the West puts one striking character on display, The Honest Whore offers a wide range: the 1604 title page entices prospective book-buyers with ‘The Honest Whore, with the Humours of the Patient Man and the Longing Wife’. Bellafront, the title character, shares the billing with Candido the patient linen-draper and his impatient wife, and this pattern is repeated on the title page of Part Two. The theatrical effect of Bellafront embodies one of the paradoxes of the popular theatre we have already glanced at. While prostitutes worked the house, the performers on stage acted out exemplary tales promoting conventional sexual morality. This is how Bellafront spends most of her career; yet her initial appeal is erotic. She is played, of course, by a boy actor. Her age is given as fifteen (Part One, III.iii.42), 2 and she is called ‘A little tiny woman’ (Part Two, III.i. 69). Her brief appearance dressed as a page (Part One, IV.i) allows the audience a glimpse of the boy actor in something like his own person. The character’s first appearance, how ever, is both feminine and titillating. She builds up expectation by speaking her first two lines offstage; then, ‘Enter Bellafront, not fully ready, without a gown; she sits down, with her bodkin curls her hair, colours her lips’ (II.i.12SD). Initially she is a stereotyped whore, identified as such by other


characters’ comments on her. Her man Roger, holding a candle before her, jokes that he is acting out an old proverb about holding a candle to the devil (II.i.33– 6). Hippolito, the gentleman who will bring about her conversion, disbelieves her claim that she had always wanted to devote herself to one man: ‘a mingled harlot/Is true in nothing but in being false’ (II.i.314–15). She breaks the stereotype when after a lecture by Hippolito she renounces her trade, but the effect is very different from Vittoria’s refusal to accept the label of whore in The White Devil. She becomes in effect a new type, the honest whore, created for the purposes of this play, but just as much a creature of formula as the familiar type she is rejecting. Alone with the audience, she puts herself on display: A woman honest first and then turn whore, Is (as with me) common to thousands more, But from a strumpet to turn chaste; that sound Has oft been heard, that woman hardly found. (IV.i.196–9) This is a familiar effect: the actor does not so much impersonate the character as present her: an object of admiration, seen from outside, striking and unique. 3 And, being so exceptional, she proves the general rule. In Part Two she switches to a more familiar stereotype. She is now married to Matheo, the man who first corrupted her. He is himself a stock character: the prodigal, abusive husband. We meet him in plays like The London Prodigal, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage and A Yorkshire Tragedy. All the outrages he commits are simply occasions for Bellafront to display herself in her new role of patient, forgiving wife. Her father Orlando Friscobaldo, pretending to denounce her patience, is really testing her ability to stay true to type: ORLANDO: Dost thou beg for him, thou precious man’s meat, thou? Has he not beaten thee, kick’t thee, trod on thee, and dost thou fawn on him like his spaniel? Has he not pawn’d thee to thy petticoat, sold thee to thy smock, made ye leap at a crust, yet wouldst have me save him? BELLAFRONT: Oh yes, good sir, women shall learn of me, To love their husbands in greatest misery, Then show him pity, or you wrack myself. (V.ii.463–70) ‘Women shall learn of me’ suggests how far this is played with one eye on the audience, presenting Bellafront as exemplary. In How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad, Arthur is placed between two female stereotypes, the dissembling whore and the faithful wife; Bellafront, exemplifying the popular fascination with strong contrasts, gets to act both parts herself in the course of the two plays. A costume device brings this effect into sharp focus theatrically: when in Part One she appears without her gown, the effect is erotic; in Part Two

THE HONEST WHORE 147

Matheo removes her gown, on stage, in order to pawn it, and the aim this time is pathos. As he unlaces it, Bellafront makes a wry, sad joke of the fact that in her old life she was also undressed by men: ‘Undo me? Yes, yes, at these riflings I/Have been too often’ (III.ii.36–7). The reminder may also add an undercurrent of eroticism to the pathos. Theatrically, Bellafront’s role hinges on two oratorical set-pieces, one in each play. In Part One, Hippolito converts her from her trade with an extended rhetorical denunciation of it. 4 This is consciously set up as a display-piece for the actor: ‘What, shall I teach you how to loathe yourself? …Lend me your silence and attention’ (II.i.316–21). In Part Two, on the ballad-principle of reversal—‘The case is alter’d now; Jenny woos Johnny’ 5 —Hippolito, now attracted to Bellafront, tries to get her to return to her trade. The title page of Part Two advertises ‘the Honest Whore, persuaded by strong arguments to turn courtesan again; her brave refuting those arguments’. The scene is held back until late in the play (its equivalent in Part One occurs quite early), and the audience’s expectation is whetted by conscious recollections of the first scene (IV.i.243–52). Not only that, but Bellafront and Hippolito prepare for the encounter itself with a self-conscious theatricality that has them playing on the audience like wrestlers working up a crowd: HIPPOLITO: Th’alarm’s struck up: I’m your man. BELLAFRONT: A woman gives defiance. HIPPOLITO: Sit. BELLAFRONT: Begin. ’Tis a brave battle to encounter sin. HIPPOLITO: You men that mean to fight in this same war, To which I’m prest, and plead at the same bar, To win a woman, if you would have me speed, Send all your wishes. BELLAFRONT: No doubt y’are heard, proceed. (IV.i.253–9) The audience is divided into camps, men and women, each with an onstage representative. After his speech Hippolito asks, ‘Is the day ours?’ and Bellafront replies, ‘Let us strike too’ (IV.i.297–9). At the end Bellafront appeals for a verdict: ‘Let the world judge which of us two have won’ (IV.i.395). Hippolito refuses to concede defeat, but his arguments have been flagrantly specious, and he not only admits as much to the audience but also makes an example of himself: Thus wisest men turn fools, doting on whores’ (IV.i.401). We may not think of extended flights of oratory as a normal popular-theatre device, but to an audience that had a taste for sermons as well as plays, these scenes had an evident appeal. Much of the impact of the second scene comes not just from the debate itself but from a conscious awareness that a popular scene from Part One is now being re-played in reverse, with the characters changing ends like tennis players.


The audience’s interest is worked up just as self-consciously in the display of the other principal character, the patient linen-draper Candido. He and Bellafront both appear only after the play is well under way: Bellafront in the sixth scene, Candido in the fifth. Candido’s first appearance is prepared by two scenes of warm-up in which other characters tell stories of his legendary patience, and determine to put it to the test. Castruchio, the courtier who helps lead the attack in Part One, declares, ‘he’s so mild, so affable, so suffering, that nothing indeed can move him: now do but think what sport it will be to make this fellow (the mirror of patience) as angry, as vext and as mad as an English cuckold’ (I.iv.13– 16). He tries Candido’s patience by demanding a pennyworth of lawn, cut from the middle of the bolt; Candido’s phlegmatic acceptance of his demand moves him to comment: is’t possible that Homo should be nor man, nor woman: not once mov’d; No, not at such an injury, not at all! (I.v.106–8) Like Bellafront, Candido is held up for display as a striking, unique figure. And, like Bellafront, he is quite conscious of being a character type, determined to stick to his role: ‘let the world say what it can,/Nothing can drive me from a patient man’ (I.v.237–8). Part of the rhythm of the jests to which he is subject is Candido’s tendency to round out each incident by moralizing and generalizing his own behaviour. He speaks, variously, as a shopkeeper who wants to keep his customers happy (I.v.121–30), a husband who wants to live in harmony with his wife (I.v.197–200), and an observer of the world who has seen what happens when people lose their sense of proportion: many worldlings Do build their anger upon feebler grounds, The more’s the pity, many lose their lives For scarce so much coin as will hide their palm, Which is most cruel: those have vexed spirits That pursue lives: in this opinion rest, The loss of millions could not move my breast. (I.v.221–7) This draws an admiring response from the courtier Fluello, ‘Thou art a blest man, and with peace dost deal;/Such a meek spirit can bless a commonweal’ (I.v. 228–9). Candido’s acts of patience are surrounded by two layers of commentary: his own, and those of the other characters who goad him into action and admire the results. Even an incident like the jest of the pennyworth of lawn is not complete theatrically until this commentary has been added.


The popular fascination with strong contrasts shows in the juxtaposition of Candido with his successive wives. Viola, the ‘longing wife’ of Part One, is as eager for battle as he is for peace: what she longs for is some show of anger from him, without which she is not living up to her own stereotype: ‘many times I am ready to bite off my tongue, because it wants that virtue which all women’s tongues have, to anger their husbands’ (I.ii.75–7). The courtier Pioratto highlights the contrast: ‘How strangely this doth show!/A patient man linkt with a waspish shrow’ (I.v.140–1). Candido’s second wife, known only as ‘Bride’ in the printed text, seems at first to repeat the pattern: at the wedding banquet she strikes one of Candido’s apprentices for pouring her the wrong wine. As in the Bellafront-Hippolito scenes, however, Part Two actually reverses the effect of Part One. Goaded by the knight Lodovico Sforza, Candido prepares to fight his wife with a yard measure (the pun on ‘yard’ makes the prop a bawdy joke as well as a comic weapon); she seizes an ell and the apprentices shout encouragement: ‘Rare, rare, a prize’ (II.ii.81). But she strikes what she calls the first blow by kneeling, and declaring, ‘I disdain/ The wife that is her husband’s sovereign’ (II.ii.108–9). The jest, once again, has a lecture attached: set against Candido’s speech on patience in Part One is the Bride’s speech on the necessity of male authority in marriage. Throughout Part Two, Candido presents a new face: he allows himself to be manipulated, as he never did in Part One; he even lets Lodovico goad him into some comically inadequate swearing (II.ii.55–60). But each play ends with Candido held up for public admiration: at the end of Part Two the Duke invites him to the court with the words, ‘A patient man’s a pattern for a king’ (V.ii.496). The sequel, then, shows familiar characters in a new light, consciously recalling their old roles even as they reverse them. It is, as I have suggested, a ballad pattern: the second part, to the same tune. Its appearance on the title page suggests that the second Bellafront-Hippolito scene was a success; Candido’s battle with the Bride has in its own way as much theatrical sharpness as his displays of patience in Part One. The later Candido scenes, however, lack this quality, as his new malleability makes him a dimmer presence, a mere victim of practical jokes. In this case, the reversal of the first effect is less well sustained, and may have helped lessen the popularity of the sequel. Part Two also introduces a new major character, Bellafront’s father Orlando Friscobaldo, who makes his own quite conscious bid for popularity. (Whether the bid was altogether successful we cannot be sure; Orlando has been popular with some critics, 6 but he does not make it on to the title page of Part Two.) His role is that of a whimsical old man who conceals sentimental good nature beneath a crusty facade. He introduces himself to Hippolito as ‘old mad Orlando’ (I.ii.35) and goes on to describe himself in two self-conscious set-pieces. The first is generalized, a rhymed character of a ‘happy man’, introduced with a flourish: I’ll give you, my lord, the true picture of a happy man; Iwas turning leaves over this morning, and found it; anexcellent Italian


painter drew it. If I have it in the rightcolours, I’ll bestow it on your lordship. HIPPOLITO: I stay for it. (I.ii.49–53) The result is a series of formulae: ‘He for whom poor men’s curses dig no grave,/ He that is neither lord’s nor lawyer’s slave’ (I.ii.58–9). It is followed by a more direct self-characterization, in which Orlando dwells on his self-sufficiency: ‘I am not covetous, I am not in debt, sit neither at the Duke’s side, nor lie at his feet’ (I.ii.68–9). When he claims, however, ‘I have no child, have no chick’ (I.ii. 81) we know he is covering up something. Hippolito both tests him and puts him on display by telling him falsely that Bellafront is dead. He professes to be ‘glad the world has lost one of his idols’ (I.ii.114), but he evidently speaks through tears. Hippolito comments, ‘I’m glad y’are wax, not marble’ and pays tribute to ‘these sweet showers fetcht from your eyes’ (I.ii.117, 121). Elsewhere Orlando comments on his own emotions, putting them on display as Hippolito has: ‘I should be well season’d, for mine eyes lie in brine’ (II.i.71–2). Telling us he is weeping may also be a substitute for doing it, sparing the actor the task of working up tears at each performance. In his role as plot manipulator and commentator Orlando keeps in general touch with the audience. Giving Matheo money, he turns in mid-speech from his fellow actor to the auditorium: ‘and ’twere ten thousand ducats, your worship should be my cash-keeper; I have heard what your worship is—[aside] an excellent dunghill cock, to scatter all abroad: but I’ll venture twenty pounds on’s head’ (II.i.109–12). He operates from within the popular world of proverbs and stock images: ‘Shall a silly bird pick her own breast and nourish her young ones, and can a father see his child starve? That were hard. The pelican does it, and shall not I?’ (I.ii.173–6). His authority is confirmed in social and theatrical terms when he enters ‘like himself, with four men after him’ (IV.i.28SD). He ends his performance with self-conscious theatricality, a pretended harshness that breaks in mid-speech to reveal his underlying kindness. He tells Bellafront, who is clinging to Matheo demanding forgiveness for him, ‘let go his hand; if thou dost not forsake him, a father’s everlasting blessing fall upon both your heads’ (V.ii.475–7). (Such devices have a long life in the popular tradition: the reformed Scrooge plays exactly the same trick on Bob Cratchit.) His last words, ‘thus for joy weeps Orlando, and doth end’ (V.ii.486), show the actor consciously finishing his part, with the tears that have been his character’s keynote throughout. Praising Henry Irving’s performance as lachimo in Cymbeline, Bernard Shaw called it ‘unbroken in its life-current from end to end’. 7 Such terms do not apply to a play like The Honest Whore. Even Orlando, the most consistent of the major characters, presents not an unbroken life-current but a series of performances; and the others present different faces according to the demands of individual scenes. Bellafront is in turn the cynical whore, the honest whore, and the patient wife. In Part One, there is no modulation between her angry and pointed attacks


on Matheo as the man who ruined her and her acceptance of him as a husband— an acceptance made even more striking by the fact that she has spent most of the play in love with Hippolito. She dismisses that love in half a line: ‘you are gone; farewell’ (V.ii.435). Viola is reconciled to her patient husband just as simply; ‘I ha’ done storming now’ (V.i.49). In Part One the Duke presides, as a standardissue Wicked Ruler, over a dark intrigue reminiscent of Jacobean tragedy. (This appears not to have clicked with the audience, since it is not repeated in Part Two.) Towards the end of the play he reforms, ‘Omnes’ cry ‘O happy change’ (V.ii.393), and from this point on he is a figure of authority, generalized and unproblematic. In Part Two, Candido’s decision to try impatience, and Hippolito’s infatuation with Bellafront, are just as arbitrary. Characters change roles not out of inner psychological necessity but as a device for putting themselves and others on display. This is a dramaturgy in which all behaviour has a quality of performance. When Candido’s brother-in-law Fustigo tries to break his patience by blustering and bullying in his shop, Candido, even though he is not literally aware that this is an act, rebukes him in theatrical terms: If you’ll needs play the madman, choose a stage Of lesser compass, where few eyes may note Your action’s error; but if still you miss, As here you do, for one clap ten will hiss. (Part One, III.i.60–3) Here, as throughout both plays, the awareness of the characters as performers includes an awareness of the watching, reacting audience. The dramaturgy, like the presentation of character, is ad hoc and eclectic. Modern readers may be tempted to make connections: for example, to read the Bride’s insistence on wifely submission to Candido ironically, in light of Matheo’s brutal treatment of Bellafront. But the play takes each effect as it comes, and does not encourage this sort of linking. If anything, it plays up its own eclecticism by sharp scene transitions. One example occurs after Hippolito has attacked Bellafront’s trade and then walked out, leaving her desperate: Not speak to me! Not look! Not bid farewell! Hated! This must not be, some means I’ll try. Would all whores were as honest now as I. Exit. Enter Candido, his wife, George and two prentices in the shop. Fustigo enters, walking by: GEORGE: See gentlemen, what do you lack? A fine Holland, a fine cambric, see what you buy. 1 PRENTICE: Holland for shirts, cambric for bands, what is’t you lack? (II.i. 454–III.i.4)


We go not just from one set of characters to another but from one kind of drama to another. Bellafront and Candido are both put on display; what is emphasized, however, is not the continuity of the device but the sharp difference between the contexts in which it is used. The theatrical mix includes passages of discursive commentary following on passages of action and observation. II.i of Part One is a long scene that breaks into two parts: in the first, we watch Bellafront’s establishment on what seems to be a typical day as she, her servant Roger, and her clients, chat idly and irritably, with an undercurrent of ill-will beneath the ordinary business of drinking, gossiping and smoking tobacco. The second part switches to a different manner altogether, with Hippolito’s long denunciation of the folly and misery of a whore’s life. We see that life on a small scale, acted out: his speech projects it on to a grand scale, making no particular attempt to pick up details from the first part of the scene. A tendency to generalizing commentary is pervasive throughout, and many of the generalizations are about the relations of men and women, playing on the divisions in the audience that are explicitly evoked in the second Hippolito-Bellafront scene. Lodovico, advising Candido to take control over his new wife, declares, ‘You know, that a woman was made of the rib of a man, and that rib was crooked. The moral of which is, that a man must from the beginning be crooked to his wife’ (I.iii.111–13). Against this conventional misogyny we may set the play’s insistence that if women become whores, it is men who make them so. Bellafront sums it up: ‘You love to make us lewd, but never chaste’ (Part One, III.iii.120). In Part Two, Hippolito’s wife Infaelice confesses (falsely) to adultery, and he attacks not only her but also all women: Oh women, You were created angels, pure and fair; But since the first fell, tempting devils you are; You should be men’s bliss, but you prove their rods; Were there no women, men might live like gods. (III.i.161–5) She then springs the trap on him, revealing that she knows his designs on Bellafront, and repeating this denunciation almost word for word, redirecting it at men and concluding, ‘Were there no men, women might live like gods’ (III.i. 190). (‘The second part, to the same tune’.) The dramatic energy of the scene is generated not only by a clash of characters but also by a neat opposition of commentaries, echoing like a ballad refrain. Like so many ballads, the play is full of good practical advice—don’t pick fights in brothels, stay out of gaminghouses—that both arises out of the dramatic situations and evokes a shared world of traditional common sense (Part One, III.iii.70–80; Part Two, II.i.30–4). One reason why the characters are discontinuous is that they are essentially social roles, projections of that general wisdom about the institutions and perversions of society that the play’s commentary is so often concerned with: the whore, the wife, the husband, the father, the tradesman. The play’s visual


language reflects the same interests. Costume in particular constitutes a sign language. Calling for his gown to attend a meeting at the senate-house, Candido sees it as a symbol of the dignity of his whole community: ‘My gown, George, so, my gown. A happy land,/Where grave men meet each cause to understand’ (Part One, III.i.164–5). In a trial of his patience, Viola refuses to let him have his gown; rather than lower the dignity of the occasion (and incur a fine) by going in ordinary dress, Candido improvises a gown by wearing a carpet with holes cut for his head and arms. In Part One, his journeyman George, addressed as ‘flat-cap’, takes it as an insult (III.i.94–6). In Part Two, Candido at his wedding is provoked by the sight of a guest in a tall hat to deliver a set speech in defence of the flat cap. The traditional badge of the citizen, it is both dignified and practical. Above all, it embodies a principle of decorum: ‘Each degree has his fashion, it’s fit then,/One should be laid by for the citizen’ (I.iii.38–9). By contrast, the ‘fantastic sea-suit’ (I.ii.SD) worn by Viola’s brother Fustigo identifies him as a povertystricken wastrel; and the fine clothes worn by Matheo in Part Two are a sign of social waste and prodigality. Orlando tells him, ‘I could feast ten good fellows with these hangers’ (IV.i.149). In the Bridewell scene that ends Part Two, the imprisoned whores convey different messages by their attire. Dorothea Target is ‘brave’ (V.ii.26SD) and acts accordingly; Penelope Whorehound, who pretends to be respectable, is dressed like a citizen’s wife; and Catherina Bountinall displays her finery provocatively: ‘Y’are so busy about my petticoat, you’ll creep up to my placket, and you could but attain the honour, but and the outsides offend your rogueships, look ’o the lining, ’tis silk… You would be glad to wipe your nose with the skirt on’t’ (V.ii.421–7). However, the beadles who accompany the whores carry the blue gowns into which they will be forced to change. The Master of Bridewell explains: Being stript out of her wanton loose attire, That garment she puts on, base to the eye, Only to clothe her in humility. (V.ii.302–4) Towards the end of Part One there are carnivalesque inversions of the dress code, as Candido returns from the senate wearing his carpet to find his journeyman George dressed in his gown; he retaliates by dressing himself as an apprentice. It is all in fun; but Candido, characteristically, draws a moral about the madness of a topsy-turvey world: ‘’tis not the fashion unless it alter: monarchs turn to beggars, beggars creep into the nests of princes, masters serve their prentices, ladies their servingmen, men turn to women’ (IV.iii. 130–3). (The last joke in particular suggests that licence in clothing leads to sexual licence.) Elsewhere in Part One Bellafront dresses as a page and Hippolito, Matheo and Infaelice disguise themselves as friars; Orlando spends much of Part Two dressed as a servant. Candido’s speech implies that these tricks are more than


