Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (31 page)

These tales were undistinguished examples of an art that we now find insufferable. Prose fiction was new to England, and the writers had an unsure command of narrative. They put all their labour into the sentiment and especially into the affected ‘beauties’ of the euphuistic style while the narrative slumped along painfully, slow, weary and laiden down with huge grandiloquent speeches, tedious interjections that deprived the action of all point and drama. But in the course of time Greene’s well-practised hand began to learn the elements of narrative construction: he was among the first in England to do so. In the long ‘romance’
Pandosto
(1588) the moral lesson of the tale is not obtrusive, if it exists at all. The hero is a tyrant at the start, bloody and violent, and remains a tyrant to the end. The story is powerful, cold and cruel, well suited to Greene’s sombre imagination. And at last the narrative is compact and progressive, the euphuistic language changed for a plain factual style, and the people characterized by their conversation. With
Pandosto
the English novel was at last hesitantly on its way, but still with far to go. And the good advance made by this book was continued in
Menaphon
(1589), a work that added a little subtlety and wit to the plain style of its predecessor.

After two or three years in London, Greene was a great success. He was wonderfully versatile; plays, poems, stories, romances flowed from his pen, even a little ranting propaganda against the Spanish in 1588, the year of the Armada, ‘least I might be thought to tie myself wholly to amorous conceits’. With his long red beard—‘like the spire of a steeple’, said Nashe, ‘whereat a man might hang a jewel, it was so sharp and pendant’—he cut an elegant figure in the company of the wits. Such great lords as Leicester, Arundel and Essex were his patrons, to whom he dedicated his works. He was now ‘famozed for an arch-playmaking-poet, his purse like the sea sometime swelled, anon like the sea fell to a low ebb; yet seldom he wanted, his labours were so well esteemed’.

In his success he indulged the wildness of his youth. ‘I was beloved of the more vainer sort of people, who being my continual companions, came still to my lodging, and there would continue quaffing, carousing, and surfeiting with me all the day long.’ Kyd, Peele, Lodge, Nashe, Marlowe and other wits were his acquaintances;
he shared their desperate ways and their exuberant discovery of a new age of English letters; collaborating, quarrelling, drinking, they saw the sun up on many mornings. ‘A good fellow he was’, wrote Nashe defending Greene against the censorious Cambridge scholar, Gabriel Harvey, ‘and in one year he pissed as much against the walls, as thou and thy two brothers spent in three.’ But he was still the malcontent, subject to melancholy and remorse. Once, in Norwich, he heard a sermon which made him hate his life. Then his companions teased him, calling him ‘puritan’ and ‘precisian’, ‘so that I fell again with the dog to my old vomit, and put my wicked life in practice, and that so thoroughly as ever I did before’.

He had other grounds for dissatisfaction. His riotous life and carelessness about money made the funds fly. ‘He had no account of winning credit by his works’, said Nashe; ‘his only care was to have a spell in his purse to conjure up a good cup of wine with at all times.’ Moreover, he was beginning to face professional competition which worried him. Perhaps he was tired of his ‘love pamphlets’—in any case he saw a new generation of playwrights growing in success, cutting into his income and, what was more, stealing many of their plots from the novels written by Greene and his friends. In his
Groatsworth of Wit
he warned his good companions Marlowe, Nashe and Peele to beware particularly of young William Shakespeare, ‘an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his
Tigers heart wrapt in a Players hide
, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute
Johannes fac totum
, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country’. At a later date Shakespeare took the story of
Winter’s Tale
from Greene’s
Pandosto
.

‘Many things I have wrote to get money’, Greene said at the end of his life. He was a hack with a living to earn and a fickle public to please. The attention of his audience was no longer so easily caught by romances and he saw the necessity to find new subjects, new styles. Fortunately, the very disorder of his life gave him the opportunity to change. The hard-living writers, like Marlowe and Greene, spent a large part of their time in the shadows. They were the darlings of literary society and of the frivolous young gentlemen, but they also knew very well the underside of the town, the world of taverns, brothels, spies, informers, cheats and rogues of all kinds. Greene had gradually reformed his prose from the flights
of euphuism to a more simple, colloquial style; he decided to use this new manner to portray the disreputable life of London.

