The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (61 page)

How do you decide which theatre to go to? As with a modern production, you will be attracted to watch the best and most celebrated performers. Many Londoners flock to see the clowns. Richard Tarlton, who plays with the Queen’s Men at The Curtain, is a crowd-puller; he can reduce the audience to tears simply by putting his head out between the curtains and pulling faces. Will Kempe, who performs first with the Lord Leicester’s Men, becomes the clown with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and takes on roles such as Dogberry and Falstaff in Shakespeare’s plays. Some gentlemen and ladies who regard the theatre as brutish – and it has to be emphasised that many do see them as lawless places infested with rogues, thieves and prostitutes – will only go to see performances by the companies of boys drawn from the choristers of the Chapel Royal and St Paul’s Cathedral. These companies are socially more elevated, and their venues are roofed over (so there is no danger of the audience getting wet). Nor are the plays inferior: Ben Jonson writes for them regularly. However, it is to the actors of the two main companies that you will be drawn. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men have Richard Burbage, who takes the lead in many of Shakespeare’s plays. The Lord Admiral’s Men have Edward Alleyn: a very tall and powerful man who roars his part as he crosses the stage. With such actors in place, a playwright can compose the part to suit the actor’s strengths. If you really want to see an all-star cast, go to The Curtain in 1598 to see the production of Ben Jonson’s
Every Man in his Humour
. William Shakespeare is playing Kno’well,
supported by the other leading men of the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, among them Richard Burbage, Augustine Philips, John Heminges, Henry Condell and Will Kempe.

Let’s say you want to go to one of the theatres for an afternoon performance. If you are heading to The Swan, The Rose or The Globe you will cross London Bridge or take a wherry across the river and then walk through Paris Garden. All sorts of people will be heading in the same direction: working men in groups, shop owners, gentlemen, householders’ wives accompanied by their servants or husbands, foreign tourists, boys and girls. As you approach the theatres you will notice that the buildings all seem to be round; in fact, they are polygonal – The Globe is twenty-sided, The Rose fourteen-sided. Whichever one you choose, you can expect to queue with 2,000 other people to get in. You will see people standing in hats with pipes in hand, and women in their headdresses, everyone chatting, with an eye open for people they know. Entrance costs a penny: this allows you to stand in the yard in front of the stage, an uncovered area (hence the need for a hat). Around the yard are three galleries where you can stand or sit under cover. It is an extra penny to stand here and another penny again for a place upstairs. If you are feeling very flash, you might hire a box for 6d. This gives you the best chance of seeing the stage and being seen by the crowd.

When the trumpets sound, most people quieten down, waiting for the play to begin. If you are sitting in the gallery you will have a clear view of the stage as it projects out from the far side of the round enclosure. Leading actors will come right out along this platform and deliver their soliloquy directly to the crowd. So too will a clown like Will Kempe, when he wishes to extemporise and make ‘a scurvy face’. There are two large columns, both elaborately painted, which support the roof that covers the back of the stage. Behind them is the ‘tiring house’ where the actors robe (or ‘attire’) themselves. Above the tiring house is a gallery – useful for scenes such as the balcony scene in
Romeo and Juliet
but sometimes let out for those spectators who want to be seen. Note how few props are used: although
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
cannot be performed without an ass’s head, and
Titus Andronicus
requires a large pie, most of Shakespeare’s plays are performed without props. The costumes, however, are splendid; many lords and merchants leave their best gowns to their servants, who, being prohibited from wearing them
by the sumptuary laws, sell them to the theatre companies. As a result, the players are normally better dressed than the audience. There is a low murmur of voices throughout the play as women shoulder their way through the crowd, selling apples, nuts and bottles of beer. People are constantly on the watch for cutpurses and pickpockets, and the chance encounter that might lead to an an illicit liaison. Unlike your modern theatre experience, you will find many people chatting away during the performance. Some speeches, however, do command universal attention and silence. At other points the report of a cannon or the sound of rolling thunder from above will make you jump. The latter effect is made by rolling cannonballs around the gallery roof.