just plot devices: they provide a playful, temporary release from the structures of a fundamentally conservative society. The underlying conservatism is conveyed by the number of times characters in both plays kneel. Both of Candido’s wives express their submission to him in this way. Candido counters Viola’s gesture by telling her, ‘Nay, rise, for ill deeds kneel unto none but heaven’ (V.ii.482). The ‘Bride’, on the other hand, underlines the importance of her submission: down I will be thrown With the least blow you give me; I disdain The wife that is her husband’s sovereign. (II.ii.107–9) When Orlando appears in his own person, Matheo takes off his hat and Bellafront kneels; both gestures recognize the authority of a father (IV.i.33–40). But just as there are carnivalesque switches of clothing, there are variations on the gesture of kneeling; Infaelice uses it ironically in Part Two, in her pretended confession of adultery: Earth is sin’s cushion: when the sick soul feels Herself growing poor, she then turns beggar, cries And kneels for help…. (III.i.138–40) In reality this is what Hippolito should be doing to her. Both plays are full of stage pictures, often quite elaborate ones, that convey social meaning. As they accumulate we seem to be watching a whole society. Part One opens with a stage picture that is ostentatiously aristocratic: Enter at one door a funeral, a coronet lying on the hearse, stutcheons and garlands hanging on the sides, attended by Gasparo Trebatzi, Duke of Milan, Castruchio, Sinezi, Pioratto, Fluello, and others at another door. Enter Hippolito in discontented appearance, 8 Matheo a gentleman his friend labouring to hold him back. (I.i.SD) The opening scene belongs to a tragedy, set in that generalized Italian court so beloved by Jacobean playwrights. A similar note is struck at the opening of IV.i: ‘Enter a servant setting out a table, on which be places a skull, a picture, a book and a taper’. The servant interprets the stage picture comically: ‘My master means sure to turn me into a student; for here’s my book, here my desk, here my light; this my close chamber, and here my punk’ (IV.i.4–6). Though not formally a clown, he has a clown’s disrespect for serious dramatic effects. Hippolito interprets the skull and the picture more conventionally: ‘here ’tis read,/False


colours last after the true be dead’ (IV.i.40–1). Both images of mourning are misleading, since they centre on Infaelice, who is not really dead; and the tragic, aristocratic ambience they create sets off by contrast the more ordinary locations in which the play spends most of its time. 9 Bellafront’s boudoir is created with as much detail as the aristocratic funeral, but it is detail of a very different order: Enter Roger with a stool, cushion, looking-glass and chafing-dish. Those being set down, be pulls out of his pocket a vial with white colour in it, and two boxes, one with white, another red painting. He places all things in order and a candle by them, singing with the ends of old ballads as be does it. At last Bellafront (as be rubs his cheek with the colours) whistles within. (II.i.SD) We are being led up to the first appearance of the title character, by the visual creation of the world she operates in. The cosmetics, a sign of deception and corruption, are not just a realistic detail but a moral image, drawing on the same conventional wisdom as Hippolito’s meditation on the skull. Set off against the disreputable world in which Bellafront begins is the decent order of Candido’s shop, a setting that recurs through both plays. The detail in the printed stage directions is less elaborate, but we know where we are. Candido’s goods are on display, and Viola fusses about them: ‘Come, you put up your wares in good order here, do you not think you, one piece cast this way, another that way?’ (I.v. 1–2). Bellafront and Candido are both in business; but the stage pictures that create their respective worlds tell us what different businesses they are. The ending of Part Two, in which the principal characters are brought to judgement, is set in Bridewell prison, a scene full of images of public justice. In Part One Candido’s apprentices break out, in the manner of their kind, to do rough justice of their own on his tormentor Fustigo; in Part Two we see the structured judgements done by society itself. The entrance of Bots the pander is accompanied by images of punishment: ‘Enter Constable, after him Bots, after him two Beadles, one with hemp, the other with a beetle’ (V.ii.213SD). When the Master explains that panders are set to beat hemp, the Duke expresses satisfaction: ‘This does savour/Of justice, basest slaves to basest labour’ (V.ii. 250–1). Dorothea Target is the centre of a similar tableau of justice: ‘Enter two of the Masters, a Constable after them, then Dorothea Target, brave, after her two Beadles, th’one with a wheel, the other with a blue gown’ (V.ii.265SD). The Master explains the wheel by saying curtly, ‘She must spin’ (290). Penelope Whorehound is accompanied by a beadle with a blue gown and another with chalk and a mallet. The social message of the props and costumes is clear: criminals are punished by being made to work on society’s terms. Both plays, taken as a whole, concern themselves with social structures and institutions: marriage, the family, the shop, the hospital (Part One ends in Bedlam), the prison. The loosely formed and almost characterless groups of courtiers who wander through both plays, commenting, playing tricks, and generally linking the plots,


never achieve the clarity of the characters we can fix in their places: Bellafront in her brothel, Candido in his shop, the patients and prisoners in their institutions. The success of the Bedlam scene in Part One is attested by the fact that the Bridewell scene is an obvious encore, and is mentioned on the title page of Part Two. Each is the culminating scene of its play, loosely linked to the story but finding its real value as the climax to a series of significant stage pictures, watched and commented on by onstage observers. In Part One the discoveryspace is used for the first time for the waking of the drugged Infaelice, who is discovered on a bed, apparently dead but really asleep; the Duke and his courtiers sit on stools and watch her as music plays and an hourglass—normally the symbol of mortality—times her return to life. It is used again, more simply but no less strikingly, as the Master of Bedlam imroduces his first patient: ‘Discovers an old many wrapped in a net’ (V.ii.176SD). He is a citizen bankrupted by losses at sea, obsessed with the idea of fishing for his lost ships. The other patients simply ‘enter’; but they could enter into the discovery-space he has vacated; and they all have the quality of being displayed and commented on. Their keeper presents them like a showman introducing a troupe of performers who can make their audience both cry and laugh: And though ‘twould grieve a soul to see God’s image So blemish’t and defac’d, yet do they act Such antic and such pretty lunacies That spite of sorrow they will make you smile. (V.ii.158–61) Like popular theatre itself, they display variety: I’ll show you now a pair quite different From him that’s gone: he was all words; and these, Unless you urge ’em, seldom spend their speech. (V.ii.244–6) The spectators watch and comment like children at a zoo: ‘Observe him’; ‘See how he notes the other, how he feeds’ (V.ii.257, 271). But when they find the show amusing, the first madman turns on them: ‘Do you laugh at God’s creatures?’ (V.ii.201); as he cries out in hunger, ‘omnes’ react like a theatre audience moved by pathos: ‘a very piteous sight’ (V.ii.240). In the process they direct the feelings of the actual audience. While the Bedlam scene displays its characters to work on the feelings of the audience (on stage and off) the Bridewell scene uses the same device for some acute social commentary. At first, however, the main note seems to be theatricality. A long introduction giving the history of the prison, based on Stow’s Survey of London, plays on the audience’s interest in its own city and its


institutions (V.ii.1–54). The types on display are again varied, with the Master acting as presenter: as Dorothea Target goes off defiantly, he concludes: You see, this drab swells with a wanton rein; The next that enters has a different strain. DUKE:

Variety is good, let’s see the rest. (V.ii.306–8)

The next, Penelope Whorehound, is just as hardened but seems demure and pleads for pity, breaking into curses only at the end of her routine. The Master then introduces his climactic performer, Catherina Bountinall: Now shall you see a monster both in shape And nature quite from these, that sheds no tear, Nor yet is nice, ’tis a plain ramping bear; Many such whales are cast upon this shore.

OMNES: MASTER:

Let’s see her. 1 Then behold a swaggering whore. (V.ii.360–4)

She enters to rough music, with a beadle pounding on a basin. The inset scenes played by Bots and the three whores have something of the quality of climactic clown-routines like the one that ends When You See Me You Know Me. With the Duke acting as his feed, Bots narrates his military career in a series of bawdy puns (V.ii.226–33). Penelope Whorehound’s fake pathos is equally bawdy: ‘Oh sweet sir, I fear the spoiling of other places about me that are dearer than my eyes; if you be gentlemen, if you be men, or ever came of a woman, pity my case, stand to me, stick to me’ (V.ii.315–17). The Duke agrees that he and his fellow watchers will conceal his identity by keeping their hats on, so that the whores will speak more freely: ‘be covered, all/Fellows now, to make the scene more comical’ (V.ii.262–3). But these comic routines have an edge. Bots’s pretence that he has nothing to do with the life of sin is broken down when the whores recognize him. This links directly with Bellafront’s insistence on men’s responsibility for prostitution, and Bots’s defence may make some members of the audience feel uncomfortable: ‘Is there any gentleman here knows not a whore, and is he a hair the worse for that?’ (V.ii.349–50). (Given that falling hair was one symptom of the pox, the answer is probably yes.) The scene also confronts squarely the question of whether a prison like Bridewell can bring about reform. In reality, Bridewell and other houses of correction were important experiments, designed not just to punish but also to cure; they were a response to a widespread recognition that prisoners came out worse than they


went in. 10 Infaelice takes a hopeful view: ‘Methinks this place/Should make even Lais honest’ (V.ii.253–4; Lais was a famous Corinthian courtesan). 11 But the hardened prostitutes we see are not encouraging, and the Master admits that while ‘some it turns good…some going hence/Are by being here more lost in impudence’ (V.ii.254–7). Whether they can be cured, then, is a moot point; all we are sure of is that they can be looked at. They are goods. The Master asks, ‘Will your grace see more of this bad ware?’ and the Duke replies, ‘No, shut up shop, we’ll now break up the fair’ (V.ii.439–40). Is there a link between the placid, respectable life of Candido—in whose shop there is a constant emphasis on goods on display—and this unsentimental image of society at its roughest? 12 I have said that the play does not normally work like this; but in this case the verbal link in the language may encourage the audience to see an equivalent link between two apparently different stage pictures. Theatrically, the common factor is a tendency to static set-pieces on display, reflecting a visually oriented culture in which selling, soliciting and punishing were all done in public, in the language of pictures. The Honest Whore, in its tendency to freeze and holds its effects, is very different from The Fair Maid of the West, with its loose, free-wheeling, storytelling quality. That play sweeps its audience along; this one holds it, watching, listening and thinking. We may imagine that as a play written for the Fortune it was acted in a handsomer playhouse, and one with greater pretensions, than the playhouses in which The Fair Maid of the West entertained its audiences. It has larger ambitions; its commentary is directed not just towards the admiration of its heroine but towards a study of the institutions of the society in which she and her fellow characters operate. Though it states some awkward truths, it is finally a conservative commentary. For all the variety of roles they adopt, its principal characters are ultimately fixed as icons embodying an acceptance of order. The tradesman is patient, the father is kindly, the wife submits. And the beadles are standing by with blue gowns for anyone who gives trouble.

8 IF YOU KNOW NOT ME YOU KNOW NOBODY

One of the persistent stories in popular culture is that of the hero from the past who is not really dead but asleep, in hiding, ready to come back to life for his people. 1 Not long after Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603, she was alive again on the popular stage, in the two parts of If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, probably acted in 1605 and 1606 respectively. This was likely a production of Queen Anne’s Men; the first part may have begun its life at the Boar’s Head or the Curtain, and after the company moved the two parts would have been a mainstay of its repertoire at the Red Bull. The Prologue for a later revival of Part One at the Cockpit declares that the play was well receiv’d and well perform’d at first; Grac’d, and frequented; and the cradle age Did throng the seats, the boxes and the stage. Given that seating on the stage was unusual in the public theatre, the last line if taken literally means overflow houses. Part One went through eight editions between 1605 and 1639, making it one of the most popular plays of the period. Evidently the reappearance of the dead Queen answered an imaginative need. Part Two, with four editions between 1605 and 1633, was relatively less popular, but only relatively. Part One centres on Elizabeth, and it has been suggested that The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth, the subtitle of the 1605 Quarto, was the original title of the play. 2 Part Two is more diffuse, but the principal character for much of its length is Sir Thomas Gresham, a citizen-hero whose achievements the play celebrates. The Gresham play may originally have been independent, and the author (almost certainly Thomas Heywood) may have grafted the two plays together by transferring to Part Two the Armada scenes that appear to have ended the original Queen Elizabeth play. 3 Part One seems to be a reported text: according to the Cockpit prologue, ‘some by stenography drew/The plot; put it in print, scarce one word true’. The actors playing Philip of Spain, Dodds, Gage, and the Clown, may have had a hand in the piracy; because of doubling possibilities, there may have been no more than two actors involved. 4 If the main reporter was taking notes at a performance, this makes the text bad in one sense, but good in another. Details of language will be unreliable, but this

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is not a play in which details of language are of primary importance; what we have instead is an eyewitness account of the more striking theatrical effects, especially the visual effects, of the performance. 5 Most of Part One concerns the persecution of Princess Elizabeth by henchmen of her sister Queen Mary. Elizabeth is first discovered in bed, an invalid, with two doctors attending on her. The later images of her as a figure of power surrounded by spectacle are a recoil from this first impression. In theatrical terms, she is menaced by the entrance of Lord Williams of Thame and Lord Chandos ‘with soldiers, drums, etc’ (iii.166). Later, such effects will buttress her own power; here she is vulnerable and persecuted, and there is a clash between the military effect of the soldiers’ entrance and the picture of the female figure in bed. Yet, she has a kind of theatrical authority. The stage direction ‘Enter Elizabeth in her bed’ (iii.188) means that the audience’s first sight of her will almost certainly involve the discovery-space, making a striking first impression. She can be imperious: ‘We are not pleas’d with your intrusion, lords’ (iii.190). But the main emphasis is on Elizabeth the invalid: ‘Oh my heart; I hope, my lords, considering my extremity and/Weakness, you will dispense a little with your haste’ (iii.203–4). Her troubles are mental as well as physical: she describes herself as ‘heart sick, brain sick, and sick even to death’ (v.315). Until near the end of the play, her key emotion is fear: ‘Shall I outlive this night?’ (xiv.978); ‘I fear this Hampton Court/ Will be my grave’ (xvii.1211–12). This may seem an odd note for a character who is so much the centre of admiration to strike. Seen in realistic terms it is an undignified, even irritating self-pity. But these are not the terms on which such plays operate. The actor is not just interpreting the character but presenting her; the pity is not just the character’s feeling for herself but the play’s (and the audience’s) feeling for her, which the actor invokes. As a victim, Elizabeth operates in a long tradition of plays about martyrs and saints. 6 This is the role she self-consciously identifies with: ‘If I miscarry in this enterprise, and ask you why,/A virgin and a martyr both I die’ (v.341–2). Overcome by illness on her way to the Tower, she is denied a chair by the Constable and forced to sit on the ground in the rain. The moment is fixed, held, and commented on: ELIZABETH: Then on this stone, this cold stone I will sit; I needs must say you hardly me intreat, When for a chair, this hard stone is my seat. SUSSEX: My lord, you deal too cruelly with the Princess; You knew her father, she’s no stranger to you. THAME: Madam, it rains. SUSSEX: Good lady, take my cloak. ELIZABETH: No, let it alone: see, gentlemen, The piteous heavens weep tears into my bosom. On this cold stone I sit, rain in my face, But better here than in a worser place


Where this bad man will lead me. (vii.595–606) Presumably the stone and the rain are both imagined (though the latter may involve a conventionalized sound effect). What we fix on is the basic theatrical image of indignity as the future Queen, surrounded by awkward and embarrassed attendants, sits on the stage floor. The signs of her virtue are equally visual, and evoke the popular value of charity. We see her distributing money to her household: ‘Gentlemen, divide these few crowns amongst you;/I am now a prisoner, and shall want nothing’ (v.334–5). She uses her imprisonment in ‘labours to relieve the poor’; she orders her gentleman-usher, ‘Go Gage, distribute these to those that need’, and the 1639 text adds a marginal stage direction, ‘She delivereth to them shirts and smocks’ (x.809–10, p. xxix). Elizabeth’s enemies are reduced to stereotyped figures of evil, drawing on the audience’s hostility in a direct and simple way. When she is imprisoned in the Tower, Mary allows her some liberty but the Constable has more lurid ideas: But that my warrant is not yet so strict, I’d lay her in a dungeon where her eyes Should not have light to read her prayer-book; So would I danger both her soul and body ‘Cause she an alien is to us Catholics. Her bed should be all snakes, her rest despair, Torture should make her curse her faithless prayer. (ix.717–23) The villainy of her other jailor Beningfield is just as forthright and selfadvertising: ‘So like a subject to my sovereign’s state,/I will pursue her with my deadly hate’ (xiv.1082–3). Like Elizabeth as martyr, her persecutors comment on their own roles as villains, working up audience indignation. The effect is reinforced by the religious issue on which the Constable focuses. Elizabeth is identified earlier in the play as ‘a favourite of these heretics’ (ii.97), and her foes are given to muttering darkly about what the future will be like if she succeeds: ‘I do divine whoever lives this seven years/Shall see no religion here but heresy’ (xviii.1324–5). That is the voice of Winchester; when he dies, and his ally Cardinal Pole sickens, Sussex comments from the other side, which is the audience’s: Let him go; why, then there’s a fall of prelates. This realm will never stand in perfect state Till all their faction be clear ruinate. (xx.1389–91)

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Bound up with the religious question is anti-Spanish feeling. In a scene incidental to the plot but crucial to the play’s values, a Spaniard treacherously murders an Englishman, stabbing him in the back; when Philip of Spain orders the culprit hanged at Charing Cross the reassuring Englishness of the place name is one sign that justice is being done. By exploiting these familiar sympathies, the play works up the audience’s excitement in its conflicts. The conflicts themselves are developed to a great extent in visual terms. We have seen the effect of Elizabeth sitting on the floor. In another scene, Winchester enters with six commissioners, and while they sit she kneels. Sussex calls attention to the stage picture: SUSSEX: It becomes you not being a princess to deject your knee: A chair there. ELIZABETH: My duty with my fortunes do agree, And to the Queen in you I bend my knee. SUSSEX: You shall not kneel where Sussex sits in place; The chamber-keeper, a chair there for Her Grace. (v.366–71) In this case there is something assertive about Elizabeth’s kneeling: it is her decision, insisted on in a way that gives her control of the moment. Later in the scene, told that she has been committed to the Tower, she kneels and pleads in a way that makes her look simply vulnerable. When the two sisters finally meet, Elizabeth kneels to Mary, and Mary’s gesture of raising her not only acts as a sign of reconciliation but also anticipates Elizabeth’s ultimate triumph. She comments, ‘Then God hath kept his promise’, and Philip adds, ‘Now by my crown, you ha’ been kept down too long’ (viii.1296–302). Aided by this commentary, the meaning of the stage picture resonates beyond the immediate moment. The language of spectacle shows Elizabeth’s changing fortunes. Naturally, it is Mary who gets the spectacle earlier in the play. Her first entrance is processional: ‘Enter Thame bearing the purse, Chandos the mace, Howard the sceptre, Sussex the crown; then the Queen, after her the Cardinal, Sentlow, Gage and attendants’ (ii.45–7). The meeting of Mary and Philip is accompanied by flourishes and loyal shouts. But in the scenes before her ultimate meeting with Elizabeth, Mary is withdrawn from the stage. Elizabeth, even as a prisoner, is constantly on show, surrounded by other characters, demonstrating a rapport with ordinary people; this will be a keynote of her reign as both plays depict it. In contrast, Mary is withdrawn and isolated, as King James was to be. When the sisters meet, Mary, entering with attendant lords and four torchbearers, gets the theatrical weight we would expect; but Elizabeth’s entrance is more spectacular. It is worked up by Mary herself: QUEEN: Usher her in by torchlight. HOWARD: Gentlemen ushers, and gentlemen pensioners, lights For the Princess, attendance, gentlemen. (xviii.1230–2)