The city of London, still standing within its medieval walls, made a great impression on Englishman and foreigner alike. ‘London is a large, excellent and mighty city of business’, the Duke of Wurtemberg wrote after his visit in 1592. ‘The inhabitants are magnificently apparelled, and are extremely proud and overbearing.’ And the citizens had much to be proud of. Observers such as William Harrison and Fynes Moryson spoke of the commodious luxury of the houses (though the streets themselves were narrow and dirty); the dignity of old St Paul’s, longer than the present church and with a spire one hundred and fifty feet taller than the present dome; the life and bustle of the Thames; and the stately aristocratic palaces that led away from the gates of the city, through Whitehall to Westminster with its great Abbey and long, low Norman Hall. London Bridge was considered ‘among the miracles of the world’ with its twenty arches built over with houses, leading to the scattered houses, fields, vegetable-gardens, pleasure-grounds and newly erected theatres of the south bank. The grand congregation of buildings and men was presided over with fitting pomp and dignity by the city government. ‘There is no subject upon earth’, the playwright Middleton wrote in his
Triumphs of Truth
, ‘received into the place of government with the like state and magnificence as is the Lord Mayor of the City of London.’

But the Lord Mayor governed a city that had grown so fast from the commercial expansion of the Tudor age that it was almost out of control, always verging on the edge of lawlessness. Thomas Dekker, a poor citizen born and raised in London, gave this picture of his city in a book persuasively titled
The Seven Deadly Sins of London
(1606): ‘In every street, carts and coaches make such a thundering as if the world ran upon wheels: at every corner, men, women and children meet in such shoals, that posts are set up of purpose to strengthen the houses, lest with jostling one another they should shoulder them down. Besides, hammers are beating in one place, tubs hooping in another, pots clinking in a third, water-tankards running at tilt in a fourth. Here are porters sweating under burdens, there merchant’s men bearing bags of money. Chapman skip out of one shop into another. Tradesmen are lusty at legs and never stand still. All are as busy as country attorneys at an assizes.’ Such a pressure and overcrowding led
inevitably to brawls, riots, threats, duels and all kinds of debauchery which the inadequate constables and watchmen were powerless to stop.

And unruly as the life was within the city walls, outside in the suburbs, all agreed that wickedness itself reigned. ‘And what saw he there?’ asked Dekker in
Lanthorne and Candlelight
. ‘More alehouses than there are taverns in all Spain and France! Are they so dry in the suburbs? Yes, pockily dry.’ In the garden alleys of the suburbs the brothels thrived. Stow mentioned them in his
Survey;
Stubbes, the Puritan, railed against them, and Dekker described them: ‘The doors of notorious carted bawds like Hell-gates stand night and day wide open, with a pair of harlots in taffeta gowns, like two painted posts, garnishing out those doors, being better to the house than a double sign.’ Here the plague bred and other diseases, and here came the ‘masterless men, needy shifters, thieves, cutpurses, unthrifty servants’, Whetstone complained. ‘Here a man may pick out mates for all purposes, save such as are good.’ This was the playground of the London rogues, Greene’s uneasy acquaintances. The city rogue lived as a gallant, haunted taverns and theatres, bantered with wits and actors, played the roaring boy, beat the watchmen, cut purses and lived on his wits. Though he sometimes sank to ruffian and murderer, as he was shown in
Arden of Faversham
or
Macbeth
, his real business was cozening, cheating by the nimbleness of his wits and the quickness of his hand. And it was these tricks that Greene now decided to expose to the public for their entertainment and his profit.

‘Rogue’ literature, the vein which Greene now set out to explore, had already been mined in a desultory way for several centuries. The Middle Ages had seen various complications of
Merrie Tales
; writers such as Barclay and Skelton had written social satires, partly fiction and partly everyday stories of low life. Towards the middle of the sixteenth century several pamphlets by different authors began to expose the tricks, habits and cant language of the rogues. These works, the most important of which were
A Manifest Detection
(1552) by Gilbert Walker,
The Fraternity of Vagabonds
(1561) by John Awdeley and
A Caveat for Commen Cursetors
(1566) by Thomas Harman, were not fiction, being aids towards reform rather than entertainment. Harman, a prosperous country gentlemen, told his readers that he wrote for ‘the utility and profit of his natural country’, and regretted that he had to
present his facts in a plain style, without much artistry: ‘Eloquence have I none’, he wrote; ‘I never was acquainted with the muses.’ The hidden lore and strange lives contained in these works caught the fancy of the people; Harman’s little book went to four editions in a short time. Seeing the popularity of these stories, Greene decided that the London rogue was as apt a subject as Harman’s country vagabond.