As you sit there watching a performance of a Shakespeare, Jonson or Marlowe play, the crowd will fade into the background. Instead you will be struck by the diction. There are words and phrases that
you
will not find funny, but which will make the crowd roar with laughter. Your familiarity with the meanings of Shakespeare’s words will rise and fall as you see and hear the actors’ deliveries and notice the audience’s reaction. That is the strange music of being so familiar with something that is not of your own time. What you are listening to in that auditorium is the genuine voice, something of which you have heard only distant echoes. Not every actor is perfect in his delivery – Shakespeare himself makes that quite clear in his
Hamlet
– but what you are hearing is the voice of the men for whom Shakespeare wrote his greatest speeches. Modern thespians will follow the rhythms or the meanings of these words, but even the most brilliant will not always be able to follow both rhythm and meaning at once. If they follow the pattern of the verse they risk confusing the audience, who are less familiar with the sense of the words; if they pause to emphasise the meanings, they lose the rhythm of the verse. Here, on the Elizabethan stage, you have a harmony of performance and understanding that will never again quite be matched in respect of any of these great writers.

It has been a long time in development, but Elizabeth’s reign sees the advent of a dramatic culture which has meaning for us in the modern world. Unlike their predecessors, the late Elizabethan playwrights are keen to explore the human condition. At the same time they have an awareness of the changing world that sets them wholly apart from the Middle Ages. Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson know
full well how novel their art is. Not for them the time-worn traditions of miracle plays, or the humility of writing only to please the wealthy. A great cultural wave is breaking here, on the Bankside shore of a Brave New World, sending up the spume of Marlowe’s vitriolic atheism and Shakespeare’s poetic and philosophical meditations amid the spray of madrigals and airs, scientific and geographic discoveries, a sense of history and Renaissance ideas. At a time of great discoveries, these wordsmiths are the spokesmen for the mass of newly educated townsmen who have never really known before what it is to have a voice. And Shakespeare above all others meets the challenge of the age by holding up a mirror to mankind and showing people what they really are – and not what they think they are in the eyes of God. This is something truly original and one of the reasons the rabble in the theatre yard does fall quiet, and strains to hear the words of the great soliloquies and speeches; and, in so doing, becomes a little more like us.

Envoi

In Peter Erondell’s dialogue book,
The French Garden
, a young girl listens to a caged bird singing. ‘I wish to God I had one of them,’ she exclaims. Her teacher replies: ‘What, Mistress, would you be so cruel as to deprive him of his liberty? O dear liberty! God grant me always the keys of the fields: I would like it better than to be in bondage in the fairest wainscoted or tapestried chamber.’
¹
It is a strikingly sympathetic and modern outlook – so different from the attitudes of the keepers of the cockpit birds, bloodied for a bet, and the bears licking their paws in cages in Southwark. The complete contrast suggests that society is at odds with itself, riddled with inconsistencies, full of both cruelty and sympathy. But as you struggle to make sense of it you realise that, not only can you
not
reconcile such contrasts, you do not need to try. It is by appreciating the contradictions and inconsistencies that exist within a society that you start to understand it.

Understanding a past society is not easy, however: your familiarity with it comes and goes like a tide. You may recognise the greetings, shouts and insults of people in the street. You may understand the feelings, the smiles and the tears. You may enjoy the laughter and music in the tavern, or see a sad death by candlelight, and feel so much a part of this old country. But then comes word of a Catholic priest who has been found hiding, who is to be pilloried and hanged, and you hear the anger in people’s voices and see the hatred in their faces by the light of burning torches. Or you see a boy in rags on the side of the road, his eyes drifting, starving, half-blind. Here is a broken door hanging from a single hinge: inside a dozen people are living in a filthy room and the smell of ordure as you enter makes you retch. The tide of familiarity has receded. Sometimes the past will inspire you and sometimes it will leave you weeping.

For these reasons it would be foolish to describe Elizabeth’s reign
as a ‘golden age’ and leave it at that. It certainly is a ‘golden age’ in many respects: in poetry, drama, architecture, aristocratic fashion and seafaring, to name just a few; but it is equally a ‘golden age’ (if that term can be used) of religious hatred, political scaremongering, superstition, racism, sexism and class prejudice. There are dark shades as well as light here. Nor are these negatives merely modern perceptions: individuals truly suffer because of them. Modern readers, cushioned by the widespread acceptance of many forms of equality, might well baulk at the hardships and inequalities of sixteenth-century life; but we should not close our eyes to them. Nor should we take our privileges for granted. Those who believe women and men naturally have equal ‘rights’ will look back on the sixteenth century with horror. Everyone who has benefited from the more evenly distributed opportunities that we enjoy in the modern world will realise how difficult it is to survive and thrive when those same chances are denied to the vast majority of people.