The stage directions ‘Exeunt for the Princess’ and ‘Enter all with Elizabeth’ (xviii.1247–9) evidently record the reporter’s impression of a full stage, with all the actors who can be spared not only accompanying Elizabeth but also briefly (and symbolically) deserting Mary in order to do so. The next important spectacle scenes show the parting of Philip and Mary, and the funeral of Winchester; even in scenes involving her adversaries, the spectacle starts to work in Elizabeth’s favour. As Elizabeth’s first appearance marks the only evident use of the discoveryspace, so her accession marks the only use of the gallery. She enters ‘above’ attended by her usher Gage and her gentlewoman Clarentia (xxi.1414). In this position of dominance she receives the news of her accession from a series of messengers who enter breathless with excitement, eager to be among the first to tell her. The villain Beningfield tries for a similar entrance in the last scene, but his bogus expression of loyalty comes too late and he gets his comeuppance when Elizabeth addresses him as ‘my jailor’—a term Beningfield, with a bureaucrat’s dislike of calling things by their true names, has begged her not to use (xiv.1013–16, xxiii.1541). The main business of the last scene is the transfer of the symbols of power to the new Queen. Her entrance is more elaborate than any Mary has been given: A sennet. Enter four trumpeters, after them sergeant trumpeter with a mace, after him purse-bearer, Sussex with the crown, Howard with the sceptre, Constable with the cap of maintenance, Chandois with the sword, Thame with the collar and a George, four gentlemen bearing the canopy over the Queen, two gentlewomen bearing up her train, six gentlemen pensioners. The Queen takes state. (xxiii.1511–17) The canopy has not been seen before, and must have made an imposing effect on an already crowded stage. The symbols are not just carried on; they are used, creating a reciprocal relationship between Elizabeth and her subjects very different from the withdrawn, hidden quality of Mary: SUSSEX: The imperial crown I here present Your Grace, With it my staff of office and my place. ELIZABETH: Whilst we this crown, so long your place enjoy. HOWARD: Th’imperial sceptre here I offer up. ELIZABETH: Keep it my lord, and with it be you High Admiral. … CHANDOIS: The sword of Justice on my bended knee I to Your Grace present; heaven bless your reign. ELIZABETH: This sword is ours, this staff is yours again. THAME: This Garter with the order of the George, Two ornaments unto the crown of England,

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ELIZABETH:

I here present. Possess them still, my lord. (xiii.1520–4, 1551–7)

There is an implied rebuke here to the Jacobean absolutism that was to cause so much trouble as the century advanced. Even the symbols that Elizabeth keeps, the crown and the sword, she gets from representatives of her people. When in turn she bestows symbols of office on her attendant lords it is part of a two-way traffic. The dramatic form itself makes a political point: while James was the unspeaking centre of the court masques, Elizabeth as a character on the public stage takes part in a dialogue. The climactic symbol of the final scene is one that could have had no place in the spectacles surrounding Mary: an English Bible. Like the symbols of political power, the Bible recurs throughout the play, forming an important part of its visual language. In an earlier scene, Beningfield reacts to this symbol like a vampire to a rope of garlic: Marry a God, what’s here, an English Bible? Sanctum Maria, pardon this profanation of my heart! Water, Barwick, water, I’ll meddle with’t no more. (xiv.1039–41) Shortly thereafter a dumb show presents a dream-action that displays the symbol’s power directly. Having called for music, Elizabeth sleeps: Enter Winchester, Constable, Barwick, and friars; at the other door two angels. The friar steps to her, offering to kill her; the angels drive them back. Exeunt. The angel opens the Bible, and puts it in her band as she sleeps. Exeunt angels; she wakes. (xiv.1049–53) She finds the Bible open at the text, ‘Whoso putteth his trust in the Lord, I Shall not be confounded’ (xiv.1064–5). It seems a comment not only on the scene but also on Elizabeth’s career up to this point in the play, a tag that summarizes the action. The Bible makes its climactic appearance at the very end, in an episode based on Elizabeth’s actual entry into London: 7 And now to London, lords, lead on the way, Praising that King that all kings else obey. Sennet about the stage in order; the Mayor of London meets them. MAYOR: I from this city London do present This purse and Bible to your majesty;


A thousand of your faithful citizens In velvet coats and chains well mounted, stay To greet their royal sovereign on the way. (xxiii.1569–77) Elizabeth—entering into the occasion as the historical Elizabeth did, and as James did not 8 —replies with a long speech in praise of the Bible, opening it in a symbolic gesture of making true religion free and public: This book that hath so long concealed itself, So long shut up, so long hid; now, lords, see, We here unclasp, forever it is free; Who looks for joy, let him this book adore, This is true food for rich men and for poor. (xxiii.1584–8) As in the dream sequence, it matters that the Bible is open. It is not just a religious object to be reverenced but an instrument to be used in a practical way. It matters, too, that London’s representative presents Elizabeth with the Bible: the city of tradesmen, shopkeepers and artisans, the home of the play’s own audience, gives the Queen what the play presents as the most important symbol of her reign; in turn she stresses what the English Bible stands for, a religion open to ordinary people. We do not see the faithful citizens on stage; the Lord Mayor stands for them, and he stands out more sharply as a single figure representing the people of London on a stage full of finely-dressed aristocrats. Throughout the play Elizabeth has been surrounded by commentary: admiring, pitying, summarizing. Sussex is typical: ‘As good a lady as e’re England bred;/Would he that caus’d this woe had lost his head’ (vii.576–7). Such lines bring the audience’s concern into focus. The play also dramatizes that concern in the reactions of representative common people. Elizabeth’s servants weep for her (v.324–310); a boy presents her with a nosegay (x.774–804); three poor men pay their respects and present her with tokens, while the offstage sound of bells conveys the greeting of their village (xi.840–76). The Constable orders the boy whipped, and Beningfield orders the poor man beaten. But in both cases the pathos is touched with comedy. When the Constable demands the boy tell him what letters he has given Elizabeth, he replies, ‘Faith, gaffer, I know no letters but great A,/B and C; I am not come to K yet’ (x.800–1). When Elizabeth, asked how she fares, replies ‘tanquam ovis’, the poor men have trouble with the language: ‘Tanqus ovrus, that I should live to see, tanqus ovris…. I shall ne’er love tanquam ovris again for this trick’ (xi.879–97). Three beer-drinking soldiers, set to guard her, discuss her fate, but cautiously: ‘Well, sirs, I have two sisters, and the one loves the other, and would not send her to prison for a million, is there any harm in this?’ (vi.484–5). Variations on the catch-phrase ‘Is there any harm in this?’ and the soldiers’ key prop, a jack of beer, give their

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sympathetic commentary a clown-quality. In each case, support for Elizabeth comes from characters who can make the audience laugh as well as engage their sympathy; this is a dimension of her popular appeal. The Clown himself is firmly on Elizabeth’s side. His first, explosive entrance —‘O arm, arm, arm!’ (iii.156)—is a warning of her danger, though he is also preoccupied with his own fear of the soldiers and their drums. Later we see him beating a soldier (viii.757); in the text the episode consists of a single stage direction, but it may have given the Clown a chance to improvise. His most striking moments are his confrontations with the villain Beningfield. In the first of these, Beningfield orders his servant Barwick to take the chair of state off its platform, and he sits on it while Barwick pulls his boots off. The Clown is outraged—‘O monstrous, what a saucy companion’s this?’ (xii.906)—and retaliates by pulling the chair out from under him. The slapstick, with its symbolic use of the stage furniture, makes a revealing social point: it is the Clown who is the conservative figure, defending the decency and order for which Beningfield has no respect. The Clown’s trick with the chair is itself disrespectful, but paradoxically it serves the interests of order: it is the second twist needed to put an upside-down world to rights. 9 True order will be confirmed in the last scene when Elizabeth ‘takes state’ in the same chair. At another point the Clown seems to betray Elizabeth by warning Beningfield that she is talking with ‘one in the garden’ (xiv.1087) who gained entrance by leaping over the wall. Praising the Clown’s loyalty, Beningfield orders the interloper brought to him: moments later a troop of soldiers, led by the Clown, enters with a goat. There would be an extra charge of surprise and relief in the laughter at this point—and if the play were done for a modern audience, the buzz of excitement that comes when a live animal appears on stage. Jacobean audiences were presumably more blasé about performing animals; but the novelty of using a goat instead of a dog or a monkey might well have produced something like the modern reaction. Concluding the scene with an obvious taunt, the Clown recalls his previous trick on Beningfield: if you have anything to say to this honest fellow, Who for his gray head and reverend beard is so like, He may be a kin to you. BENINGFIELD: A kin to me, knave? I’ll have thee whipt. CLOWN: Then your worship may cry quittance with my posteriors for misusing of yours. (xiv.1113–18) Both routines end with Beningfield beating the Clown, recalling St John Chrysostom’s classic definition of the clown as ‘he who gets slapped’. But he has made his point, using strongly physical low comedy to play on the audience’s hostility to Elizabeth’s enemies. In the end, the Clown celebrates:


for joy of the old Queen’s death, Let bells ring, and children sing, For we may have cause to remember The seventeenth day of November. (xxii.1474–7) The rhyme (which anticipates the Guy Fawkes jingle) fixes the Queen’s accession as a great event in the popular imagination. But at this point the play introduces an odd twist. Thame, who has generally been a sympathetic figure, rebukes the Clown for his callous attitude to Mary: methink ’twere fit To spend some funeral tears upon her hearse Who while she liv’d was dear unto you all. … Had you the wisest and the lovingest prince That ever swayed a sceptre in the world This is the love he shall have after life. (xxii.1483–5, 1498–1500) Nothing else in the play suggests that the joy of Elizabeth’s accession should be shadowed by regret for what is lost. If the speech means just what it says (and in popular drama this can happen) then it is an interesting minority report. Though the old Queen stood against the Protestantism the play celebrates, and though her passing means England’s salvation, she was still Queen, and in her death she is entitled to respect. There is another possibility, however: Thame’s speech is transferable in time. His bitter reflections on how the dead are forgotten could apply to Elizabeth as well as to Mary, shading the joy of her accession with the knowledge of her recent loss, and rebuking those who were mindlessly eager to welcome the new king. The Clown accepts Thame’s reproach—‘By my faith, my masters, he speaks wisely’ (xxii.1503)—but runs off to have his bonfire anyway. Thame concludes, ‘I blame you not, nor do I you commend,/For you will still the stronger side defend’ (xii.1509–10). For the most part the Clown has simply lined up with the play’s sympathies (and in so doing, contrary to Thame’s rebuke, he has defended the weaker side). But the eclectic, expedient quality of popular dramaturgy, coupled with the free-wheeling nature of stage clowns generally, allows a different use of him in this scene, a rebuke to what is shallow in the popular response to great events. In Part One as a whole, however, the popular response is the true one. In Elizabeth’s troubles her allies are not just sympathetic nobles but servants, poor people, a boy and a clown (to say nothing of the goat). In Part Two, the focus shifts to the life of the people—specifically, the middle classes who would have made up a large part of the audience—and to their fantasies of prosperity and

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munificence. The central figure is Sir Thomas Gresham. His wealth and power make him in his own way as remote from the actual lives of the audience as Elizabeth is; but he represents the highest possibilities of their life, not a different life altogether. He has a small role in the first play, where he frustrates a plot on Elizabeth’s life. He enters in the opening minutes of the second play surrounded by commentary, including his own: FACTOR: Neither to flatter nor detract from him, He is a merchant of good estimate; Care how to get and forecast to increase (If so they be accounted) be his faults. MERCHANT: They are especial virtues, being clear From avarice and base extortion. But here he comes: good day to master Gresham; You keep your word. Enter Gresham. GRESHAM: Else should I ill deserve The title that I wear; a merchant’s tongue Should not strike false. (i.13–24) Like Candido in The Honest Whore, he generates admiring commentary that forms an important part of the rhythm of his scenes and is uttered in full awareness of the audience. From the beginning he is on display, and the actor has to present him as well as impersonate him. Gresham’s most notable feat is the building of the Royal Exchange. The fascination with local places, essential to works like Stow’s Survey of London, comes into play here. Planning his work, Gresham sees it as a way of embodying the dreams and values of his class, and of securing his own fame: ’Twill do me good to see shops with fair wives Sit to attend the profit of their husbands; Young maids brought up, young men as prentices. Some shall prove masters and speak in Gresham’s praise: In Gresham’s work we did our fortunes raise. (viii.1154–8) Like the Mayor in Edward IV, he has a historical perspective on himself and his own achievement; the voice of the character is also the voice of posterity celebrating him. He conceives the idea of the building when he and his colleagues are caught by an unexpected shower and he deplores the lack of a roofed meeting-place. Like the accession of Elizabeth, the date will be famous, and this is a way of fixing the audience’s attention on the scene itself:


The tenth of March; well, if I live, I’ll raise a work shall make our merchants say, ’Twas a good shower that fell upon that day. (iii.558–60) The actual work of building is enacted symbolically by the use of significant props. The workmen appear, displaying their tools like the builders of the Ark in a miracle play: ‘Here, here with trowel and tools ready at hand’ (ix.1183). Gresham and his colleagues lay the first bricks on stage, putting a gold coin on each one, and once again Gresham fixes the date as memorable: ‘This seventh of June we the first stone will lay’ (ix.1188). His commentary holds each prop, and the action itself, in focus for a moment: Here’s a brick, here’s a fair sovereign; Thus I begin, be it hereafter told I laid the first stone with a piece of gold. (ix.1190–2) The rhyme seems intended to fix the moment in memory, and the symbolic gestures make the scene as ceremonial in its own way as the passing of the symbols of power between Elizabeth and her nobles. Shortly afterwards a blazing star appears. It too seems to mark the occasion as famous, but it also predicts a string of disasters for Gresham. In a later scene he gives a banquet, attended by the Russian ambassador (who speaks Latin, lending a certain gravitas to the scene); the banquet is the occasion for Gresham to display his strength in adversity, as messengers arrive with bad news. The ship carrying the pictures for the Royal Exchange has sunk; Gresham is concerned not with his own loss but with the loss to the Exchange, and a lord who is one of the guests admires his attitude: ‘A noble citizen’ (x.1504). A trade venture with the King of Barbary has collapsed, and Gresham’s only return for an enormous financial outlay is a dagger and a pair of slippers. The same lord sets up Gresham’s response, rather as the characters who test Candido’s patience do: ‘I fear me this will plague him, a strange cross;/How will he take this news, loss upon loss?’ (x. 1524–5). Gresham rises to the challenge by donning the slippers—‘then hautboys play,/On slippers I’ll dance all my care away’—and telling the lords to report, ‘You Gresham saw a pair of slippers wear/Cost thirty thousand pound’ (x. 1531–6). He then powders and drinks a pearl for.which he has paid £16,000. Gresham’s demonstration of his wealth and the cheerful ease with which he can take his losses is punctuated by the admiring commentary of the bystanders —‘As royal in his virtues as his buildings’ (x.1540)—commentary which ultimately issues in a moral drawn by Gresham himself: GRESHAM: …Whoever saw a merchant bravelier fraught,

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LADY RAMSEY:

GRESHAM:

In dearer slippers or a richer draught? You are an honour to all English merchants, As bountiful as rich, as charitable As rich, as renowned as any of all. I do not this as prodigal of my wealth, Rather to show how I esteem that loss Which cannot be regained; a London merchant Thus treads on a king’s present. (x.1554–62)

The commentary has a dramatic shape of its own, shifting from ebullient selfassertion to sober correction and back again. The gestures involving the slippers and the pearl dramatize Gresham’s wealth visually, with a cartoon playfulness; the surrounding commentary holds each gesture sharply in focus, broadening its significance as it does so. In one of the play’s most telling juxtapositions, Gresham’s banquet is followed by the entrance of Tawny-coat, a pedlar reduced to poverty, who comes on with a spade, commenting, ‘Hard world, when men dig living out of stones’ (xi.1577). The spade is his prop as the pearl and slippers are Gresham’s; it symbolizes a life of hard toil, for barely enough to live on, the other side of the money-making world in which Gresham has done so well. The play’s conservatism holds, however, for Tawnycoat—who, instead of begging, works to pay his debts and support his family—is rescued by the play’s other principal citizen character, the eccentric haberdasher Old Hobson. Hobson enters in his dressing-gown and slippers, in which he has chosen to take a morning walk, turning the whole scene into comedy even before he rescues Tawny-coat. Hobson’s popularity as a character is attested by the fact that he is the hero of a jestbook that appeared shortly after the play and incorporates incidents from it. 10 Like Orlando Friscobaldo, he is conscious of himself as a famous eccentric, parading his name and his catch-phrases, ‘Bones a God’ and ‘Bones a me’ in scene after scene. Like Candido he is located in a shop, shown on stage with apprentices ‘opening the shop’ (vii.979) and setting out his wares. It is a less sober place than Candido’s, however: in Hobson’s first scene, no sooner have his apprentices opened the shop than they head for the taverns. Their master’s entrance causes them to scuttle behind the hangings, recalling a favourite trick of contemporary clowns. As Hobson declares, ‘Now they peep like Italian pantelones/Behind an arras, but I’ll start you knaves’ (ii.184–5). When Tawny-coat finds his way to Hobson’s shop by following the signs, he evokes a London street, but with as much comedy as realism: ‘Sure this is the lane, there’s the Windmill, this is the Dog’s head in the pot, here’s the Friar whipping the Nun’s arse; ’tis hereabout sure’ (vii.974–7). Hobson’s ebullience is ultimately the vehicle for citizen values as serious as those of Gresham. When he hears that the Puritan Timothy Thin-beard is about to be hanged for stealing from him, he sets off to save him with a burst of comic


energy: ‘A horse, a horse, cart-horse, malt-horse, anything’ (xiv.2172); but he follows this outburst with a serious reflection: A hundred thousand pound cannot make a man; A hundred shall not hang one by my means: Men are worth more than money. (xiv.2179–81) Once he has left, Lady Ramsey underlines the point by repeating and generalizing it: He is plain and honest; how many great possessors Live in this populous city, that make show Of greater zeal, yet will not pay so dear For a transgressor’s life; but few are found To save a man would lose a hundred pound. (xiv.2187–91) Hobson, no less than Gresham, is a centre of admiration, and as the other characters comment on the significance of his comic action, the tone gets increasingly sober and the action is generalized. Though human life is more important, money does matter in this play. Characters pause from time to time to check the cash flow: ‘So here’s five hundred pound come, one run away’ (vi.949). What matters is the attitude towards it. Hobson, trying to settle a long-standing feud between Gresham and Sir Thomas Ramsey, takes it as one of his chief arguments that they shouldn’t waste money on lawyers: ‘Ere I’d consume a penny amongst lawyers,/I’d give’t poor people, bones a me, I would’ (ii.349–50). In one of the principal set-pieces, Dr Nowell, the Dean of St Paul’s, shows off a portrait gallery of famous citizens who used their wealth for the community as a whole. The portraits are evidently on stage, likely in the discovery-space. There are five of them, enough to make an imposing show. Their presence buttresses the moral of the scene, the importance of public generosity, by giving it historical resonance, and the details of their subjects’ lives play on the audience’s interest in its own city and its history—including at one point a sober correction of a popular legend: NOWELL: This Sir Richard Whittington, three times mayor, Son to a knight and prentice to a mercer, Began the library of Greyfriars in London, And his executors after him did build Whittington College, thirteen alms-houses for poor men, Repaired St. Bartholomew’s in Smithfield, Glazed the Guildhall, and built Newgate. HOBSON: Bones of me, then I have heard lies,

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NOWELL:

For I have heard he was a scullion And rais’d himself by venture of a cat. They did the more wrong to the gentleman. (vi.791–801)