In 1591 Greene began to write a series of pamphlets which exposed the tricks of the town to the public. The first piece,
A Notable Discovery of Coosnage
, was licensed in December 1591, and the last, the
Blacke Bookes Messenger
, in August 1592. In between came four pamphlets on
Conny-catching
. Because he wished to profit from a popular work, Greene very artfully took over entirely the conventions of Harman’s work. He, too, would write for the good of the country. He had
Nascimur pro patria
boldly printed on the title page of his first pamphlet, and informed his readers that his aim was to preserve ‘young gentlemen, merchants, apprentices, farmers, and plain countrymen’ from the card-sharpers and cheats of London. Like Harman, he would write in a racy, colloquial style, not because he was incapable of fine phrases, but because a ‘certain decorum is to be kept in everything, and not to apply a high style in a base subject’. Like Harman, he would write from his own intimate knowledge; he had mixed with ‘those mad fellows’ whom he learned ‘at last to loath’. And to spice his expositions with the salt of danger, he warned his readers that his old criminal companions were out to get him: ‘yet gentlemen am I sore threatened by the hacksters of that filthy faculty, that if I set their practices in print, they will cut off that hand that writes the pamphlet.’ All this was merely self-advertisement. Perhaps Greene did have some intention of remedying the evils of life, for he was a person subject to remorse and repentance. But first of all he was a working writer with a living to make; he took Harman’s worthy social observation and turned it into popular journalism. And he quickly perceived that what the public in all ages likes best is a scandalous tale, told in the greatest and most lively detail by a writer who claims his purpose is purely moral and patriotic.

The arts of ‘cozenage’ and ‘conny-catching’ were arts of cheating, especially cheating at gambling and card playing. And if we are to believe the literature, the amount of gambling that went on in London was very great indeed. The fleecing of the citizens went
on the year round in taverns, cheap ordinaries, dicing houses and bowling alleys. The law forbade gaming, but the royal patents overrode the law, licensed gaming houses and so protected the sport that the citizens loved. To the taverns and dicing houses came ‘your gallant extraordinary thief that keeps his college of good fellows’; to the ordinaries came ‘your London usurer, your stale batchelor, and your thrifty attorney’ so that the room became as crowded as a jail; and to the disreputable alleys of the suburbs came the riff-raff ‘that have yet hands to filch, heads to deceive, and friends to receive’. All times were good for cheating, but the best time was during the court terms when the dull countrymen came to London either on business or to taste the pleasures of the town, with their purses well stuffed. ‘What whispering is there in Term times’, wrote the knowledgeable Dekker, ‘how by some slight to cheat the poor country clients of his full purse that is stuck under his girdle?’ The ways of parting the gull from his purse were many and highly developed. In the crowded paths round St Paul’s, at Westminster in term time, at the Tyburn executions, at the theatres and at the bear garden, the skilled pickpocket waited. In the evenings, the ‘cross-biter’ flourished—a whore who tempted the gull into her room and then had a roaring bully interrupt the proceedings in the character of her brother and demand satisfaction from the craven victim.

But the prince of deceivers, the man most likely to spirit money out of simple purses, was the one Greene called the conny-catcher, the dishonest gambler. His boldness, his sleight-of-hand, his ingenuity with marked cards, loaded dice and the like made him something of an artist; his various ‘laws’—or cheating devices—were fully expounded in Greene’s pamphlets. ‘Though I have not practised their deceits’, he wrote, ‘yet conversing by fortune, and talking upon purpose with such copes-mates, hath given me light into their conceits, and I can decipher their qualities, though I utterly mislike of their practices.’ Greene’s investigations were perhaps not quite as original as he pretended: much of his material had appeared in the
Manifest Detection
of forty years before. ‘I have shot at many abuses,’ Greene said in his
Vision
, ‘over shot myself in describing of some; where truth failed, my invention hath stood my friend.’ But his stories, some in the form of conversations between rascals, and other in the form of ‘merry tales’ illustrating the tricks of the cheats, gave a surprising view of the London
underworld. Honest citizens were not to know that the Elizabethan rogue often regarded gaol as a refuge and could not be persuaded to leave. Prison was the university of their profession. In the King’s Bench gaol and in the Marshalsea there were workshops for the manufacture of false dice. Friends, confederates and mistresses were allowed in, and when the rogue had perfected his tricks in gaol, he was allowed out at so much a day to practise them on the outside. When he had made his mark he bolted back to the comparative safety of the wards; even highwaymen returned to the anonymity of the Counters after their robberies.