And yet our ancestors do survive and thrive. We are the descendants of the survivors. Elizabethans are not some distant, alien race, but our families – they are
us
, in a manner of speaking – and they show us what human beings are capable of enduring. They cope with plague, low life-expectation, child mortality, endemic violence, superstition, harsh winters and the taut rope of the law: humanity is remarkably resilient. More than that, our ancestors overcome their adversities to build, collect and create. There might be a gnawing hunger in their bellies, but they circumnavigate the world and sail to the Arctic, they laugh and sing, they cut topiary gardens and design banquets of sugar. They look to the stars and chart a new course for the Earth to follow round the Sun. They are afraid and, at the same time, they are excited and in love.

What is striking is that so many of the changes in society are made by individuals. In today’s world even politicians elected by a landslide majority find it difficult to change a nation significantly. The leader’s hand is the one on the tiller but it is not possible for him radically to change course. Civil servants stop him. The democratic process restrains him, and his political party never takes its hand off his shoulder. But in the sixteenth century some individuals
do
change the course of society. We think immediately of the queen. The shift to Protestantism is Elizabeth’s doing, and the form of the new English religion is even more her personal design. She not only turns the tiller, she holds it
firmly and never lets go, and shrugs off every hand placed on her shoulder. Elizabeth also deserves the credit for making herself splendidly visible to her people, even after the pope excommunicates her and puts her life at risk. It would be easy for her simply to hide away and keep herself safely; but then we would not have Gloriana, the regal symbol of English sovereign independence and national pride. She is loved by her people – not all of them, certainly, but by the majority – who have confidence in her as a God-chosen ruler. She decides not to marry, and while it is the correct political decision, she makes a huge personal sacrifice: much of her later life is tinged with loneliness and sadness. So many responsibilities lie on her shoulders that one cannot see her alone in her palace, putting on her wig, without hearing a whisper from Shakespeare’s
Henry V
: ‘What infinite heart’s ease must kings neglect that private men enjoy. And what have kings that privates have not too save ceremony, save general ceremony?’

Other less eminent individuals also have a great impact on people’s lives. You can hardly avoid the figure of Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who carefully guides the queen’s government and yet finds time to promote so many aspects of culture: art, architecture, gardening, mathematics and astronomy. Then there are the heroes and pioneers – Grenville, Cavendish and, above all, Drake. And there are pioneers of another sort: Emilia Lanier for her railing against the misogynistic assumptions of society, John Leland for igniting the fires of historical enquiry, and Dr John Dee for a mind open to the possibilities of both the past and the future. You have to admire those who rise above the hardships and fears of the time and set out to understand the universe, or search for new lands in spite of the huge risks. You have to take your hat off to those who apply themselves to the task of improving society, creating the Poor Law that saves hundreds of thousands of lives over the next centuries.

Then you have that singular genius who speaks with such authority about every condition of life: rich and poor, young and old, those in love and those in mourning. Shakespeare has given voice to so many of our feelings. Probably no other Englishman has been more influential. His influence is not militaristic or nationalistic, nor is it the discovery of a scientific phenomenon; it is simply that his writings are the biggest step ever taken along the path towards understanding the human condition. It is a path we are still following. Through his plays we can see that our ancestors are not inferior to us; they do not lack
sophistication, subtlety, innovation, wit or courage. In Shakespeare we can see that the Elizabethan creative intellect is equal to our own. His drive in attaining such heights becomes understandable when one sees what prejudices he has to overcome, as the son of a provincial glover. Through force of will and wit Shakespeare makes his way in society; he pays scant regard to the prejudices of nobles and gentlemen, always wanting to become one of them and yet always understanding what it is
not
to be one of them – not university-educated, never being able to take advantage of family connections. But at the end his social transformation is almost as complete as that of Francis Drake, and his kicking against contemporary prejudices every bit as revolutionary as that of Emilia Lanier. Again, we are reminded that it is through contrasts and contradictions that one becomes familiar with a society. In this case, it is by appreciating the exceptions to the norms, the hierarchies and prejudices, that one starts to understand Elizabethan England.