The scene is an illustrated lecture, in which sober history with a moral matters more than popular myth. 11 The value of charity, generalized here—‘Heaven grant that I may live, that when I die,/Although my children laugh, the poor may cry’ (vi.852–3)—is acted out in a specific example when Hobson raises Tawnycoat from penury. He is justified by the event: when we last see him the former pedlar is ‘now an able citizen late chosen/A master of the Hospital’ (xiv.2130– 1). The character who seems to stand against citizen virtue is Gresham’s prodigal nephew Jack. His jesting manner introduces something like the irreverence of the clown (appropriately, the play’s actual Clown acts as his messenger at one point). He parodies the sententiousness of the principal characters, and their key value of charity, when Gresham rebukes him for giving a gown to a prostitute: ‘Why, alas, uncle, the poor whore went naked, and you know the text commands us to clothe the naked’ (i.124–5). While Hobson values simplicity in dress, Jack, about to be hired as his factor, appears in a fancy costume that leads Hobson to exclaim, ‘He looks more like my master than my servant’ (ii.280). He plays successful jokes not only on the Puritan Timothy Thin-beard, an easy target, but also on Hobson himself: in an episode of pure farce, Hobson crosses the Channel in his dressing-gown and slippers to track down Jack in a French brothel; Jack turns the tables on him by having him arrested as a found-in, and threatens to tell his mistress: ‘She shall know what a slippery trick you would have served her in your slippers in France’ (xii.1987–9). (Hobson’s wife is referred to nowhere else; she exists only for purposes of this jest.) Jack varies the tonal mix of the play, and his ability to get away with his irresponsible pranks makes the overall value system ad hoc and eclectic. Ultimately, however, he is absorbed into the citizen culture. Gresham tolerates him as a young man who simply needs to sow his wild oats, as he himself did when he was young (vi.956–62). Finally Jack tries to restore his fortunes by proposing marriage to the widowed Lady Ramsey. Though his tone is impudent, his plan is not just a fantasy; some 25 per cent of London artisans and tradesmen got their start by marrying widows. 12 She turns him down, but good-humouredly, and gives him enough to pay off his debts. In the end he anticipates rejoining the citizen community: ‘And if I can grow rich by help of his,/I’ll say I rose by Lady Ramsey’s kiss’ (xvi.2533–4). The tag reduces the story to a neat formula, which can be held in the memory like the commentary that surrounds Gresham. In the text as we have it, Jack’s exit is followed by ‘a peal of chambers’ (xvii. 2535) introducing the Armada sequence. The citizen characters vanish as though they had never been, and the Queen and her lords—joined, in the longer version in the 1633 Quarto, by some boastful Spanish commanders—take over the stage


and talk us through the famous victory. The Queen has already appeared in the play to lend her approval to the Royal Exchange, and to give it its name. She enters in procession, heralded by trumpets. As we would expect, she is a figure held up for admiration; she talks to ambassadors in their own languages. But she approaches through the familiar streets of London: ‘She comes along the Strand from Somerset House,/Through Temple Bar, down Fleet Street and the Cheap’ (xiii.2021–2). She has a special relationship with Hobson, who earlier was delighted and nonplussed when a representative of the crown asked him for a loan: How, bones a me, Queen know Hobson, Queen know Hobson? And send but for one hundred pounds? Friend, come in; Come in, friend, shall have two, Queen shall have two. (vii.1115–17) When she appears he presumes on their acquaintance—‘Knowest thou not me, Queen? Then thou knowest nobody’ (xiii.2071)—and expresses astonishment that she should ask for a loan from a man she doesn’t know. He offers her more, and she responds goodhumouredly, ‘Thanks, honest Hobson, as I am true maid/ I’ll see myself the money back repaid’ (xiii.2093–4). In reality the City made regular loans to the Crown during Elizabeth’s reign, and the two institutions enjoyed a mutually supportive relationship; 13 but one imagines the tone of the transactions was usually a little different from this. As this scene brings Elizabeth into the orbit of the play’s comedy, it also ends characteristically with a tag, spoken by the Queen herself: ‘We to our people, they to us are dear’ (xiii.2113). As in Part One, she is the people’s Queen, not only held up for the audience’s admiration but also related closely to its world. The Armada sequence itself is theatrically simple: Elizabeth and her lords stand together, receiving news from the battle. It is as though the famous names and famous events, just by being recounted, will be enough to stir the audience. Drake’s entrance with captured Spanish ensigns is the only attempt to use the full language of theatre, as though for this sequence there is a natural audience rapport that does not need to be reinforced by extra effort. (The same simple methods are used for the Armada scene in the Fortune play The Whore of Babylon.) The longer 1633 text (which may have been the original ending of Part One) 14 adds some visual detail: Elizabeth enters ‘completely armed’, not only with the drums, trumpets and soldiers of the short version, but also with the Royal Standard (xix.2684–6). It is in the 1633 version in particular, where she has a long speech comparing herself to ‘brave Zenobia,/An eastern queen, who fac’d the Roman legions’ (xix.2704–5) that we see a striking difference between this courageous, assertive figure and the fearful victim of Part One. The Cockpit Epilogue to Part One portrays Elizabeth as a character who has played many parts:

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A subject, and a sovereign; in the one A pitied lady; in the regal throne A potent Queen; it now in you doth rest To know, in which she hath demean’d her best. We may be tempted to think in terms of character development; but the Epilogue stresses variety, and a ballad-like setting of opposites against each other. Each of the Queen’s roles has its own theatrical value; the play does not attempt to fuse them into a whole, but rather creates its energy by opposing them. This is in line with its general eclecticism—a striking feature of Part Two in particular, where the Queen’s first entrance is immediately preceded by the play’s bawdiest comedy, the scene in the French brothel. Part Two throws events together: the 1606 title page offers ‘the building of the Royal Exchange and the famous victory of Queen Elizabeth in the year 1588’, to which a cancelled title page now in the Folger library adds ‘Doctor Parry’s treasons’ and ‘the humours of Hobson and Tawny-coat’. This eclecticism is parodied in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, where the Citizen who comes from the audience demands ‘the life and death of Sir Thomas Gresham with the building of the Royal Exchange’ and the boy who speaks for the company counters with ‘the life and death of fat Drake, or the repairing of Fleet Privies’ (Induction, 19–28). Even within the citizen scenes there is considerable variety: the ebullient showmanship of Gresham taking his losses, the gravity of Dr Nowell’s lecture on his pictures, the eccentric, ultimately sentimental comedy of Hobson, and the trickster comedy of Jack. One moment captures the variety: Tawney-coat goes out singing a pedlar’s song—‘Points, points, gloves and purses,/ Poking-sticks and black jet rings’ and Gresham enters with the Sword-bearer of London, discussing plans for his new building (vii.1124– viii.1135). We see the free-wheeling life of a man who lives on the road, and the settled life of a man dealing with the institutions and ceremonies of a city. The fact that the Armada scene is so easily transferable from one play to the other is revealing. It does not matter where it comes, so long as it comes somewhere; it is part of a varied theatrical occasion, not part of a set dramatic structure. The Fair Maid of the West and The Honest Whore held up heroines for display. If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody does that too; but it also holds up to a whole community a lively and varied image of itself, its history and legends, its jokes, its ways of making and spending money.

9 THE TRUE CHRONICLE HISTORY OF KING LEAR

The title page of the 1608 Quarto of The True Chronicle History of the Life and Death of King Lear and his Three Daughters not only gives the name of the playwright in unusually large type but also announces a double provenance for the play itself; it was acted before the King at Whitehall on St Stephen’s night (26 December), by ‘His Majesty’s servants playing usually at the Globe on the Bankside’. Fascinating though it is to speculate on the effect of this play at a court performance, and common though it is to see it as the work of a famous playwright, our concern here is with King Lear as a play for the Globe audience. It may not have been so popular as the other three plays we have looked at, but there is no reason to believe it was an outright failure. A second quarto was printed eleven years earlier, substantially the same as the first, and the play appeared again in the 1623 Folio edition of the author’s collected works. The Folio version represents a substantial revision, possibly carried out by the author himself; this suggests that the play had, or was intended to have, a continuing life in the repertoire. On the other hand, a comparative lack of contemporary references suggests that it did not have the impact of, say, Richard III or Hamlet, and the printing history does not indicate anything like the wild (and admittedly unusual) success of If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody. In this chapter we shall look at the grounds of the play’s appeal to its first audience, and at the reasons why this appeal may finally have been limited. The discussion will be based on the Quarto version, with occasional excursions into the Folio. The Quarto, being somewhat more discursive and moralizing than the Folio, is closer to the play’s roots in popular dramaturgy; the revision makes the play more elliptical and sophisticated. Moreover, there is reason to believe that the Quarto text, like that of Part One of If You Know Not Me, is based on a shorthand transcription of the play in performance, giving it at some points the special value of an eyewitness account. 1 King Lear is part of a Globe tradition of plays about family troubles: The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, A Yorkshire Tragedy and The London Prodigal are other examples. But while each of these centres on the destruc tive behaviour of a relatively young husband (who in two of the three cases is also a father) King Lear concerns itself with the problem of children dealing with aged parents. It was unusual in this society for grown children to live with their parents

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—unusual, and discouraged because of the inevitable tensions built into this situation. 2 Respect for one’s parents was a deeply ingrained value; it surfaces in popular culture in ballads of ungrateful children punished by the wrath of God. 3 When elderly parents become difficult, that respect would have made the situation doubly painful. As we shall see, some of the play’s theatrical power comes from its use, and abuse, of the gestures that define personal and family relations. 4 It is also a play of state. After the low-key opening, in which Kent, Gloucester and Edmund talk a little of state and much more about Gloucester’s sons, the first entrance of Lear and his court is firmly hierarchical: 5 ‘Sound a sennet…. Enter one bearing a coronet, then King Lear, then the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall, next Gonoril, Regan, Cordelia, with followers’ (i.33SD). First comes the symbol of power, as though to imply that there is a principle of authority that transcends the individual person of the King; then the King; then the royal Dukes, with the women after them, grouped for this occasion not as their husbands’ wives but as Lear’s daughters—this being the relation that matters most to Lear and goes on mattering most throughout the play. But while in the last scene of If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Part One, the symbols of power are bestowed and exchanged in a way that consolidates both the monarch’s authority and her reciprocal relations with her people, here the symbols are used to express the undoing of the state: the map is divided, the coronet is parted. At the centre of the stage, presumably, is an imposing chair of state—like the one Beningfield treats disrespectfully in If You Know Not Me— perhaps mounted on a dais, with a canopy over it (see Plate 6). It could have been flown in, assuming the Globe had descent machinery, 6 either at the start of the play or just before Lear’s entrance. It would have to be flown out later—at Lear’s exit, or at the point where Gonoril and Regan are left alone, or at the very end of the scene, just before Edmund appears for his first soliloquy. At any of these points, the departure of the chair of state would be effective punctuation for the play’s depiction of social and family order crumbling. Whenever and however the chair of state departs, the important point is that it is never seen again. Edmund announces his plan to overturn custom on a stage that has been cleared of traditional symbols. The furniture of the later scenes, as specified in the dialogue, is simple and functional: for the mad trial, a joint-stool and some cushions (xiii.30, 47). Anyone who sits in that scene will sit with no particular dignity, close to the floor. A simple chair becomes an instrument of torture in the blinding of Gloucester, anticipating Lucretia Borgia’s use of a chair in the murder of her husband in The Devil’s Charter—shortly thereafter, and in the same playhouse. Clothing has it usual function as social coding. 7 Popular drama shows a preference for simple honest dress against fancy clothing, as in Old Hobson’s critical view of Jack Gresham, and Orlando Friscobaldo’s of Matheo. This is reflected here in the suggestion that Oswald the steward is an overdressed fop —‘Nature disclaims in thee’, says Kent, ‘a tailor made thee’ (vii.52–3)—and in Lear’s sardonic remarks on Regan’s dress: ‘nature needs not what thou,

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6 The trial scene in Swetnam theWoman-hater, Arraigned by Women, from the 1621 title page, showing a chair of state of the sort that might have been used in If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody and King Lear. (Photo: The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC 20003)

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gorgeous, wearest,/Which scarcely keeps thee warm’ (vii.428–9). Yet mad Tom’s nakedness is a horror, and Gloucester’s old tenant farmer sees to it that the beggar is dressed for his journey with the blinded Duke in ‘the best’ parel that I have’ (xvi.48). Lear’s restoration includes fresh garments. Proper clothing, in other words, confers humanity and dignity on the wearer. Clothing has a particular value in the storm scene. The Quarto text is generally deficient in stage directions (many entrances and exits are unmarked) and gives no sound cues for the storm other than those in the dialogue. In the Folio text the cue ‘Storm still’ is scattered at intervals throughout the sequence. Evidently the sound effect, a beaten drum or rolled cannonball, was not just occasional punctuation (as in plays where thunder signals the entrance of a devil) but sustained over three out of four scenes—a daring, unusual and possibly exhausting effect. Gloucester and Edmund enter for their brief interior scene ‘with lights’ (x.SD), evoking a contrast between a sheltered, domestic interior and the chaos outside. In the modern theatre, the storm sequence is a trap, tempting directors to create the chaos with elaborate technology that dwarfs the actors (as in the 1990 Royal Shakespeare Company production, where the actors were stuck in a huge revolving cube). In the Globe a simpler and more pointed language was available, based on the meaning of clothing. In an age when men usually wore hats, doffing them only in the presence of a superior, there would be a real shock value in Kent’s cry when he sees Lear in the storm, ‘Alack, bareheaded?’ (ix.61). In an age when clothing was expensive, and conveyed the wearer’s dignity and social position, there would be terrible impact in Lear’s attempt to imitate Tom by tearing his clothes off. For the Jacobean mind it was one of the most unsettling symptoms of madness that mad people showed no respect for their clothes, tearing them or even going naked. 8 All the characters are painfully exposed in the storm, Lear and Tom particularly so. Tom’s nakedness, and Lear’s bare head and his attempted stripping, convey both their exposure and their mental disturbance. In a sharp, economical use of visual language, the storm in the heavens is linked with the storm in the mind. In a dramatic idiom in which clothing counts for so much, the storm is not just a cosmic phenomenon but a social one, and the language of clothing helps even more than the sound effects to create the necessary image of disorder. The visual language of social relations is also crucial. In The Fair Maid of the West the sight of a barmaid sitting with the customers is enough to start a fight; we see in that moment how coded this society and this theatre can be. When Oswald walks across the stage, ignoring the King’s attempt to question him, the incident is equally provocative. So is the sight of the King’s messenger in the stocks; both Kent and Gloucester are at pains to emphasize that the punishment of the King’s servant is a deep insult to the King, and Lear himself dwells on the shame and outrage of the sight. The effect is compounded by having Kent still in full view of the audience during Edgar’s soliloquy announcing his plan to disguise himself as a beggar. The point is lost in modern editions which (unlike the Quarto and Folio) treat Edgar’s soliloquy as a separate scene. It uses the split-


stage convention (as in the ending of Herod and Antipater or the ghost scene in Richard III) to put two victims, the servant punished for loyalty and the innocent fugitive, together in a picture that shows the corruption and abuse of justice as the kingdom’s order breaks down. There is an equivalent breakdown in the little world of man when Lear’s body turns against itself, as he strikes his forehead—‘Beat at this gate that let thy folly in/And thy dear judgement out’ (iv.265–6)—highlighting the gesture by a moment of commentary. But the play’s most important piece of body language is the act of kneeling. It was a daily custom in England for children to kneel to their parents and ask their blessing; even grown children performed this ritual on entering or leaving their parents’ houses. 9 The restoration of the family at the end of The Miseries of Enforced Marriage includes the picture of the children kneeling to their father. With angry sarcasm Lear inverts the significance of this gesture by kneeling to Regan: Do you mark how this becomes the house? ‘ Dear daughter, I confess that I am old. Age is unnecessary. On my knees I beg That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed and food’. Regan’s ‘These are unsightly tricks’ (vii.311–15) emphasizes the visual shock of Lear’s action. Later, and this time without irony, Lear attempts the same gesture of submission to Cordelia, who in her own way is as embarrassed as Regan. The difference is that she asks for the scene to be played properly: O look upon me, sir, And hold your hands in benediction o’er me. No, sir, you must not kneel. (xxi.55–7)

As Gloucester prepares to commit suicide at what he thinks is the cliff of Dover, he kneels. The Quarto stage direction reports this, though the dialogue is not explicit; the reporter must have been struck by the image, perhaps because the picture of Lear kneeling to Regan was so disturbing that he became sensitive to other, similar moments. In this case, pagan though the play’s invented world may be, there is irony for a Christian audience: Gloucester kneels in a traditional act of prayer just before attempting suicide. Kneeling is a gesture of respect, implying a hierarchy. It is typical of the play’s thinking that whenever it appears it is somehow ironic, while gestures of simple affection are more straightforward in their meaning. Lear is shocked when his daughters join hands—‘O Regan, wilt thou take her by the hand?’ (vii. 352); the sisterly gesture is to him a threat. But later, in one of the military entrances that help prepare for the final battle, there is a similar gesture, striking

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enough in its context for the reporter to note it down: ‘Alarum. The powers of France pass over the stage… Queen Cordelia with her father in her hand’ (xxiii.SD). In the middle of the military display there is a small but telling sign of personal affection. A key moment in Cordelia’s restoration of Lear comes when she kisses him, and this moment is held for our contemplation: O my dear father, restoration hang Thy medicine on my lips, and this kiss Repair those violent harms that my two sisters Have in thy reverence made! KENT:

Kind and dear princess! (xxi.24–7)

Lear, I think, reciprocates with a simple gesture of his own. On ‘Be your tears wet? Yes, faith’ (xxi.68) it would be natural for him to touch her face. Taking the traditionalist line basic to popular drama, the play registers shock and horror at the subversion of hierarchical order. But it also shows enough of the corruption of power to make the whole notion of order suspect. What is not suspect is the concern the play’s characters have for each other. The popular virtue of charity comes into play here, and again it is expressed visually. Twice the blinded Gloucester gives Edgar a purse, and on the first occasion he comments on his gesture: Here, take this purse, thou whom the heaven’s plagues Have humbled to all strokes. That I am wretched Makes thee the happier. Heavens deal so still. Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man That stands your ordinance, that will not see Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly. So distribution should undo excess, And each man have enough. (xv.62–9) When we see the heroine of The Duchess of Suffolk distributing alms to beggars and prisoners, or when we see Brackenbury and others relieving the destitute Jane Shore, it is an image of hierarchy working humanely: those who have give something to those who have not. Gloucester uses the same gesture, but makes it mean something more radical: a flattening of hierarchy itself, with the power of the great not affirmed (as it is in conventional almsgiving) but chastened. The stage picture itself embodies his idea of levelling: literally he and Edgar are on the same social level in any case, both aristocrats; but on the theatrical surface, which in this case is more important, we see a blind man giving alms to a beggar.


Gloucester’s commentary on his gesture draws on the popular tradition of generalizing events, bringing out their significance for the community of shared values popular culture tends to create. In line with this the characters are broadly drawn, almost (if not quite) stereotyped. Attacking Lear’s folly in the first scene, Kent presents himself as a type-figure of loyalty—‘My life I never held but as a pawn/To wage against thy enemies’ (i.146–7). Cordelia as the long-suffering, forgiving daughter has some affinity with the long-suffering, forgiving wives of plays like The Fair Maid of Bristow and The Honest Whore. The popular fascination with strong contrasts shows itself in the configuration of good and evil daughters, good and evil sons, the loyal Kent and the treacherous Oswald. (The latter case embodies some irony, since Oswald’s treachery is by his own lights loyalty to the party he follows.) Gloucester’s speech on the eclipses, immediately followed by Edmund’s sardonic reflections on the way people blame the stars for their own natures, shows a contrast of character types, the conservative old man and the young rebel. There is some challenge to the stereotyping, particularly when Edmund tries, too late, to do some good ‘Despite of my own nature’ (xxiv.240). But this is self-consciously exceptional; and for the most part the effect, as usual in popular drama, is to challenge the stereotype only to confirm it. Cornwall claims to see through Kent’s role as the plain blunt man: These kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness Harbour more craft and more corrupter ends Than twenty silly-ducking observants That stretch their duties nicely. (vii.97–100) But his speech recoils on himself: Kent is as honest as he looks; the real corruption is Cornwall’s. There is the same quality of set formula in the dialogue, which is frequently shaped by strong patterns of antithesis. This is particularly true in the opening scene. As Kent goes into banishment he pauses for a set speech: Why, fare thee well, King; since thus thou wilt appear, Friendship lives hence, and banishment is here. (To Cordelia) The gods to their protection take thee, maid, That rightly thinks, and hast most justly said. (To Gonoril and Regan) And your large speeches may your deeds approve, That good effects may spring from words of love. Thus Kent, O princes, bids you all adieu; He’ll shape his old course in a country new. (i.169–76)

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As words are balanced against each other—friendship and banishment (freedom and banishment in the Folio), old and new—so Kent balances Cordelia, whom he trusts, against Gonoril and Regan, whom he does not. The opposition of Lear and Cordelia is an opposition of formulae: LEAR: So young and so untender? CORDELIA: So young, my lord, and true. (i.99–100) The King of France is particularly given to balanced phrasing: ‘Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor;/Most choice forsaken; and most loved, despised’ (i.241–2). His role as Cordelia’s champion makes him a speaker of gnomic wisdom, using (like Kent) the sort of voice the audience particularly likes to hear. The whole first scene displays this fascination with antithesis: eloquence and silence, flattery and honesty, loyalty and treachery, gain and loss. Kent and France also have a strong tendency to generalize. Kent couches his protest in language that goes beyond the immediate situation to abstract statement: ‘To plainness honour’s bound/When majesty stoops to folly’ (i.140–1). So does France, in his lecture to Burgundy: What say you to the lady? Love is not love When it is mingled with respects that stands Aloof from the entire point. (i.230–2) The generalizations slip easily into the dialogue; the play is never far from basic principles. Gloucester goes from the crises of two families, his own and Lear’s, to ‘Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities mutinies, in countries discords, palaces treason, the bond cracked between son and father’ (ii.106–9). As Lear and Gloucester learn from their calamities they move from their own problems into a world of shared wisdom embodied in speeches that sound like proverbs. Lear embraces this world, as he embraces the hovel and the Fool: Where is this straw, my fellow? The art of our necessities is strange, That can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel. Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart That sorrows yet for thee. (ix.70–4) Gloucester shows the same easy movement from the particular to the general, and the same quality of acceptance: I have no way, and therefore want no eyes.


