A Brief History of the Tudor Age (37 page)

The plays that were acted at the beginning of the Tudor Age, apart from the illegal Robin Hood interludes, were all on religious subjects – the ‘morality plays’, with the
characters pointing out the virtues and vices which should be emulated or avoided. The plays
Noah’s Flood
,
The Death of Pilate
,
The Fall of Lucifer
, and
The
Incredibility of Thomas
were among those which were often acted. One of the last to be written and acted before the repudiation of Papal supremacy was
Everyman
. The character of
Everyman represented all men, with their faults and temptations, and the play emphasizes that the only way to attain salvation is by good works, by penance, especially self-flagellation, and
through the sacraments and doctrines of the
Catholic Church. Every man is reminded by the character Five Wits that no emperor, king, duke or baron had the power which the least
priest has been granted by God, to bear lithe keys to the blessed sacraments:

This was at the time when the Protestants were challenging the official doctrine that the seven sacraments were the means of salvation, and asserting that they were merely the
channels through which salvation could be attained; and Luther had declared that there were only three sacraments, not seven. In 1552, the Protestant Second Book of Common Prayer declared that
Baptism and the Lord’s Supper were the only two sacraments, and this again became the official doctrine of the Church of England under Elizabeth I.

A very different line was put over by the Protestant propagandist, John Bale, in his play
King John
, which was probably first written in 1538, though in its final form it was only
completed after the accession of Elizabeth I, shortly before Bale’s death in 1563. The characters in the play, besides King John himself, include ‘England, a widow’,
‘Sedition, the vice’, ‘Civil Order’, ‘the Pope’, ‘Treason’, ‘Verity’, and the monk Simon of Swinefleet, who, according to a tradition
which was constantly referred to by the Protestants in the sixteenth century, had poisoned King John at Swinefleet on the Humber at the orders of the Pope by giving him a cup of poisoned wine,
after the monk had sacrificed his own life by drinking first from the cup in order to persuade King John that it was not poisoned. The character Verity, who speaks the words of truth and wisdom
throughout the play, declares that a king is, by God’s Word, supreme in his kingdom and must never be criticized, even after he has been dead for 300 years, like King John. In the final
scene, a new
character enters, ‘Imperial Majesty’, who is clearly meant to be Henry VIII, and Verity extols his absolute power. Imperial Majesty orders another
wicked priest to be hanged, drawn and quartered, although he had induced him to confess by promising him his life, for Imperial Majesty is quite entitled to break his word if he chooses to do so;
and the priest is taken away to Tyburn, protesting that he will be canonized by the Pope, like Thomas Becket.

In the reign of Henry VIII, a new type of play was being written; the light comedy, in which some philosophical truths emerge through the humour, reached England with other products of the
Italian Renaissance. John Heywood wrote them for nearly seventy years, from his first plays in 1520, when he was a young protégé of Sir Thomas More, to his last works written very
shortly before his death in 1587. Nicholas Udall, who was headmaster of Eton and a ferocious flogger until he was disgraced for homosexual offences against the boys, wrote the comedy
Ralph
Roister Doister
in about 1535; it was an adaptation of Plautus’s comedy of 206 B.C.,
Miles Gloriosus
.
Gammer Gurton’s Needle
, a very coarse farce by an unknown
author, dealing with English village life, was first performed in 1552.

English dramatists also began to write tragedies, usually based on historical themes. Two young students of the Inner Temple, Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, wrote a play in blank verse,
Gorbaduc
, about a mythical early British King who was let down by his two sons when he divided his kingdom between them – a story which may have given Shakespeare the idea for his
King Lear
. It was first acted before Elizabeth I in January 1562. When Elizabeth visited Oxford in 1566, the scholars at Christ Church performed the play
Pelemon and Arcite
, based
on the story from Greek mythology; but many tragedies were written about English Kings. The villainous Richard III was a favourite subject; eight plays were written about him in the years after
1565.

Sometimes the playwrights ventured to write plays about contemporary events, which had been expressly forbidden by
Henry VIII’s Privy Council in the period of
repression in 1543, but was possible under the more tolerant régime of Elizabeth.
The King of Scots
, a tragedy about the assassination of Darnley, was performed in London within a
few months of his death in 1567. The ‘Spanish fury’ at Antwerp in 1576, when Alva’s soldiers killed, raped and looted, was the subject of a play,
Alarum for London
,
performed a few months later in London, which warned the Londoners of what would be in store for them if Spanish soldiers were ever to capture the city. In one scene, two little boys plead for
their lives with a Spanish soldier, who pitilessly kills them both.

These tragedies paved the way for the remarkable output of great dramatic plays which were produced, as well as the comedies, on the London stage in the last fifteen years of the Tudor Age. They
began with Christopher Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine
which was produced in 1587. Marlowe was a slightly suspect character in the eyes of the authorities. At Cambridge he was thought to have
come under the influence of Francis Kett, an ‘Arian’ who followed the teaching of the fourth-century theologian, Arius, and denied the divinity of Christ. Kett was one of the few people
to be burned as a heretic in Elizabeth’s reign, suffering at the stake in Norwich in 1589. There was a passage in
Tamburlaine
which was interpreted by Marlowe’s critics as
suggesting that he did not believe in God. But Marlowe escaped from the persecution which he would almost certainly have suffered thirty years before; according to one theory, this was because he
was protected by Walsingham in return for agreeing to act as an agent in the government’s secret service.