I stumbled when I saw. Full oft ’tis seen Our means secure us, and our mere defects Prove our commodities. (xv.16–19) If there is consolation for the characters in being able to generalize their experience like this, there is consolation for the audience as well: the reassurance that something can be drawn from all this suffering, if only a confirmation of commonsense proverbial wisdom. Given this function, it is possible that speeches like these could be delivered directly to the audience. Albany’s attack on Gonoril, coming as it does so soon after the blinding of Gloucester, is particularly satisfying. It speaks for the audience’s feelings not only about Gonoril and Regan but also about the whole principle of evil they embody, giving eloquent form to the unspoken outrage that has been building up in the auditorium, and drawing on popular feeling about disobedient children: That nature which contemns it origin Cannot be bordered certain in itself. She that herself will sliver and disbranch From her material sap perforce must wither, And come to deadly use. GONORIL: ALBANY:

No more. The text is foolish. Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile: Filths savour but themselves. (xvi.32–8)

Just when the audience may wonder if Albany is going to stay too much at the level of intellectual analysis, Gonoril provokes him into a satisfying burst of namecalling. Commenting on his own production of the Quarto text, David Richman notes how the play was slowed down, especially in the second half, by passages of commentary; he notes also that the audience always seemed particularly engaged by Albany’s attack on Gonoril. 10 In the Folio, however, Albany’s denunciation is severely cut; the generalizing passage quoted above vanishes. And in neither text is the effect of the generalizations always consoling. Some of the commonsense pronouncements are placed ironically in their contexts: to wilful men The injuries that they themselves procure Must be their schoolmasters. (vii.458–60)

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This may be good sense (indeed, the play bears it out) but it is also the voice of Regan justifying shutting her father out in the storm. Mad Tom offers the sort of practical advice about living we find in moralizing ballads and plays like The Honest Whore—‘Keep thy foot out of brothel, thy hand out of placket, thy pen from lender’s book’ (xi.87–8)—but this is also the voice of a shivering, naked madman. Some of the generalizations themselves are quite sharply unconsoling: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th’gods;/They kill us for their sport’ (xv.35– 6). The play goes from the usual attacks on innovation and corruption to more radical attacks on social order itself. The Bridewell scene in The Honest Whore allowed some doubts about the effectiveness of imprisonment as a corrective; but for the most part the audience was invited to look on with satisfaction at a display of whores surrounded by images of justice and punishment. When Lear watches an unseen image of punishment, the picture in his mind is more harrowing than the stage pictures of The Honest Whore, and hiscommentary on it is not complacent: Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand. Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back. Thy blood as hotly lusts to use her in that kind For which thou whip’st her. (xx.154–7) This element of satire is more pervasive in the Quarto than in the Folio, where some of it—such as the Fool’s joke on monopolies (iv.147–8) and the mad trial— is cut. 11 The mad trial itself has popular roots in the tradition of ‘mock proclamations, mock trials, such as the trial of Carnival (or, in England), The whole trial and indictment of Sir John Barleycorn’. 1 2 The sort of inversion on which the mad trial is based is captured in a line from a Red Bull play, The Honest Lawyer: ‘The goose sometimes must sit and judge the fox’ (V.i.I3v). It may be that at certain points the audience itself would feel under attack. When in the storm Lear denounces a string of unseen culprits— Tremble, thou wretch That hast within thee undivulged crimes Unwhipped of justice; hide thee, thou bloody hand, Thou perjured and thou simular man of virtue That art incestuous…. (ix.51–5) —there is a chance here for the actor to fire the accusations into theauditorium, turning the audience itself into guilty creatures sitting at aplay. Elsewhere, however, the device of audience address has its usualfunctions of giving information, commenting on the action and enlistingsympathy. Cordelia’s asides in the first scene give her a rapport with theaudience that helps it side with her


during her confrontation with Lear.Kent begins his period of disguise by taking the audience into his confidence (iv.1–6). It is also common in popular drama for villains—likeEleazar in Lust’s Dominion or Antipater in Herod and Antipater— to usesoliloquies to announce their motives and anticipate their plots. Edmundhas such a soliloquy, but with a difference. In the speech that opens thesecond scene he defends his bastardy and declares his purpose of gettingEdgar’s land; he seems driven by clear motives. Yet, like Wendoll in A Woman Killed with Kindness, he keeps shifting his relation to himself: heis ‘I’, ‘us’, ‘Edmund’ and ‘bastards’. He addresses himself variously toNature, to Edgar, and to the gods. He is in greater tension than hisconfident manner shows on the surface. As he becomes an active andsuccessful schemer, however, his expository manner and his relation tothe audience are more straightforward, and he becomes, simply, ‘I’: ‘Letme, if not by birth, have lands by wit./All with me’s meet that I canfashion fit’ (ii.170–1). By the time of his soliloquy just before the battle(xxii.59–73) he has become one of the audience’s guides to the action,speaking with clarity and deliberation as he sorts out his tangled relationswith Gonoril and Regan and declares his intention to kill Lear and Cordelia. Left alone at the end of the first scene, Gonoril and Regan talk onlyto each other; they have no contact with the audience, and this confirmsthe negative, self-enclosed quality that differentiates them from the moreexpansive Edmund. But this is while they are conducting a holding action.As their desires become more active, Gonoril in particular (the moredecisive of the two) picks up the villain’s habit of declaring herself to theaudience in a series of asides: ‘I had rather lose the battle than that sister/Should loosen him and me’ (xxii.20–1). When characters declare their purposes so self-consciously we see the actors presenting rather than impersonating them. In some of Lear’s scenes of passion this device is used to show the character struggling with his emotions, saying what they are in an attempt to distance himself from them: Life and death! I am ashamed That thou hast power to shake my manhood thus, That these hot tears, that break from me perforce And should make thee—worst blasts and fogs upon thee! Untented woundings of a father’s curse Pierce every sense about thee! Old fond eyes, Beweep this cause again I’ll pluck you out And cast you, with the waters that you make, To temper clay. (iv.290–8) The device of having a character say what he is feeling is given a twist as Lear tries not to feel the emotions he talks about. It is significant that in Cordelia’s reunion with Lear she does not talk about her feelings—as, for example, Bess Momford describes her tears in her meeting with her father (The Blind Beggar of

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Bednal Green, II.iii.E1r). She talks only of Lear, not of herself, and her feelings are conveyed implicitly in what she says of him. So are Lear’s feelings when he cradles her dead body. All his talk is now of her, and his only overt reference to his own emotion is to his inability to express it: ‘Had I your tongues and eyes, I would use them so/That heaven’s vault should crack’ (xxiv.254–5). Both characters are denied the self-conscious discussion of feeling—which an actor could use as a retreat from emotional commitment to the part—and pared down to feeling itself. The character Cordelia displays in the reunion is not herself but Lear. She says, as characters in popular drama so often do, ‘look at this’: Had you not been their father, these white flakes Had challenged pity of them. Was this a face To be exposed to the warring winds, To stand against the deep dread-bolted thunder In the most terrible and nimble stroke Of quick cross-lightning, to watch—poor perdu— With this thin helm? (xxi.28–34) Earlier in the play Edgar reacts to the entrance of the mad Lear with a similar directing of attention: ‘O thou side-piercing sight!’ (xx.85). Lear does the same for Tom: ‘Is man no more but this? Consider him well’ (xi.93–4). In all these cases the audience is asked to look at something it can actually see. The character is put on display; the audience’s attention is focused. But the device of saying ‘look at this’ is cruelly twisted when Edgar tells the blind Gloucester, ‘Do but look up’ (xx.59). The mad Lear is constantly demanding that we look at things only he can see: ‘Look, look, a mouse!’: ‘When I do stare, see how the subject quakes’; ‘Behold yon simp’ring dame’ (xx.88, 106, 114). The usually tight relationship between stage picture and commentary is broken as the picture vanishes and only the commentary is left. The audience is like the blind Gloucester, being told to look at something it can’t see. For an audience trained on the usual method, this would create profound unease. King Lear, then, takes the devices of popular dramaturgy, using them directly at some points, giving them unsettling twists at others. Yet its value system is to a great extent familiar: loyalty, kindness and charity all play on the audience’s sympathies. The popular fondness for tough, plain-spoken characters would be richly satisfied by the disguised Kent’s first meeting with Lear. Behind the mad King’s rapport with the mad beggar is the popular image of the monarch who moves easily among his people—not perhaps quite as Elizabeth does with Old Hobson, but if anything the sympathy runs deeper. Gloucester’s lament for the lost days of good order—strengthened in the Folio with the additional words, ‘We have seen the best of our time’ (I.ii.110)—would rouse the same sympathy as Old Hobson’s words to Gresham, ‘’twas a golden world/When we were boys’ (ii.


266–7). The traditionalist strain shows up in references to long-standing loyalties. The servant who tries to stop the blinding of Gloucester—insisting this is the best service he can do Cornwall—declares, ‘I have served you ever since I was a child’ (xiv.71). The Old Man who helps Gloucester can go further: (I have been your tenant and your father’s tenant/This fourscore…’ (xv.10–11). Both present the image of ordinary people rising against injustice. Regan’s outraged cry ‘A peasant stand up thus!’ (xiv.78) only sharpens sympathy for the peasant, and confirms that the scene, like the play as a whole, is tapping a vein of popular protest. (One detail stuck in the mind of the Quarto reporter: Regan stabs the servant in the back.) Two characters in particular draw on, and appeal to, the popular imagination: the Fool and Edgar. The Fool is the obvious part for the company clown. The way his entrance is built up by Lear’s repeated requests for him shows a conscious playing on the audience’s desire to see the clown. He enters on a surge of physical excitement as Lear strikes Oswald and Kent trips him; he comes on just as the scene’s energy level has risen sharply, and he keeps it high. His first gag is a sight gag, parodying Lear’s gesture of giving Kent money by offering him his coxcomb. His riddles generate the cross-talk rhythm of a typical clown’s routine. He is practical, physical and bawdy: ‘Whoop, jug, I love thee’; ‘She that is maid now, and laughs at my depature/Shall not be a maid long, except things be cut shorter’ (iv.219, v.50–1). But while other clowns have onstage claques to tell us how amusing they are, the Fool’s hearers draw attention to the sharpness of his jokes: Lear declares, ‘A pestilent gall to me!’ and ‘A bitter fool!’; Kent, ‘This is not altogether fool, my lord’ (iv.110, 131, 146). The device that is normally used to stir enthusiasm for the clown is used here to direct attention to what he says. Though it is part of his job to bring the King down to earth—he calls him ‘this fellow’ (iv.98)—his jokes about a world turned upside down embody an underlying conservatism, a wish to see proper order restored: I have used it, nuncle, since thou madest thy daughters thy mother; for when thou gavest them the rod and puttest down thine own breeches, Then they for sudden joy did weep, And I for sorrow sung, That such a king should play bo-peep, And go the fools among. (iv.165–71) Like the clowns of Fortune by Land and Sea and The Fair Maid of the West, he is ultimately loyal, following Lear into the storm. As if to compensate for its reduction of the play’s moral commentary and satire, the Folio adds the Fool’s prophecy. Its gnomic, riddling doggerel—‘When priests are more in word than matter,/When brewers mar their malt with water’ (III.ii.81–2)—picks up echoes from all over popular drama. Frog, the clown of The Fair Maid of Bristow, promises to be unkind to his love only ‘When tinkers

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leave to drink good ale,/And soldiers of their weapons fail’ and so on through a long list of impossibilities (C1r–v). The anti-Catholic satire of The Whore of Babylon includes a mock-prophecy along similar lines: When surgeons long since dead and gone Can cure our wounds, being called upon, When from yon towers I hear one cry, You may kill princes lawfully…. (I.ii.237–40) The Fool also picks up the old popular tradition of ‘Merlin’s prophecies’, which according to Peter Burke had started to die out around 1600. 13 Being the Fool’s direct address to the audience, this is also an overt disruption of the illusion. Its intrusion in the middle of the storm sequence—‘I’ll speak a prophecy ere I go’ (III.ii.79–80)—is as stunningly arbitrary as the intrusion of the songs in The Rape of Lucrece. At its end the Fool, like Jenkin in A Woman Killed with Kindness, shows a simultaneous awareness of his time and the audience’s: ‘This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time’ (III.ii.95–6). King Lear as a whole, with its ancient setting, its contemporary references to monopolies and heretics, and its characters like the Fool and Oswald who seem out of place in pre-Conquest Britain, has something of the timeless, anachronistic quality of the ballads and chapbooks. The anachronism gives its satire an immedi ate impact for the Jacobean audience, and the Fool’s bold escape from historical time is the moment when we feel that anachronism most sharply. In one important respect the Fool is unlike the clown-figures of other popular plays. While characters like Will Sommers in When You See Me You Know Me and Smirk in The Two Merry Milkmaids loom larger as their plays go on, and finally take over the last scenes, the Fool vanishes. It is Edgar who takes up the running. He too, in his own very different way, has popular appeal. For anyone who wants psychological consistency and dramatic realism, Edgar’s shapeshifting is a constant worry; but his impact on the first audience is suggested by the space devoted on the Quarto title page to ‘the unfortunate life of Edgar, son and heir to the Earl of Gloucester, and his sullen and assumed humour of Tom of Bedlam’. Of all the play’s characters, Edgar has the most fully sustained relationship with the audience. In his first soliloquy he talks us through his disguise as Tom. While the Folio version has the Fool disrupt the storm sequence with his cryptic prophecy, the Quarto allows Edgar an equivalent function: he stays behind after the mad trial for a generalizing soliloquy that, unlike the Fool’s prophecy, comments on the action in a deliberate and discursive way: ‘When we our betters see bearing our woes/We scarcely think our miseries our foes….’ (xiii.95–6). He keeps up a flow of asides, stepping out of his assumed roles and out of the scenes themselves, to underline his emotions and guide the audience’s: ‘My tears begin to take his part so much,/They’ll mar my counterfeiting’; ‘I would not take this from report; it is/And my heart breaks at


it’ (xiii.55–6, xx.136–7). He does this through both the storm sequence and the Dover scene, passages that can be complex and exhausting for actors and audiences, and the instruction he gives is simple: just feel the pain. Elsewhere he tells the audience to listen closely to Lear’s madness and not dismiss it as mere incoherence: ‘O matter and impertinency mixed—/Reason in madness’ (xx.163– 4). Guiding his father, and the audience, through the fake suicide, he explains his own actions—‘Why I do trifle thus with his despair/Is done to cure it’ (xx.33–4) —and shares his worries about the danger of the experiment: ‘And yet I know not how conceit may rob/The treasury of life’ (xx.42–3). If we are tempted at times to ask what on earth he is up to, so is he: ‘Bad is the trade that must play fool to sorrow,/Ang’ring itself and others’ (xv.37–8). Here in particular he stands well outside his own performance, not just commenting on it but attacking it, without being able to stop it. If he is in a special sense our man on stage, it is because his constant efforts to understand, to adjust, or simply to cope and carry on, mirror the audience’s own efforts to come to terms with what it is seeing. Mad Tom, the most striking of Edgar’s performances, is a popular figure in another sense. A contemporary rhyme lists him as one of the sights of London: 14

A morris-dance, a puppet play, Mad Tom to sing a roundelay, A woman dancing on a rope, Bull-baiting also at the Hope… This puts Tom in a context of sport and pastime, and suggests that there may have been in Edgar’s impersonation an element of play that we miss now. According to William C.Carroll, Bedlam beggars were commonly regarded as frauds (this is literally true of Edgar) but also as figures who inspired terror. 15 We sense the terror in the Fool’s frightened reaction to the unseen ‘spirit’ in the hovel (xi.34–9), which builds up excitement for Tom’s entrance. When he appears, he babbles about devils, and (according to the Folio directions) his speeches are constantly accompanied by thunder. There is a suggestion here of the devil effects that were one of the favourite crowd-pleasing devices of popular drama, but these devils are not actors in costume; they are unseen figures who haunt Tom’s mind, created imaginatively by a single actor. He also inspires a social fear. He is not a safe, sympathetic object of charity, as (say) Tawny-coat is for Old Hobson—a member of the community, down on his luck, who will prosper again with a little help. He is beyond society, beyond the help of charity, a menace to be violently expelled, ‘whipped from tithing to tithing, and stockpunished, and imprisoned’ (xi.122–3). Once again a contemporary verse gives us a context. Of the Bedlamite verses that have survived from the period, the most powerful and the closest to King Lear is ‘From the Hag and the Hungry Goblin’, in which Tom evokes his life 16

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On the lordly lofts of Bedlam With stubble soft and dainty, Brave bracelets strong, sweet whips ding dong With wholesome hunger plenty. A popular bogeyman, a figure from a ballad, a creature of pain and deprivation: this is the character Lear embraces as a philosopher, the character to whom Gloucester gives his purse. Other plays give us a perspective from the lower reaches of society; few if any go as low as this. It is out of Tom that Edgar emerges. That may seem to be putting it backwards, but in theatrical terms we know so little of Edgar before he becomes Tom that Tom is our first and most powerful impression of him; the character we know as Edgar develops later. This means that Edgar, as shape-shifter, is not just an aristocrat driven into poverty but—more powerfully—a figure who rises from humble origins to heroic action. The actor gets to show off his command of different accents (it is part of the element of play, like the quick-change effects of disguised characters elsewhere) and when he gets respectable clothes from the Old Man he also gets a different voice: as Gloucester observes, ‘Methinks thy voice is alter’d, and thou speak’st/With better phrase and manner than thou didst’ (xx.7–8). The text bears this out. But though the Tom-voice vanishes as Edgar is clothed, to be replaced for a while by standard English, his confrontation with Oswald brings out a new voice, that of a plain countryman resisting a threat from a social superior: Good gentleman, go your gate. Let poor volk pass. An’chud have been swaggered out of my life, it would not have been so long by a vortnight. Nay, come not near the old man. Keep out, ‘che’vor’ye, or I’ll try whether your costard or my baton be the harder; I’ll be plain with you. (xx.229–34) In the fight that follows, it is the staff or cudgel (‘my baton’: ‘battero’ and ‘bat’ in different copies of the Quarto) against the sword. As in The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, the weapons are socially coded, and the plain man’s weapon—the equivalent of Tom Stroud’s cudgel in the earlier play—wins. At last Edgar emerges from the social depths to challenge the new Earl of Gloucester, his brother Edmund. Entering unexpectedly, he introduces himself to Albany: If e’er your grace had speech with man so poor, Hear me one word…. Wretched though I seem, I can produce a champion that will prove


What is avouchèd there. (xxii.40–1, 44–6) Like an apprentice hero, he emerges from oblivion to chivalric achievement, acting out the audience’s own romantic fantasies. Once again the Bedlamite ballad gives a context, putting in its own eerie terms the play’s image of the hero whose wilderness journey is both an excursion into madness and a preparation for a final, mysterious combat: 17 With an host of furious fancies Whereof I am commander. With a burning spear, and a horse of air, To the wilderness I wander. By a knight of ghosts and shadows I summon’d am to tourney, Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end, Me think it is no journey. In his madness Lear reviews imaginary troops, and threatens war to restore his power. His cries of ‘kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kffl!’ (xx.175) and (in the Folio) ‘Sa, sa, sa, sa!’ (IV.v. 199) are the cries given by Spanish soldiers bent on massacre in A Larum for London (E2r). In The Knight of the Burning Pestle the Wife demands a battle scene—‘then skirmish, and let your flags fly, and cry, kill, kill, kill’ (V. 60–1)—and the Citizen recalls his own military adventures: ‘sa, sa, sa, bounce quoth the guns’ (V. 81–2). Their appearance in this knowing parody of popular drama may suggest how often these cries were heard from the stage in battle plays. Lear is playing on what may be a strong feeling in the audience: the need for a decisive battle that will end the cruelty and injustice with a victory of good over evil, the sort of ending we see in plays like The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green and The Trial of Chivalry. For a while the play builds up such an expectation with the familiar device of massed military entrances: ‘Enter Edmund, Regan, and their powers’; ‘Enter Duke of Albany and Gonoril with troops’ (xxii.SD, 19SD). The Folio adds drum and colours to both these entrances; also to Cordelia’s first entrance on her return to England and to Edmund’s victorious entry in the final scene. But the excitement thus worked up is frustrated. There is, so far as we can tell from the original texts, no onstage fighting, just offstage trumpet-calls, ‘Alarum and retreat’ (xxiii.4SD), as Gloucester sits alone on the stage waiting for news. When news comes it brings still deeper frustration, the defeat of Lear and Cordelia. Yet the play is not altogether working against popular tradition here: as we saw in The Four Prentices of London, the frustration of expected action serves as preparation for more important action to come. In the final scene there is at last an onstage fight, between Edgar and Edmund, and good at last overcomes evil. Once again, and to

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greater purpose, expectations are worked up: by the mutual defiance of Edmund and Albany, each flinging down a glove, and simultaneously by Regan’s mounting agony as the poison takes hold of her. Three soundings of a trumpet precede Edgar’s entrance with ‘ a trumpeter before him’ (xxiv.114SD). Just before the fight itself, Edmund commands, Trumpets, speak!’ (146). In the excited atmosphere this creates, the nameless knight defeats the villain in what had looked like the villain’s hour of triumph. Not only that, but also the brothers agree on a moral analysis of the whole action in which they have been involved, drawing it into a pattern that (to them at least, and to many in the audience) finds a justifying coherence in the suffering: The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to scourge us. The dark and vicious place where thee he got Cost him his eyes. EDMUND:

Thou hast spoken truth. The wheel is come full circled. I am here. (xxiv.166–70)

The satisfaction of the moment comes not just from the event itself but from the commentary that finds a meaning in it. But in the face of the next event, Lear’s entrance with the dead Cordelia, commentary struggles and dies. Once again, we are told to look, and to look at something we can actually see on stage. Albany’s attempt to order the state collapses into ‘O see, see!’ (xxiv.299). The Folio has Lear die on the same command: ‘Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips./ Look there, look there’ (V.iii.286–7). But the intensity of the command has now become frantic, and this time we cannot be certain what Lear thinks he sees. We need commentary, generalization, something to console us with understanding. But through the last moments of the play the commentary becomes increasingly inarticulate. A gentleman enters with a striking prop, a bloody knife, but when he tries to say what it means his language chokes: ‘It’s hot, it smokes/It came even from the heart of—’ (xxiv.219–20). Kent and Edgar, two of the play’s most articulate commentators, have not answers but questions: KENT: Is this the promised end? EDGAR: Or image of that horror? (xxiv.259–60) Kent’s next attempt recalls the antithetical language that shaped the opening scene, but his phrasing is oddly difficult, as though the idea emerges with reluctance: ‘If fortune bragged of two she loved or hated,/One of them we behold’ (xxiv.276–7). Albany’s final injunction to ‘Speak what we feel, not what


we ought to say’ (xxiv.319) leads nowhere, as there seems to be nothing to say. The domestic pathos of the father cradling his dead child will be repeated shortly hereafter on the same stage in The Miseries of Enforced Marriage as Harcop grieves for his daughter Clare, trying, like Lear, to get her to speak; but the refusal of consoling commentary is like the abrupt ending of A Yorkshire Tragedy. There is only the stage picture, in which the smallness of the boy actor (as in the effect of the murdered princes in Edward IV) adds to the pathetic helplessness of the image. Cordelia, logically, is a part for the youngest of the three boys in the cast: in the Folio, Lear calls her ‘our last and least’ (I.i.83). Gonoril and Regan are called on for knowing cynicism and sophistication; Cordelia is always simple and direct. The youth of the boy, and the youth of the character, come together as they have all through the play—this time to let the actor’s slight body make a statement of its own, a statement developed in the play’s final verbal opposition, Albany’s contrast of the toughness of age and the frailty of youth: ‘The oldest have borne most. We that are young/Shall never see so much, nor live so long’ (xxiv.320–1). There remains, in the Folio text, a funeral march for carrying off the bodies, giving a sense of formality and order that may be some comfort. 18 In a winter performance the gathering darkness—with perhaps the oily glow of cresset lights —would add resonance to Kent’s question, ‘Is this the promised end?’ and his statement, ‘I am come/To bid my king and master aye good night’ (xxiv.259, 230–1). But the end of the play is not the end of the theatrical occasion. The text can take us no further, and there are no eyewitness reports; yet we can speculate. As the funeral march ends, some of the audience leave. But others stay, crowding closer to the stage, joined by a few interlopers who have just come in. They start calling and clapping rhythmically until the company clown, Robert Armin, appears with a tabor and does a comic song and dance routine, upbeat and mildly improper (only mildly; this is not the Fortune) that sets the audience laughing, clapping and singing along with the refrain. Or, if King Lear ended as we know on one occasion Julius Caesar did, 19 four members of the company—let us say, the actors who have played Edgar, Cornwall, Gonoril and Cordelia—come out and do a graceful dance. A couple of stage-keepers start cleaning up empty bottles, orange peels and apple cores. Two young men leave with the prostitutes they have just picked up. If the jig or the dance puts the remaining spectators in a more sharply upbeat mood than usual, this may be a recoil from the play they have just seen. It has called on many of the devices they are used to, leaving them moved and excited; but it has not used them quite as expected, so that with the excitement goes a certain frustration and discomfort, which the final entertainment may dispel. The entertainment has not been added for that reason, however; the company would do it anyway. For a modern imagination trying to recover a lost theatre, it is part of the eclectic occasion in a public playhouse. For the actors, it’s part of the job.

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APPENDIX

This appendix identifies the authors of plays and the editions used for references. References to the plays of Shakespeare other than King Lear are to The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, Glenview, Ill., 1980. The following abbreviations are used: Bowers: Fredson Bowers (ed.), The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, 4 vols, Cambridge, 1953–61. Brooke: C.F.Tucker Brooke (ed.), The Shakespeare Apocrypba, Oxford, 1908. MSR: Malone Society Reprint. Pearson: The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, 6 vols, London, 1874 (published by John Pearson; not so much an edition in the usual sense as a reprint of the early texts). The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, by Henry Chettle, John Day and William Haughton: London, 1659. The Brazen Age, by Thomas Heywood: Pearson, vol. III. The Devil’s Charter, by Barnabe Barnes: ed. Jim C.Pogue, New York and London, 1980. The Devil’s Law-Case, by John Webster: ed. Frances A.Shirley, Lincoln, Nebr., 1972. The Duchess of Suffolk, by Thomas Drue: London, 1631. Edward IV, Parts One and Two, possibly by Thomas Heywood: Pearson, vol. I. The Fair Maid of Bristow, anonymous: London, 1605. The Fair Maid of the Exchange, anonymous (possibly by Thomas Heywood): MSR, ed. Peter H.Davison and Arthur Brown, Oxford, 1963. The Fair Maid of the West, Parts One and Two, by Thomas Heywood: ed. Robert K.Turner, Jr, London, 1968. Fortune by Land and Sea, by Thomas Heywood and William Rowley: ed. Herman Doh, New York and London, 1980. The Four Prentices of London, by Thomas Heywood: ed. Mary Ann Weber Gasior, New York and London, 1980. The Golden Age, by Thomas Heywood: Pearson, vol. III. Greene’s Tu Quoque, by Jo.Cooke: ed. Alan J.Berman, New York and London, 1984.

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APPENDIX

Grim the Collier of Croydon, by I.T. acording to the title page, but often attributed to William Haughton: London, 1662. The Hector of Germany, by Wentworth Smith: London, 1615. Herod and Antipater, by Gervase Markham and William Sampson: ed. Gordon Nicholas Ross, New York and London, 1979. Hoffman, by Henry Chettle: MSR, ed. Harold Jenkins, Oxford, 1951. The Honest Lawyer, by S.S.: London, 1616. The Honest Whore, Parts One and Two, Part One by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, Part Two by Dekker alone: Bowers, vol. II. How a, Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad, anonymous (sometimes attributed to Thomas Heywood): London, 1602. If This be not a Good Play, the Devil is in It, by Thomas Dekker: Bowers, vol. III. If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Part One, almost certainly by Thomas Heywood: MSR, ed. Madeleine Doran, Oxford, 1935. If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Part Two, by Thomas Heywood: MSR, ed. Madeleine Doran, Oxford, 1935. The Iron Age, Parts One and Two, by Thomas Heywood: Pearson, vol. III. Jack Drum’s Entertainment, by John Marston: H.Harvey Wood (ed.), The Plays of John Marston, III, Edinburgh and London, 1939. King Lear, by William Shakespeare: William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Oxford, 1986. (Note: This edition presents edited versions of the Quarto and Folio texts as separate plays. Readers interested in the original stage directions should use this edition with caution.) The Knave in Grain, New Vampt, by J.D.: MSR, ed. R.C.Bald, Oxford, 1961. The Night of the Burning Pestle, by Francis Beaumont: ed. Cyrus Hoy, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, general editor Fredson Bowers, I, Cambridge, 1966. A Larum for London, anonymous: London, 1602. The Late Lancashire Witches, by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome: Pearson, vol. IV. The London Prodigal, anonymous: Brooke. Lust’s Dominion, anonymous (attributed to Thomas Dekker, William Haughton and John Day): Bowers, vol. IV. The Martyred Soldier, by Henry Shirley: London, 1638. Match Me in London, by Thomas Dekker: Bowers, vol. III. The Merry Devil of Edmonton, anonymous: Brooke. The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, by George Wilkins: London, 1607. Nobody and Somebody, anonymous: ed. David L.Hay, New York and London, 1980. Patient Grissil, by Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle and William Haughton: Bowers, vol. I. The Rape of Lucrece, by Thomas Heywood: Pearson, vol. V.

APPENDIX 197

The Roaring Girl, by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton: Bowers, vol. III. The Royal King and the Loyal Subject, by Thomas Heywood: Pearson, vol. VI. Satiromastix, by Thomas Dekker: Bowers, vol. I. The Seven Champions of Christendom, by John Kirke: London, 1638. A Shoemaker a Gentleman, by William Rowley: London, 1638. The Shoemakers’ Holiday, by Thomas Dekker: Bowers, vol. I. The Silver Age, by Thomas Heywood: Pearson, vol. III. Sir Thomas Wyatt, by Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, Went-worth Smith and John Webster: Bowers, vol. I. Swetnam the Woman-hater, Arraigned by Women, anonymous: Coryl Crandall (ed.), Swetnam the Woman-hater: the Controversy and the Play, n.p., Purdue University Studies, 1969. Thomas Lord Cromwell, anonymous: Brooke. The Travels of the Three English Brothers, by John Day, William Rowley and George Wilkins: London, 1607. The Trial of Chivalry, anonymous: London, 1605. Two Merry Milkmaids, by I.C.: London, 1620. The Two Noble Ladies and the Converted Conjurer, anonymous: MSR, ed. Rebecca G.Rhoads, Oxford, 1930. The Valiant Scot, by J.W.: ed. George F.Byers, New York and London, 1980. The Valiant Welshman, by R.A.: London, 1615. The Virgin Martyr, by Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger: Bowers, vol. III. The Weakest Goeth to the Wall, anonymous: ed. Jill L.Levenson, New York and London, 1980. When You See Me You Know Me, by Samuel Rowley: London, 1613. The White Devil, by John Webster: ed. John Russell Brown, London, second edition, 1966. The Whore of Babylon, by Thomas Dekker: Bowers, vol. II. The Wise-woman of Hogsdon, by Thomas Heywood: ed. Michael H.Leonard, New York and London, 1980. A Woman Killed with Kindness, by Thomas Heywood: ed. R.W.van Fossen, London, 1961. A Yorkshire Tragedy, anonymous: Brooke.

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NOTES

The following abbreviations are used throughout the notes: E.S: E.K.Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols, Oxford, 1923. J.C.S: G.E.Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols, Oxford 1941– 68. INTRODUCTION 1. See Keith Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatre, London, 1987, p. 4. 2. See, for example, Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, Baltimore, Md., and London, 1978: and, Michael D.Bristol, Carni val and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England, New York and London, 1985. 3. On the interpretation of stage directions, see Alan C.Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 19–52. My concern is with stage directions that seem to originate from the theatrical process, not with those that reflect—as in some of Ben Jonson’s plays—an effort to transform the play into a literary text for readers. 4. Theatre and Crisis 1632–1642, Cambridge, 1984, p. 181. 5. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols, London, 1970–83, VIII, 1974, p. 435; IV, 1971, p. 2; IX, 1976, p. 2.

1 PLAYHOUSES, STAGES AND PERFORMANCES 1. Quoted from G.E.Bentley (ed.), The Seventeenth-Century Stage, Toronto, 1968, p. 35. 2. It was not the first regular playhouse, as used to be supposed, having been preceded by the Red Lion in 1567. 3. See John Orrell and Andrew Gurr, ‘What the Rose can tell us’, TLS, 9–15 June 1989, pp. 636, 649. 4. R.A.Foakes and R.T.Rickert (eds), Henslowe’s Diary, Cambridge, 1961, p. 213. 5. The fullest and most reliable account of this playhouse is Herbert Berry, The Boar’s Head Playhouse, Washington, DC, London and Toronto, 1986.

200 NOTES

6. Boar’s Head, p. 119. 7. J.C.S., VI, p. 123. 8. Sir Henry Wotton, letter to Sir Edmund Bacon, 2 July 1613; quoted from E.S., II, pp. 419–20. 9. E.S., II, p. 421. 10. Herbert Berry, Shakespeare’s Playhouses, New York, 1987, p. 184. 11. The date 1644 is sometimes given, but depends on a document, a manuscript found in a copy of Stow’s Annals, that is now suspected to be a forgery. See Berry, Playhouses, pp. 78, 181. Even if the document is not an outright forgery, it is unreliable: it gives the wrong dates for the fires at the Globe and the Fortune. 12. The contract is reprinted in various reference works, including Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 1980, pp. 127–9. 13. J.Leeds Barroll, Alexander Leggatt, Richard Hosley and Alvin Kernan, The Revels History of Drama in English, III: 1576–1612, London, 1975, p. 142. 14. James Wright, Historica Histrionica, quoted in J.C.S. , VI, p. 155. 15. J.C.S., VI, pp. 177–8. 16. E.S., II, p. 442. 17. See J.C.S. , I, p. 279. 18. See Charles Read Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama, Chicago, 1929, pp. 113, 116. 19. Quoted from J.C.S., VI, p. 146. 20. See J.C.S. , VI, pp. 160–1. 21. J.C.S., I, p. 21. 22. Quoted from J.C.S. , VI, p. 173. 23. See J.C.S. , VI, p. 218; and Edmund Gayton, Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixote (1654), p. 24. 24. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, Cambridge, 1987, p. 171. 25. Quoted from Gurr, Playgoing, p. 226. 26. ‘Dice, wine and women, or the unfortunate gallant gull’d at London’, in Hyder Edward Rollins (ed.), The Pepys Ballads, I, Cambridge, Mass., 1929, p. 239. Rollins dates the ballad about 1625. 27. Entry for 30 October 1662. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols, London, 1970–83, III, 1970, pp. 243–4. Bentley, J.C.S. , VI, p. 243, calculates that the period Killigrew refers to would have been 1620–5. 28. The Fancies’ Theatre, quoted from Gurr, Playgoing, p. 249. It is possible that the Two Merry Milkmaids prologue also marked the return of an old company, the Company of the Revels (formerly Queen Anne’s). If so, it presents a parallel case of a troupe that knew the Red Bull audience facing it with some trepidation. (See J.C.S. , III, pp. 102–3). 29. 23 March 1661. Diary, II, 1979, p. 58. 30. 26 May 1662. Diary, III, p. 93. 31. J.C.S., VI, p. 238. 32. Quoted from The Works of John Dryden, ed. John Loftis and David Stuart Rodes, IX, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1978, p. 14. 33. See Leslie Hotson, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage, Cambridge, Mass., 1928, pp. 69–70. 34. See Berry, Boar’s Head, pp. 128–9.

NOTES 201

35. See Warren Smith, ‘Evidence of Scaffolding on Shakespeare’s Stage’, Review of English Studies, n.s. II, 1951, pp. 22–9. 36. See Berry, Boar’s Head, p. 127; and Bernard Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe 1599–1609, New York, 1962, pp. 93–4. On the general question of descent machinery, see John H.Astington, ‘Descent Machinery in the Playhouses’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, II, 1985, pp. 119–33. 37. John Melton, Astrologaster, or the Figure-Caster, quoted from J.C.S., VI, p. 152. 38. See Hosley, Revels, III (see n. 13), pp. 190–1. 39. . See E.S., II, p. 544, and John Orrell, The Human Stage: English Theatre Design, 1567–1640, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 88–102. 40. The evidence is collected, and the whole problem discussed, in David Klein, Time Allotted for an Elizabethan Performance’, Shakespeare Quarterly, XVIII, 1967, pp. 434–8 41. See R.B.Graves, ‘Shakespeare’s Outdoor Stage Lighting’, Shakespeare Studies, XIII, 1980, pp. 235–50. 42. Boar’s Head, pp. 116–18. 43. Shakespeare’s Theatre, London, 1983, p. 108. 44. Quoted from Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time 1590–1642, Princeton, NJ, 1984, p. 104. 45. See Bentley, Player, p. 268. 46. See Gurr, Playgoing, p. 227. 47. See Beckerman, Shakespeare, pp. 96–7. 48. See Gurr, Playgoing, pp. 4–5.

2 THE AUDIENCES AND THEIR CULTURE 1. J.Cocke, ‘A common Player’ (1615), quoted from E.S., IV, p. 256. The author may be the ‘Jo. Cooke’ who wrote Greene’s Tu Quoque. 2. ‘Towards a Definition of Popular Theatre’, in David Mayer and Kenneth Richards (eds), Western Popular Theatre, London, 1977, pp. 263–5. 3. The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London, 1576–1642, Princeton, NJ, 1981, pp. 132–9. 4. J.C.S., VI, p. 153; Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, Cambridge, 1987, p. 165. 5. Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis 1632–1642, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 293–306; Gurr, Playgoing, p. 4. 6. Privileged, pp. 195–207, 224–5. 7. Theatre and Crisis, pp. 300–1. 8. Gurr, Playgoing, pp. 64–5. 9. Cook, Privileged, pp. 218–22. 10. Frank Freeman Foster, The Politics of Stability: A Portrait of the Rulers in Elizabethan London, London, 1977, p. 47. 11. E.S., IV, p. 322. 12. Cook, Privileged, p. 248. 13. See Gurr, Playgoing, pp. 147–50.

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14. Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time 1590– 1642, Princeton, NJ, 1984, p. 125. 15. Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain, Ithaca, NY and London, 1985, p. 170. 16. Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time 1590– 1642, Princeton, NJ, 1971, pp. 51–3. 17. Peter Burke, ‘Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century London’, in Barry Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, London and Sydney, 1985, p. 49. 18. Michael Hattaway, Elizabetban Popular Theatre, London, 1982, p. 1. 19. Gurr, Playgoing, pp. 79, 153. 20. Gurr, Playgoing, pp. 76–8, 237–9. The quotations are from Alexander Gill’s verses against The Magnetic Lady (1632) and Thomas Carew’s verses for Davenant’s The Just Italian (1630). 21. Historia Histrionica, quoted in Gurr, Playgoing, p. 251. 22. See Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680, London, 1982, pp. 139–40; and Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London, 1978, pp. 273–4, 277–8. 23. See, for example, James Shirley, Prologue to The Doubtful Heir (1640), quoted in Gurr, Playgoing, pp. 248–9. Shirley is actually addressing the Globe audience, and wishing his play were performed at the Blackfriars; but part of the joke seems to be his pretended fear that the Globe audience will behave like those at the northern playhouses. 24. Early Modern Europe, p. 28. 25. ‘Seventeenth-Century London’, p. 32. 26. See Barry Reay, ‘Introduction’, p. 4; Burke, ‘Seventeenth-Century London’, p. 49; Jonathan Barry, ‘Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century Bristol’, p. 63; all in Reay, Popular Culture. 27. Playgoing, p. 55. 28. Reay, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. 29. Ibid. 30. Charles Read Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama, Chicago, 1929, pp. 398, 401. 31. Early Modern Europe, p. 137. 32. Playing Shakespeare, London and New York, 1984, pp. 55–6. 33. Baskervill, Jig, pp. 394–7. 34. Reay, ‘Introduction’, p. 5. 35. J.S.R.Goodlad, A Sociology of Popular Drama, London, 1971, p. 28. See also Burke, Early Modern Europe, pp. 146–7. 36. Baskervill, Jig, pp. 382–6, 389–93. 37. Hyder Edward Rollins (ed.), The Pepys Ballads, I, Cambridge, Mass., 1929, p. 131. 38. Bernard Capp, ‘Popular Literature’, in Reay, Popular Culture, p. 221. 39. The People and the Law’, in Reay, Popular Culture, p. 257. 40. Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seven teenth-Century England, London, 1981, pp. 219, 224. 41. Burke, Early Modern Europe, p. 173. 42. David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660, Oxford, 1985, p. 110.

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43. See above, n. 2; and Goodlad, Sociology, p. 169 and pp. 9, 28, 167–78. 44. See Capp, ‘Popular Literature’, pp. 209–11; and Spufford, Small Books, p. 224. On examples of this motif in the drama, see Ann Barton, ‘The King Disguised: Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Comical History’, in Joseph G.Price (ed.), The Triple Bond, University Park, Pa., and London, pp. 92–117. 45. See Burke, Early Modern Europe, pp. 36, 161; and Walter R.Davis, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction, Princeton, NJ, 1969, pp. 252, 261–9. 46. Capp, ‘Popular Literature’, p. 201; see also Spufford, Small Books, p. 145. 47. Robert Armin, Fool upon Fool, London, 1600, E2r. 48. Thomas Deloney, Works, ed. Francis Oscar Mann, Oxford, 1912, pp. 57–60. 49. Foster, Politics of Stability, pp. 117–18. 50. Barry Reay, ‘Popular Religion’, in Reay, Popular Culture, pp. 91–128. 51. Small Books, p. 56; see also Burke, ‘Seventeenth-Century London’, p. 46. 52. Burke, Early Modern Europe, p. 175. Underdown, Revel, pp. 126–7, argues that the poor had strong ‘notions of political right and wrong’ which ‘were often expressed in nostalgic yearnings for a vanished past’. 53. Capp, ‘Popular Literature’, p. 206. 54. Burke, ‘Seventeenth-Century London’, pp. 34, 33, 36. 55. Buchanan Sharp, ‘Populer Protest in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Reay, Popular Culture, p. 285. 56. ‘The London Apprentices as Seventeenth-Century Adolescents’, Past and Pres ent, LXI, 1973, p. 159. 57. Baskervill, Jig, pp. 404–6. 58. Small Books, p. 144. 59. Works, p. 262. 60. Capp, ‘Popular Literature’, p. 206. 61. Idea and Act, p. 185. 62. Martin Ingram, ‘The Reform of Popular Culture? Sex and Marriage in Early Modern England’, in Reay, Popular Culture, p. 150. Ingram argues against historians like G.R.Quaife, who claims, in Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early Seventeenth Century England (London, 1979), that the lower classes took a more free-and-easy view of sex than their superiors did (pp. 178–83). 63. Capp, ‘Popular Literature’, p. 202. 64. See Ann Jennalie Cook, ‘“Bargaines of Incontinencie”: Bawdy Behavior in the Playhouses’, Shakespeare Studies, X, 1977, pp. 271–90. 65. Michael D.Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England, New York and London, 1983, pp. 111–12. 66. The Implications of this have been explored by Stephen Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England, Chicago, 1988. 67. ‘A Merry Progress to London to See Fashions, by a Young Country Gallant that had more Money than Wit’, Pepys Ballads, I, p. 152. 68. See Gurr, Playgoing, pp. 48, 57–8; and Cook, Privileged, pp. 97–9. 69. Gurr, Playgoing, pp. 8, 56, 58. 70. See Judith Doolin Spikes, ‘The Jacobean History Play and the Myth of the Elect Nation’, Renaissance Drama, n.s., VIII, 1977, pp. 117–49. 71. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 1980, p. 160.