Marlowe lived for six years after writing
Tamburlaine
before being killed in a brawl in 1593, when he was on the point of being arrested for atheism and sedition. During this time he
wrote five more tragedies in blank verse –
Dr Faustus
,
The Jew of Malta
,
The Massacre at Paris
(the Massacre of St Bartholomew),
Edward II
, and
Dido,
Queen of Carthage
. In 1589 Marlowe’s friend, Thomas Kyd, wrote
The Spanish Tragedy containing the Lamentable End of Don Haratio and Bel-imperia,
with the Pitiful
Death of Old Hieronimo
, a very popular play about murder and revenge. Kyd was suspected of being involved with Marlowe in the circulation of atheist and seditious leaflets, and after being
arrested and tortured, died in 1594 before he could write another tragedy, unless he was the author of the play
Titus Andronicus
, which is usually attributed to Shakespeare. In 1592
Shakespeare’s first play was performed,
The Contention betwixt the Two Noble Houses of York and Lancaster
, which is now known as
Henry VI, Parts II and III
. His
Tragedy
of King Richard III
, and his three comedies,
A Comedy of Errors
,
The Taming of the Shrew
, and
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, followed within a year. Before the
end of the Tudor Age, in the eleven years between 1592 and 1602, twenty-four of his plays were performed in London, including
Romeo and Juliet
,
The Merchant of Venice
,
Henry
V
,
Julius Caesar
and
Hamlet
.

Elizabeth I herself came to see several of Shakespeare’s plays performed, and particularly enjoyed
The Merry Wives of Windsor
. Her approval enabled him to survive the difficulty
in which he became involved when his play
Richard II
was revived, six years after it had first been performed, at the time of Essex’s rebellion in 1601. Apparently Essex’s
supporters paid the actors to perform it, thinking that a play about a successful
coup d’état
and the deposition of a king would be good propaganda at the time of
Essex’s rising. Elizabeth was very upset, and complained that the play had been performed forty times in London and had led people to say that she was Richard II. The scene in the play in
which Richard abdicates in Westminster Hall was cut out in the remaining performances that year; but Shakespeare escaped without any loss of the royal favour.

The advance in the quality and status of the theatre since the days when plays had been included among unlawful games and actors were regarded as vagabonds was due to the patronage of the
nobility; for in view of the Act of Parliament which exempted actors from the whippings and ear-croppings which were the fate of vagabonds, only if they were attached to the household of a
nobleman, this patronage alone made it possible for the theatre
to survive. Much of the credit must go to the Earl of Leicester, who in 1574 was the first nobleman to arrange
for his actors to perform to the general public in London. The stage was in the courtyard of an inn, the Bull in Bishopsgate, and for some years all plays were acted in the courtyards of inns. The
parts were played by professional actors, but no women acted in plays until after 1660, and the women’s parts were played by young boys.

Leicester’s players played for some years at the Bull, and other companies acted at the Bell Savage inn in Ludgate, the Blackfriars inn, and the Red Bull in St John’s Street. Then
James Burbage, who was the manager of Leicester’s players, decided to build a theatre which would be used for no other purpose except to perform plays to the public. In 1577 he opened the
Theatre in Holywell Lane in Finsbury Fields, and the venture was a success. A few years later, a rival company opened a second theatre in London, the Curtain, not far from the Theatre. After these
two theatres had survived and prospered for fifteen years, the great boom in stage plays in the 1590s led to three more theatres being opened between 1592 and 1598 – the Rose Theatre, the
Swan Theatre in Paris Gardens, and the Globe Theatre, all of them close to each other on the river in Southwark. A sixth theatre, the Fortune Theatre, in Golden Lane, was opened in 1600, and three
more theatres had been built by 1613.

Although the comedies of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare were popular, the dramatic tragedies were appreciated even more. By far the most successful was
The Spanish Tragedy
. The great
feature about all of them was the violence and cruelty in the stories, though unlike more modern examples of violence in the theatre they were dignified by the magnificent verse in which they were
written. The violence in the plays matched the cruelty of the broadsheets which were sold in the streets of London, with the accounts of the tortures shamefully inflicted by Catholics on Protestant
martyrs in France and the Netherlands, and those most justly inflicted by Protestants on Catholic traitors who attempted to assassinate the Queen and foreign Protestant leaders. These bloodthirsty
accounts were often illustrated by
horrific woodcuts showing tortures and mutilations in the most realistic and unpleasant detail. Often the imagination of the writers exceeded
the worst malice of the torturers. Balthasar Gérard, who murdered William the Silent in the Netherlands in 1584, was horribly tortured before being executed; but the tortures which he
suffered were not as appalling as those described in the fictitious account of his execution which was sold in London.

The dramatists likewise gave full scope to their imagination. The real Timur i Leng in the fourteenth century massacred whole populations in Asia, but the subtle cruelties which he inflicts on
his prisoners in Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine
were invented by Marlowe. The ancient Romans committed many cruelties, but the story of
Titus Andronicus
, with all its horrors, is
pure fiction, which was first invented by an unknown author before 1592, and adapted for the London stage in 1594 by Shakespeare and by several other English dramatists.