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72. Gurr, Stage, p. 209. 73. John Stephens, Satirical Essays, Characters and Others (1615), quoted in Gurr, Playgoing, p. 228. 74. E.S. , II, p. 549. 75. E.S. , IV, p. 218. 76. Gurr, Playgoing, p. 48. 77. A Strange Horse-Race (1613), quoted in Baskervill, Jig, p. 112. 78. Drayton, Idea (1600?), sonnet XLVII; Fennor, Fennor’s Descriptions (1616); quoted in Gurr, Playgoing, pp. 215–16, 230. 79. John Tatham (?), Knavery in all Trades (1664), quoted in J.C.S. , VI, pp. 172–3. 80. Quoted in Gurr, Playgoing, p. 71. 81. Pleasant Notes, p. 271. 82. Gurr, Stage, p. 200; J.C.S. , VI, pp. 151–2. 83. See Cook, ‘Bargaines’, p. 281. 84. Burke, Early Modern Europe, pp. 132–4. 85. Martha Tuck Rozett, The Doctrine of Election and the Emergence of Elizabethan Tragedy, Princeton, NJ, 1984, pp. 19–20.

3 PRODUCTION VALUES 1. For a survey of the uses of the trap—or traps, since there may have been more than one—at the Red Bull, see George Fullmer Reynolds, The Staging of Elizabethan Plays at the Red Bull Theater 1605–1625, New York and London, 1940, pp. 88– 92. 2. ‘The Discovery-space in Shakespeare’s Globe’, Shakespeare Survey, XII, 1959, pp. 44–5. 3. R.A.Foakes and R.T.Rickert (eds), Henslowe’s Diary, Cambridge, 1961, pp. 218, 321. 4. Diary, p. 319. 5. In the Chester Fall of Lucifer, for example, Lucifer sits in God’s throne, then he and Lightburne fall to Hell. 6. Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time 1590– 1642, Princeton, NJ, 1984, p. 72. 7. Bentley, Player, p. 49. 8. Diary, pp. 291–4. See also the inventory of the Admiral’s Men, pp. 316–25. 9. The sumptuary legislation of 1597 is conveniently reproduced in Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, 2nd edn, New York, 1989, pp. 143–4. 10. Quoted from A.C.Cawley (ed.), Everyman and Mediaeval Miracle Plays, 2nd edn, New York, 1959. 11. This interest was revived by Bertolt Brecht, who emphasized the importance of well-made properties. See Brecht on Theatre, tr. John Willett, 2nd edn, London, 1974, pp. 213, 231. 12. Hand properties had a similar importance in civic pageantry. We see this in Anthony Munday’s notes on his pageant for the Ironmongers, Sidero-Thriambos (1618): ‘For better understanding the true morality of this device, the personages

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13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

have all emblems and properties in their hands, and so near them, that the weakest capacity may take knowledge of them’. Quoted from David M.Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry 1558–1642, Columbia, SC, 1971, p. 161. Margot Heinemann, ‘Political Drama’, in A.R.Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (eds), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, Cambridge, 1990, p. 200. The Duchess’s troubles were also the subject of a popular ballad. The convention is used to similar effect in mediaeval drama, so that (for example) the stable at Bethlehem and Herod’s court are visible simultaneously. See David Bevington, Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1984, p. 121. See Richard Hosley, ‘The Playhouses’, in J.Leeds Barroll, Alexander Leggatt, Richard Hosley and Alvin Kernan, The Revels History of Drama in English, III: 1576–1613, London, 1975, pp. 192–3. Arguing for a view of the play as Protestant propaganda, Julia Gasper claims it is also designed ‘to galvanize the audience into active support for the Protestant cause in Europe at that very moment’ (The Dragon and the Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker, Oxford, 1990, p. 158.) The Doctrine of Election and the Emergence of Elizabethan Tragedy, Princeton, NJ, 1984, pp. 21–2. J.C.S. , VI, p. 167. Staging, pp. 9–11. Bergeron, Pageantry, pp. 168, 185; and Anne Lancashire, ‘The Emblematic Castle in Shakespeare and Middleton’, in J.C.Gray (ed.), Mirror up to Shake speare: Essays in Honour of G.R.Hibbard, Toronto, 1984, pp. 236–7. Quoted from The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A.H.Bullen, VII, London, 1886, pp. 261–2. Frank Freeman Foster, The Politics of Stability: a Portrait of the Rulers in Elizabethan London, London, 1977, p. 79. Foster adds, ‘This is still the practice today’. John Melton, Astrologaster, or the Figure-Caster, quoted from J.C.S. , VI, p. 152. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 1980, p. 170. Stage, p. 125. Gasper, Dragon, p. 126, offers a political explanation of the coda; reading the play as a satire on James I, she proposes that the inclusion of Ravillac (the assassin of Henri IV) and Guy Fawkes among the damned made the play ‘more politically acceptable’. Maybe so; but the theatre has its own imperatives, and I prefer to think of the scene as the product of the script conference I have imagined taking place between Dekker and the Red Bull company. If political safety were the aim, there were surely more economical ways to achieve it. Jonsonus Virbius (1638), in C.H.Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (eds), Ben Jonson, XI, Oxford, 1952, p. 453. Quoted from Louis B.Wright, ‘Stage Duelling in the Elizabethan Theater’, in G.E.Bentley (ed.), The Seventeenth-Century Stage, Toronto, 1968, p. 159. Wright, ‘Stage Duelling’, pp. 163, 169. The Rise of the Common Player, Cambridge, Mass., 1962, p. 109.

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4 ACTING VALUES 1. Quoted from E.S. , IV, p. 256. 2. On mediaeval drama, see Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tra dition in the Theater, Baltimore, Md., and London, 1978, p. 85; on popular theatre generally, Peter Davison, Popular Appeal in English Drama to 1850, London, 1982, passim. S.L.Bethell cites the Marx Brothers as a twentieth-century example, in Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition, London and New York, 1944, p. 38. 3. See J.C.S. , VI, p. 147. 4. This bears an obvious resemblance to Brecht’s idea that actors should ‘show’ characters, not be transformed into them. See Brecht on Theatre, tr. John Willett, 2nd edn, London, 1974, p. 137. The difference is that Brecht is recreating selfconsciously what earlier actors would have done as a matter of course. 5. See A.R.Braunmuller, ‘The Arts of the Dramatist’, in A.R.Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (eds), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, Cambridge, 1990, p. 70. Braunmuller cites an example from Edward II, and comments: ‘the script does not allow the actor playing Edward to be “frantic” at Gaveston’s banishment, or to enact that frenzy. Rather, the actor says Edward is frantic’. 6. Quoted from E.S. , IV, p. 258. The author may be John Webster. 7. ‘Towards a Definition of Popular Theatre’, in David Mayer and Kenneth Richards (eds), Western Popular Theatre, London, 1977, p. 275; Shakespeare’s Thea tre, London, 1983, p. 118. 8. See David Klein, ‘Did Shakespeare Produce his Own Plays?’, Modern Language Review, LVII, 1962, pp. 556–60. 9. Grim the Collier of Croydon, IV.ii., p. 60; The Virgin Martyr (Red Bull, c. 1620), IV.ii.105; The Wise-woman of Hogsdon, III.i.969; The Rape of Lucrece, p. 168. 10. How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad, F3r; Lust’s Dominion, I.ii.94; The Honest Lawyer, III.ii.F1v. 11. A Shoemaker a Gentleman (Red Bull, c. 1608), IV.i.G4r; Sir Thomas Wyatt (?Rose, 1602), II.iii.8. 12. For other examples, see Alan C.Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 30–3. 13. In The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 1980, pp. 98–101, Andrew Gurr surveys evidence of the use of coded gestures and suggests that by the turn of the century some of them were looking old-fashioned. The popular theatre, of course, was never afraid to be old-fashioned. 14. See Diana Rigg (ed.), No Turn Unstoned, London, 1983, p. 61. 15. On the ages at which boy actors retired, see J.B.Streett, The Durability of Boy Actors’, Notes and Queries, CCXVIII, 1973, pp. 461–5. 16. Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, 2nd edn, New York, 1989, pp. 9–36. 17. Julia Gasper, The Dragon and the Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker, Oxford, 1990, p. 161.

NOTES 207

18. Quoted from G.E.Bentley (ed.), The Seventeenth Century Stage, Toronto, 1968, p. 32. 19. Henry Peacham, Thalia’s Banquet (1620), quoted from Gurr, Stage, p. 86. 20. See David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, Cambridge, 1987, p. 151. 21. Clown, p. 103. 22. Shakespeare’s Comic Rites, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 110–11. 23. On the persistence of this tradition, see Davison, Popular Appeal, pp. 48–61; Davison gives examples ranging from pre-Shakespearean drama to the modern period. 24. Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, p. 104. One of the actual fools described in Robert Armin’s Fool upon Fool (London, 1600), Jack Oates, has the same voluble quality —angry, violent, uncontrollable. When his master offends him he cries ‘Hang Sir Willy, hang sir Willy’ (B1r). 25. Since the play was produced by Worcester’s Men, not the Admiral’s Men, this may be evidence of another clown using one of Singer’s tricks. 26. Fool upon Fool, A3v. (See also n. 22). 27. The historical Will Sommers’ comment on Henry’s title was, ‘Let thou and I defend one another, and let the faith alone to defend itself’. See Theodore B.Leinwand, ‘Conservative Fools in James’s Court and Shakespeare’s Plays’, Shakespeare Studies, XIX, 1987, p. 221. The play’s Will utters a garbled version of this, saying of Prince Edward, ‘and he and I can defend our selves, we care not, for we are sure the faith can’ (D2r).

5 TELLING THE STORY 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

See Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, London, 1981, p. 222. The Elizabethan Dumb Show, London, 1965, pp. 23–4. See Chapter 2, n. 31. See, for example, Mary Ann Weber Gasior, introduction to Thomas Heywood, The Four Prentices of London, New York, 1980, pp. xxxii–xxxiii. Chapter 2, n. 40. Renaissance Dramatists, Atlantic Heights, NJ, 1989, p. 123. See Gasior, introduction, pp. xlix–li. The play was presented by Queen Anne’s Men, and there is an outside chance that they performed it at the Curtain, which they still used occasionally after their move to the Red Bull. But the Red Bull was their regular playhouse, and is more likely to have been the play’s first venue. The point that matters for this discussion is that it was performed in a popular playhouse; which playhouse it was matters less. (See John Russell Brown, introduction to John Webster, The White Devil, 2nd edn, London, 1966, p. xxii.) Webster’s notes to the reader are found on pp. 2–4 and 187 of Brown’s edition. Marion Lomax, Stage Images and Traditions: Shakespeare to Ford, Cambridge, 1987, p. 128. Lomax contrasts Webster’s method with Heywood’s.

208 NOTES

6 THE FAIR MAID OF THE WEST 1. The play treats the drawers’ concerns as important enough to spend an extra scene and a large number of actors settling them. I.iv opens with a dumb show in which the English general (Essex), accompanied by captains and the Mayor of Plymouth, hands out money to various petitioners—among them the drawers, who are collecting debts owed to the Castle inn. The presence of Essex also allows the background political action to come briefly onstage. 2. There is a similar effect in 1 Henry IV, when Falstaff stabs the dead Hotspur: ‘Nothing confutes me but eyes, and nobody sees me’ (V.iv. 126–7)—nobody but two or three thousand members of the audience. 3. See Thomas Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West, Parts One and Two, ed. Robert K.Turner, Jr, London, 1968, p. 201. 4. See the note on this passage in Turner’s edition, p. 73. 5. Shakespeare’s Theatre, London, 1983, p. 123. 6. Fair Maid, p. 66.

7 THE HONEST WHORE 1. Attempts to show how the authorship was divided have not yielded decisive results; the contributions of the two authors are very hard to disentangle. See Cyrus Hoy, Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries to Texts in ‘The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker’, II, Cambridge, 1980, pp. 3–6. 2. In Part Two we are told that her father has not seen her for seventeen years (I.ii. 143); but references to time in the drama of this period tend to be ad hoc expedients, for local effect, and need not be taken literally. 3. For a characteristic expression of modern distaste with this sort of writing, see Alexander Leggatt, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare, Toronto and Buffalo, NY, 1973, p. 115. 4. On the rhetoric of Hippolito’s speech, see Viviana Comensoli, ‘Gender and Eloquence in Dekker’s The Honest Whore, Part Two’, English Studies in Canada, XV, 1989, pp. 249–50. 5. See Chapter 2, n. 31. 6. See Hoy, Introductions, II, pp. 68–70. 7. Shaw’s Dramatic Criticism, ed. John F.Matthews, New York, 1959, p. 184. 8. I suspect the stage direction is wrongly punctuated, and Hippolito and Matheo should enter at the other door. 9. Michael Neill has suggested that the opening funeral pageant conveys ‘the empty pride and hypocrisy of the court world’. See ‘“Exeunt with a Dead March”: Funeral Pageantry on the Shakespearean Stage’, in David M.Bergeron (ed.), Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater, Athens, Ga., 1985, p. 174. 10. See J.A.Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England 1550–1750, London and New York, 1984, pp. 179–82. 11. See Hoy’s note on this passage, Introductions, II, p. 124.

NOTES 209

12. In the first scene in Candido’s shop in Part One, there is a link between his trade and prostitution when his journeyman George refers to a bolt of calico he is trying to sell as ‘she’, calling it ‘the purest she that ever you fingered’ (I.v.24), and going on to a whole string of sexual jokes.

8 IF YOU KNOW NOT ME YOU KNOW NOBODY 1. See Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London, 1978, pp. 152– 3. 2. See Madeleine Doran, introduction to the Malone Society Reprint of I If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Oxford, 1935, pp. xviii–xix. 3. See Madeleine Doran, introduction to the Malone Society Reprint of II If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Oxford, 1935, pp. xii–xviii. 4. See Doran, introduction to Part One, pp. xvi–xvii. 5. See George Fullmer Reynolds, The Staging of Elizabethan Plays at the Red Bull Theater 1605–1625, New York and London, 1940, p. 4. 6. See Judith Doolin Spikes, ‘The Jacobean History Play and the Myth of the Elect Nation’, Renaissance Drama, n.s. VIII, 1977, p. 137. Burke, Popular Culture, p. 164, points out that popular heroines ‘were admired not so much for what they did as for what they suffered’. 7. See David M.Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry 1558–1642, Columbia, SC, 1971, pp. 20–1. 8. See Bergeron, Pageantry, pp. 74–5. 9. As David Underdown has noted, popular protest included elements of inversion, like cross-dressing and the use of mock titles, whose function was to invert a world that had been turned upside-down by enclosers and the like, ‘in order to turn it right-side-up’. See Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660, Oxford, 1985, p. 111. 10. Richard Johnson, The Pleasant Conceits of Old Hobson the Merry Londoner (1607), reprinted in W.Carew Hazlitt (ed.), Shakespeare Jest-Books, III, London, 1864. Johnson’s description of Hobson’s characteristic dress includes ‘a pair of slippers…of an ancient fashion’ (p. 7). The slippers are a kind of comic signature for Hobson throughout the play. 11. The hero of Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury has a similar gallery, though its object is to encourage ambition: the subjects of his portraits rose from humble beginnings to high estate. See Deloney, Works, ed. Francis Oscar Mann, Oxford, 1912, pp. 40–3. 12. See Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680, London, 1982, p. 81. 13. See Frank Freeman Foster, The Politics of Stability: a Portrait of the Rulers in Elizabethan London, London, 1977, pp. 138, 151. 14. It begins with a Chorus who announces a leap in time from Elizabeth’s accession to the year of the Armada; this is illogical at the end of Part Two, but perfectly logical at the end of Part One.

210 NOTES

9 THE TRUE CHRONICLE HISTORY OF KING LEAR 1. See P.W.K.Stone, The Textual History of King Lear, London, 1980, pp. 13–40. 2. See Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost, 2nd edn, London, 1971, p. 95; and Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680, London, 1982, p. 69. 3. See Bernard Capp, ‘Popular Literature’, in Barry Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, London and Sydney, 1985, p. 221. 4. See David Bevington, Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1984, pp. 170–2. 5. See David Farley-Hills, Shakespeare and the Rival Playwrights 1600–1606, London and New York, 1990, p. 191. 6. On the ‘flying’ of the chair of state, see Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300 to 1660, vol. II, part 1, London, 1963, p. 315; and Peter Thomson, Shakespeare’s Theatre, London, 1983, p. 49. It is not certain that this property was flown; it could have been simply carried on and off. 7. On the symbolism of clothing in this play, see G.K. Hunter, ‘Flatcaps and Bluecoats: Visual Signs on the Elizabethan Stage’, Essays and Studies, XXXIII, 1980, pp. 31–3. 8. See Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England, Cambridge, 1981, pp. 129–31. 9. See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, London, 1977, p. 171. 10. ‘The King Lear Quarto in Rehearsal and Performance’, Shakespeare Quarterly, XXXVII, 1986, pp. 380, 381–2. 11. See Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain, Ithaca, NY, and London, 1985, p. 343; and Margot Heinemann, ‘Political Drama’, in A.R.Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (eds), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 193–4. It would be wrong to suggest that the text has been systematically censored, since the ‘rascal 1 beadle’ passage, and others embodying the play’s most cutting satire, are preserved. 2. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London, 1978, p. 122. 13. 1 Popular Culture, pp. 273–4. 4. Henry Farley, St. Paul’s Church her Bill for the Parliament (1621), quoted in J.C.S., VI, p. 209. 15. ‘“The Base Shall Top th’Legitimate”: the Bedlam Beggar and the Role of Edgar in King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly, XXXVIII, 1987, pp. 431–4. 16. Quoted from Jack Lindsay (ed.), Loving Mad Tom: Bedlamite Verses of the XVI and XVII Centuries, London, 1927, p. 23. 17. Lindsay (ed.), Loving Mad Tom, p. 25. 18. Michael Neill has argued that Elizabethan funerals were occasions of lavish display that reinforced the hierarchical order of society; but he finds the ending of King Lear too stark to have this effect. See ‘“Exeunt with a Dead March”: Funeral Pageantry on the Shakespearean Stage’, in David M.Bergeron (ed.), Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater, Athens, Ga., 1985, pp. 161–2, 173. 19. E.S., II, p. 365.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Astington, John H., ‘Descent Machinery in the Playhouses’, Mediaeval and Renais sance Drama in England , II, 1985, pp. 119–33 . Barroll, J.Leeds, Alexander Leggatt, Richard Hosley and Alvin Kernan, The Revels History of Drama in English , III: 1576–1612 , London, 1975. Baskervill, Charles Read, The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama , Chicago, 1929. Beckerman, Bernard, Shakespeare at the Globe 1599–1609 , New York, 1962. Bentley, Gerald Eades, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage , 7 vols , Oxford, 1941–68. Bentley, Gerald Eades, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time 1590–1642 , Princeton, NJ, 1971. Bentley, Gerald Eades, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time 1590–1642 , Princeton, NJ, 1984. Bergeron, David M., English Civic Pageantry 1558–1642 , Columbia, SC, 1971. Berry, Herbert, The Boar’s Head Playhouse , Washington, DC, London and Toronto, 1986. Berry, Herbert, Shakespeare’s Playhouses , New York, 1987. Braunmuller, A.R. and Michael Hattaway (eds), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama , Cambridge, 1990. Bristol, Michael D., Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England , New York and London, 1985. Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe , London, 1978. Butler, Martin, Theatre and Crisis 1632–1642 , Cambridge, 1984. Chambers, E.K., The Elizabethan Stage , 4 vols , Oxford, 1923. Cohen, Walter, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain , Ithaca, NY and London, 1985. Cook, Ann Jennalie,‘ “Bargaines of Incontinencie”: Bawdy Behavior in the Playhouses’, Shakespeare Studies , X, 1977, pp. 271–90 . Cook, Ann Jennalie, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London, 1576–1642 , Princeton, NJ, 1981. Davison, Peter, Popular Appeal in English Drama to 1850 , London, 1982. Dessen, Alan C., Elizabetban Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters , Cambridge, 1984. Edwards, Philip, Gerald Eades Bentley, Kathleen McLuskie and Lois Potter, The Revels History of Drama in English, IV: 1613–1660 , London, 1981. Foakes, R.A. and R.T.Rickert (eds), Henslowe’s Diary , Cambridge, 1961. Goodlad, J.S.R., A Sociology of Popular Drama , London, 1971. Graves, R.B., ‘Shakespeare’s Outdoor Stage Lighting’, Shakespeare Studies , XIII, 1980, pp. 235–50 . Gurr, Andrew, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London , Cambridge, 1987. Gurr, Andrew, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642 , 2nd edn, Cambridge, 1980. Hattaway, Michael, Elizabethan Popular Theatre , London, 1982.

212 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hosley, Richard, ‘The Discovery-space in Shakespeare’s Globe’, Shakespeare Survey , XII, 1959, pp. 35–46 . Klein, David, ‘Time Allotted for an Elizabethan Performance’, Shakespeare Quar terly , XVIII, 1967, pp. 434–8 . Mayer, David, and Kenneth Richards (eds), Western Popular Theatre , London, 1977. Orrell, John, The Human Stage: English Theatre Design, 1567–1640 , Cambridge, 1988. Orrell, John, and Andrew Gurr, ‘What the Rose can tell us’, TLS , 9–15 June 1989 , pp. 636, 649 . Reay, Barry (ed.), Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England , London and Sydney, 1985. Reynolds, George Fullmer, The Staging of Elizabethan Plays at the Red Bull Theater 1605–1625 , New York and London, 1940. Smith, Warren, ‘Evidence of Scaffolding on Shakespeare’s Stage’, Review of English Studies , n.s.II, 1951, pp. 22–9 . Spufford, Margaret, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England , London, 1981. Thomson, Peter, Shakespeare’s Theatre , London, 1983. Weimann, Robert, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater , Baltimore, Md., and London, 1978. Wiles, David, Shakespeare’s Clown , Cambridge, 1987.

INDEX

‘above’ see gallery accents 87, 189–5 Admiral’s Men see Prince Henry’s Men Alleyn, Edward 29, 40 All’s Lost by Lust (Rowley) 22 All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare) 95 apprentices 4, 28, 30, 35–9, 131, 134, 155, 190 Armin, Robert 29, 92, 98, 193 As You Like It (Shakespeare) 88, 94 asides 74, 82, 83, 123, 136, 149, 184, 188

boy actors 25, 86, 88–5, 133–9, 138, 143– 47, 192 Bradbrook, M.C. 71 Brazen Age (Heywood) 47–47, 48, 62, 64, 66, 73, 104, 104 Brecht, Bertolt 204, 205 Buckingham, Duke of 27 Burbage, James 9, 29 Burke, Peter 30, 31, 187 Busino, Orazio 41 Butler, Martin 4, 27, 28 Cane, Andrew 29, 91 canopy 12, 17, 19, 24 capacity of playhouses 10, 12, 16, 17, 26, 39 Careless Shepherdess, Praeludium 9, 91, 94 Carroll, William C. 189 Chamberlain’s Men see King’s Men Charles I 37–38 Chaste Maid in Cheapside (Middleton) 2, 12 Chettle, Henry 29 Children of Paul’s 28 Christmas Carol (Dickens) 150 civic pageants 62, 204 ‘clap-trap’ 86 Clark, Hugh 138 clowns 1, 9, 20, 21, 30, 71, 82, 91–101, 131, 133–9, 139, U6~7, 154, 157, 165– 3, 170, 171, 186–5 ‘Cocke, J.’ 26, 71 Cockpit (Phoenix) 2, 19, 30, 35, 120, 158 Cook, Ann Jennalie 27

ballads 16, 20, 29, 31–4, 34, 35, 36, 37, 94–9, 108, 146, 148, 152, 173, 175, 183, 187 Bartholomew Fair (Jonson) 22 Barton, John 31 battles see fights bearbaiting 22 Beeston, Christopher 19 Bentley, G.E. 41 Berry, Edward 92 Berry, Herbert 14, 25 Bible 34, 163–70 Blackfriars playhouse2, 17, 202 Blind Beggar of Bednal Green (Chettle, Day and Haughton) 55, 66, 80, 85, 87, 94, 96, 97, 108, 109–14, 114, 117, 118, 185, 190, 191 Boar’s Head playhouse 2, 9, 12–14, 16–17, 19, 23, 24, 25, 47, 129, 131, 158 Bodley, Thomas 29 Boutell, Mrs 89

213

214 INDEX

Coriolanus (Shakespeare) 47 costumes 16, 18, 21, 25, 40, 48, 51–6, 54, 61, 63, 77, 90, 106, 132, 138, 143, 146, 152–8, 155, 158, 164, 169, 171, 173, 176–5, 208 Country Wife (Wycherley) 89 court performances 20, 26, 29, 129, 138, 174 cresset lights 25, 139–4, 192–193 Curtain playhouse 2, 9, 14, 18, 22, 23, 40, 129, 158, 207 cutpurses 18, 37, 39, 42, 47, 73 Cymbeline (Shakespeare) 24, 150 Davenant, William 69 Davis, Walter N. 36 Dekker, Thomas 39, 42, 64, 143 devils 20, 21, 30, 42, 48, 61, 63–66, 176, 189 Devil’s Charter (Barnes) 49, 50, 55, 59–2, 62, 85, 90, 120, 175–3 Devil’s Law-Case (Webster) 57, 117 de Witt, Johannes 10–12 direct address 71–84, 107, 114, 132–9, 136, 141, 146–2, 182, 183–ix, 187, 188 discovery-space 19, 23, 48–2, 63, 64, 66, 104, 120, 155–1, 159, 170–7 disguise 77, 87, 189 Dish of Lenten Stuff (Turner) 20 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe) 2, 22, 24, 26, 63 doors (stage) 12, 19, 23, 84, 108 doubling 25–7, 84 Doubtful Heir, Prologue (Shirley) 202 Downton, Thomas 29 Drayton, Michael 39 Dryden, John 22 Duchess of Malfi (Webster) 125 Duchess of Suffolk (Drue) 38, 47, 53, 57– ix, 112, 180 Duke of Lennox’s Men see Prince Charles’s (I) Men dumb shows 47, 68, 104–9, 120–4, 207 Eastward Ho (Chapman, Jonson and Marston) 28 Edward II (Marlowe) 205

Edward IV 1 & 2 (Heywood?) 54, 58, 62, 63–5, 68, 77, 82, 85–86, 90, 91, 96, 101– 7, 107–12, 110, 114, 117, 118–3, 121, 168, 180, 192 Edward VI 38 ‘Elect Nation’ plays 37–38, 112, 117 Elizabeth I 38, 142–9, 158, 163–66, 166, 172 England’s Joy 12 entrances 12, 23, 56–58, 66, 67, 82, 84–9, 99, 108, 137, 140, 145, 149–4, 157, 159, 161–8, 173, 175, 179, 186, 191 Epicoene (Jonson) 88 executions 51, 58, 59 Fair Maid of Bristow 51, 77, 87, 108, 110, 112, 114, 180, 187 Fair Maid of the Exchange (Heywood?) 73 Fair Maid of the West, 1 & 2 (Heywood) ix, 129–48, 143, 158, 174, 178, 187 Fall of Lucifer (Chester) 204 fencing 9, 12, 22; see also fights Fennor, Richard 39 Fields, W.C. 95 fights 1, 20, 21, 22, 25, 30, 40, 66–5, 104, 121, 131, 139, 143, 190–9 fire effects 61, 62, 64, 65; see also fireworks fires in playhouses 16, 17–18, 51, 200 fireworks 1, 20, 21, 24, 42, 63–66; see also fire effects Fletcher, John 129 flying machinery 19, 24, 48, 58–1, 62, 175 Fool upon Fool (Armin) 31 Fortune by Land and Sea (Heywood and Rowley) 47, 52–6, 80, 97, 104, 187 Fortune playhouse 2, 4, 9, 10, 14, 17–19, 20, 22, 23–5, 26, 27, 29–2, 38, 39, 40, 41, 51, 60, 63, 64, 158, 200 Foscarini, Antonio 40 Four Prentices of London (Heywood) 23, 55, 63, 68–4, 89, 98, 104–8, 117, 118, 191 Fowler, Richard 39–2 Freeman’s Honour (Smith) 117–2

INDEX 215

Frith, Moll 76 ‘From the Hag and the Hungry Goblin’ 189, 190 furniture 25, 49–2, 51, 131, 137, 139, 165, 175–3; see also properties galleries as audience seating 9, 9, 12–14, 17, 23–4, 26, 41–3, 73 gallery as acting area 12, 23–5, 47–47, 65, 66, 69, 73, 162 Galli, Antonio 40 Gentle Craft (Deloney) 35 ‘gentlemen’s rooms’ 17, 26, 27 gesture 85–86, 133, 169, 175, 178, 179–5, 186; see also kneeling Globe playhouse 2, 9, 14–17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 27, 30, 38, 174, 175, 200, 202 Golden Age (Heywood) 89, 92–9 Gondomar, Count 27 Goodlad, J.S. R. 33 Gosson, Stephen 38–ix Greene, Robert 29, 36 Greene, Thomas 91–5, 96 Greene’s Tu Quoque (Cooke) 4, 54, 63, 92–5, 95, 96, 97–1, 114 Grim the Collier of Croydon (Haughton?) 53, 63, 73, 74, 75 Gurr, Andrew 19, 27, 31, 66 Gwynn, Nell 90 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 33, 47, 104–9, 174 Hannibal and Scipio, Prologue 25 Hattaway, Michael 2 ‘Heavens’ 24 Hector of Germany (Smith) 23, 88, 117–1 Heminges, John 29 Henry IV, 1 & 2 (Shakespeare) 112, 207 Henry VI, 1, 2 & 3 (Shakespeare) 10, 88 Henry VIII (Shakespeare) 16, 100 Henslowe, Philip 9, 10, 17, 27, 49–2, 51 Herod and Antipater (Markham and Sampson) 51, 58, 79, 86, 101, 110, 178, 184 Heywood, Thomas 129, 158

hired men 25, 26, 50, 67, 193 Hoffman (Chettle) 56, 57, 63, 80 Honest Lawyer (S. S.) 74–9, 79–3, 87, 112, 114, 115–19, 183 Honest Whore, 1 & 2 (Dekker and Middleton) 18, 143–63, 167, 174, 176, 180, 183 Hope playhouse 14, 17, 22, 49, 189 Hosley, Richard 17, 49 How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad (Heywood?) 75, 78–3, 84, 95, 96, 104–9, 107, 113, 123, 135, 146 Hundred Notable Things for a Penny 36 Hunt, Leigh 86 hut 12, 24 If This be not a Good Play, the Devil is in It (Dekker) 42, 64–66, 67, 98 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, 1 & 2 (Heywood) 158–80, 174, 175, 176, 186, 189 improvisation 87, 92, 94, 165 Iron Age, 1 & 2 (Heywood) 49, 53, 86, 112, 121 Irving, Henry 150 Jack Drum’s Entertainment (Marston) 28, 39 Jack of Newbury (Deloney) 34, 35, 36, 208 James I 2, 9, 27, 29, 37–38, 139, 162, 163, 164, 205 Jardine, Lisa 88 jestbooks 35, 129, 133, 169 Jew of Malta (Marlowe) 40, 49–2 jigs 9, 9, 16, 18, 30, 39, 101, 193 Jonson, Ben 2, 29, 66, 76, 117 Jugurth 40 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) 28, 33, 193 Kemp, Will 92 Keysar, Robert 29 Killigrew, Thomas 20 King and Queen of Bohemia’s Men 18 King Lear (Shakespeare) 174–193 King’s (Chamberlain’s) Men 2, 9, 14–17, 18, 19, 20, 125, 174

216 INDEX

King’s Revels Company 18 Knave in Grain, New Vampt (J. D.) 23–4 kneeling 57, 68, 85, 90, 140, 148, 153–9, 161, 178–5 Knight of the Burning Pestle (Beaumont) 55, 173, 191 Kyd, Thomas 29 Lady Elizabeth’s Men 12, 22 Larum for London 47, 48, 58–1, 66, 111, 116, 117, 190–9 Last Will and Testament of the Doctor’s Commons 18–19 Late Lancashire Witches (Heywood and Brome) 2, 73, 115 Laud, William 37, 60 light in playhouses 9, 24–6, 71, 139–4, 192–193 literacy 30–2 London Merchant (Lillo) 35 London Prodigal 114, 145, 174 Long Meg of Westminster 36, 129, 133 Looking-Glass for London and England (Greene and Lodge) 111 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare) 24–5, 68 Lowin, John 29 Lust’s Dominion (Dekker, Haughton and Day?) 47–1, 58, 74, 79, 80, 109, 120, 184 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 63 Marlowe, Christopher 18, 29 Martyred Soldier (Shirley) 48, 59, 63, 96– ix Match Me in London (Dekker) 53 Mayer, David 26, 33, 84 Mayne, Jasper 66 McLuskie, Kathleen 115 Mehl, Dieter 104 Merry Devil of Edmonton 16, 84, 85 Middleton, Thomas 143 Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare) 29 miracle plays 33, 50, 62, 71, 168, 204

Miseries of Enforced Marriage (Wilkins) 57, 75–76, 79, 90–5, 92, 95–96, 97, 111, 113, 145, 174, 178, 192 morality plays 71, 112 Munday, Anthony 29 music 21, 22, 42, 56, 59–3, 61, 64–9, 66, 68, 73, 90, 105–11, 112, 118, 139, 140, 157, 173, 191 music room 19, 22, 24, 66 My Little Chickadee 95 Noah’s Flood (Chester) 55 Nobody and Somebody 112 Oates,Jack 98, 206 Olivier, Laurence 85 Ordo Representationis Adae 64 Oxford’s Men 14 Palsgrave’s Men see Prince Henry’s Men pantomime 73 Parker, Martin 37 Patient Grissil (Dekker, Chettle and Haughton) 52, 53, 74, 92, 96, 113, 118 Paul’s Boys see Children of Paul’s Peel, Emma 36 Peele, George 29 Pepys, Samuel 4, 20, 21–2 Pericles (Shakespeare) 29 Perkins, Richard 119 Phoenix playhouse see Cockpit pillars 12, 17, 19, 22, 24, 39, 47, 49 Plain Dealer (Wycherley) 89 platforms see scaffolding Pleasant Conceits of Old Hobson the Merry Londoner (Johnson) 169, 208 Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixote (Gayton) 31, 40–2, 42 posts see pillars prices ix, 9, 26, 26, 27, 29, 73 Prince Charles’s (I) (Duke of Lennox’s) Men 9, 14, 19, 22 Prince Charles’s (II) Men 9, 18, 20, 91 Prince Henry’s (Admiral’s, Palsgrave’s) Men 2, 9, 10, 17–18, 19, 129

INDEX 217

properties 53–7, 55–9, 131–7, 136, 139, 145, 148, 154–60, 162–70, 168–5, 175, 176, 192, 204; see also tools, weapons prostitutes 34, 37, 89, 143, 193 proverbs 32, 33, 114–19, 132, 149, 181–9 Queen Anne’s (Worcester’s) Men (Revels Company) 2, 9, 10, 14, 19, 30, 91, 119– 4, 129, 158, 200, 207 Queen Henrietta’s Men 120 rails 23 Rape of Lucrece (Heywood) 49, 74, 78, 86, 96, 105–11, 123, 187 Red Bull Company 18, 19–ix Red Bull playhouse 2, 4, 9, 9, 14, 17, 18– 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 29–2, 38, 42, 48, 64, 119–4, 129, 131, 158, 200, 207 Red Lion playhouse 197 rehearsals 84 Restoration theatre 4, 21–2, 89, 90 Revels Company see Queen Anne’s Men Revenger’s Tragedy 2, 16 Reynolds, George Fullmer 62 Richard III (Shakespeare) 24, 74, 90, 174, 178 Richman, David 182–86 riots 18, 19, 33, 34, 35, 40–2 Roaring Girl (Dekker and Middleton) ix, 18, 41–4, 63, 73, 76, 87, 89 Romeo and juliet (Shakespeare) 24, 92 roofing 9, 12–14, 16 Rose playhouse 2, 9–10, 14, 16, 17, 23, 129 Royal King and the Loyal Subject (Heywood) 52 Royal Shakespeare Company 176 Rozett, Martha Tuck 60–3 Salisbury Court playhouse 9 Satiromastix (Dekker) 117 scaffolding 23, 47, 50–3 Secunda Pastorum 33 sermons 41, 147 Seven Champions of Christendom (Kirke) 47, 48, 63, 98

Shakespeare, William 2, 16, 20, 29 Shank, John 29 sharers 25 Sharpe, James 32–4 Shaw, Bernard 150 Shirley, James 202 Shoemaker a Gentleman (Rowley) 48, 54, 62, 66–1, 98, 104, 118 Shoemakers’ Holiday (Dekker) ix, 28, 118 shop scenes 63–5, 77–2, 151, 155, 157, 169–5 Sidero-Thriambos (Munday) 204 Silver Age (Heywood) 48, 62, 63, 77 Singer, John 96, 206 Sir Thomas Wyatt (Chettle, Dekker, Haughton, Smith and Webster) 116 Smith, Steven R. 35 Smith, Wentworth 117–1 Sommers, Will 34, 35, 206 Spanish Tragedy (Kyd) 10, 18, 28, 141 Spufford, Margaret 33, 34, 35–9, 111–14 stage directions 1, 56–62, 84–86, 176, 179, 196, 197 stage-keepers see hired men Statute of Artificers 27–28 stereotyping 32, 77–3, 112–18, 115, 122, 132–8, 145–ix, 160, 180 Street, Peter 17 ‘study’ see discovery-space Sturgess, Keith 2 Survey of London (Stowe) 156, 167 Swan playhouse 2, 10–12, 14, 16, 20, 22, 23, 66 Swetnam the Woman-hater, Arraigned by Women 47, 76, 87–2, 95, 96, 176 Tamburlaine the Great 1 & 2 (Marlowe) 10, 21, 40 Tarlton, Richard 91 Tarlton’s News out of Purgatory 39 Tatham, John 21 Taylor, Thomas 29 Theatre (playhouse) 9, 14, 39 Thomas Lord Cromwell 58, 113, 116, 119 Thomas of Reading (Deloney) 36 Thomson, Peter 2, 25, 84, 139 thunder 48, 60, 62, 63, 65, 176, 189

218 INDEX

tiring-house 9, 10, 21, 23, 24 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) 10, 25 tools 31, 53–7, 168, 169 torture 47, 58–2, 61 trap 19, 47–1, 62, 64, 65–66 Travels of the Three English Brothers (Day, Rowley and Wilkins) 50, 66, 85, 92 Trial of Chivalry 49, 67–2, 69, 85, 87, 92, 97, 108, 110–15, 117, 191 Triumphs of Truth (Middleton) 62 Turner, Robert K., Jr. 139 Two Merry Milkmaids (I.C.) 21, 30, 40, 94, 98–3, 188, 200 Two Noble Ladies and the Converted Conjurer 56–57, 61, 107 Valient Scot (J.W.) 50 Valiant Welshman (R.A.) 68, 79, 117 van Buchell, Aernout 10 Vennar, Richard 12 Virgin Martyr (Dekker and Massinger) 51, 54, 59, 60–4, 64, 90, 116 Volpone (Jonson) 29 wardrobe see costumes Weakest Goeth to the Wall 53–5, 116, 117, 118 weapons 54–9, 68, 190 Webster, John 25, 119–3, 124–9 West, Mae 95 When You See Me You Know Me (Rowley) 35, 47, 55–9, 61, 84, 99–5, 104, 121, 141, 157, 188 White Devil (Webster) 119–9, 129, 145 Whittington, Dick 34, 35, 171 Whore of Babylon (Dekker) 42, 60, 173, 187 Wiles, David 92 Wise-woman of Hogsdon (Heywood) 57, 77–1 Wits (Kirkman), title page 95 Wolsey, Cardinal 35 Woman Killed with Kindness (Heywood) ix, 50, 54, 55, 56, 63, 73, 75, 80, 82–9, 101, 184, 187 Worcester’s Men see Queen Anne’s Men Wright, James 30

yard 9, 9–10, 12, 23, 26, 42, 66 Yorkshire Tragedy 55, 75, 85, 90, 114–19, 145, 174, 192

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