Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (34 page)

Education was the nurse of comedy; tragedy was fostered at the Inns of Court. The Inns were not merely places for the training of lawyers. They were the university for the prosperous young gentleman who aimed to make a place in the world rather than in the Church. And like their fellows at Oxford and Cambridge the young students of London had a taste for all kinds of revels, masques and dramas. As the colleges had their Lords of Misrule, so Gray’s Inn enacted the mock reign of the Prince of Purpoole. As the boys of the grammar schools and the undergraduates of the colleges entertained the court on occasions, so the young men of Gray’s Inn and the Inner Temple welcomed the monarch to their revels. Elizabeth pronounced herself ‘very much beholden’ to Gray’s Inn, ‘for that it did always study for some sports to present unto her’.

When they turned from the fun of the revels and the formal elegance of the masque to more extended drama, the lawyers preferred
the austerity of tragedy. Seneca had long been a favourite of scholars. His melodramatic violence and dark imagination made him a more appropriate master for the worldly young Londoners, who were soon to know the pains of society as they took up their places in Tudor government, than Terence with his lighter talent. The authors of
Gorboduc
, acted for the Christmas revels of the Inner Temple in 1561–62 and the first blank verse tragedy on a London stage, were Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, two men of affairs who rose high in the country’s service. To a legendary story of English history they added the structure and the gloomy conventions of Senecan drama, and gave it topicality for the England of the Virgin Queen by making the play bear on the question of royal succession. Here were the elements for future success—noble characters falling to violent tragedy seen as a mirror of the contemporary world, and expressed in the flexible poetry of blank verse given form by the Senecan model. This pattern, more or less, was followed in the future productions of the Inns of Court, in
Jocasta
, mainly by the versatile George Gascoigne, in
Gismond of Salern
, by various hands, and in
The Misfortunes of Arthur
, by Thomas Hughes. But by the time this last play was acted, on 28th February 1588, by the men of Gray’s Inn for the Queen at Greenwich, tragedy had passed from lawyers to professionals and was being developed on the public stage.

The changes in comedy and tragedy were done with the encouragement of the court. The development of Tudor drama could hardly have gone on without the active interest of the court. Scholars and lawyers alike entertained the courtiers; the court was the fountain that nourished the popular pageants and masques which taught a later age so much about stage production, about effects, scenery and costume, about music, song and dance. By the reign of Henry VII, the Gentlemen and Children of the Chapel Royal already existed. These were primarily musicians and choristers for religious celebrations who were gradually given the task of organizing the royal entertainments. William Cornish, the Master of the Children from 1509 to 1523, greatly extended the dramatic activities of the Children and was a composer of interludes and masques himself. It seems that John Heywood had begun as one of the Children and no doubt learnt the rudiments of the theatre here. Henry VII was too cold to care for expensive entertainments; he was, wrote Bacon, ‘rather a princely and gentle
spectator than seemed much to be delighted’. But when the gallant young Henry VIII and the ingenious Cornish came together in the first year of the new reign, pleasure was the business of the court so that ceremonious revels, interludes, pageants, masques, dumb-shows, dances, theatrical performances of all kinds, were the delight of all the later Tudors. Such was their liking for these entertainments that they were prepared to overlook remarkable failings in those who amused them. Nicholas Udall was a vehement Reformer, a thief and a lecher, yet he still devised shows for the pious and moral Queen Mary; the well-known papist Sebastian Westcott, master of the choir school at St Paul’s Cathedral, produced with his company of boys some twenty-seven plays for Elizabeth. When a professional public theatre at last emerged in the reign of Elizabeth, it did so protected by the crown against the law which frowned upon it; the dramatic companies were licensed by the Queen and supervised by her official, the Master of the Revels.

Public theatre was slow to come. A hopeful start had been made in the first thirty years of the sixteenth century, when Rastell and Heywood were writing their secular interludes, and Rastell set up a stage in his own garden and got together costumes and props to hire to other professionals. In the play
Sir Thomas More
there is a picture of these early professionals presenting an interlude in More’s house before an audience of burgesses. Strype noted that companies of actors, some amateur and some professional, ‘played at certain festival times, and in private houses at weddings, or other splendid entertainments, for their own profit’. Then, with the coming of the religious troubles, the public theatre made little advance for many years. Secular drama was not in favour with the religious controversialists of the Reformation. The economic and social troubles of the mid-century disrupted the players. Though money could be found for the entertainments and shows of the court, the reliable
Discourse of the Common Weal
, published about 1549, said that popular ‘stage plays, interludes, May games’ and the like were abandoned because of ‘much expenses’.

The public theatre, when it did arrive, benefited from the pause. Following after Rastell and Heywood, it might have produced little except their old-fashioned secular moralities. As it was, in the long interval of disquiet, amateur players made experiments which later invigorated the public stage. The efforts of the schoolboys,
the scholars, the lawyers and the courtiers reformed the drama.
Gorboduc
became a model for verse tragedy,
Gammer Gurton’s Needle
for verse comedy, and Gascoigne’s
Supposes
(1566) for prose comedy. Historical and biographical plays had been written, chiefly by the industrious John Bale, who died in 1563. Stage production and the art of blending music and song with drama had been fostered by the entertainments of the court. All the elements out of which Shakespeare was later to construct his magic were present: they only awaited the men to use them.

By 1557 the churchwardens of St Botolph, in London, were renting their parish hall to players, and they continued to do this regularly for the next eleven years. Nor were they alone. The stability that Elizabeth slowly gave to the country brought the actors back before the public. Small ventures were tried here and there. Elizabeth liked the court revels, though her well-known parsimony prevented her from supporting them with the lavish generosity of her father. Westcott and his company of children from St Paul’s choir school acted for her in 1560, and then every year except one until his death in 1582. The Children of the Chapels Royal were also active under William Hunnis and Richard Farrant. In 1576 Farrant took a lease on some old buildings in Blackfriars, converted them to a theatre for the Children of the Chapel, and began to give performances to a courtly audience. The great men of the kingdom were encouraged to re-form their ‘servants’ into companies of actors. In 1574 the Earl of Leicester, an enthusiastic patron, persuaded the Queen to grant his company a licence under royal patent. This was a wise precaution, for Elizabeth’s government was even then enacting strict laws against vagrancy, and wandering players were liable to severe penalties unless well organized and well protected. Even a royal patent was no absolute safeguard against the enmity of city fathers. In London, the Common Council banned performances within the city limits.
²
James Burbage, the first of the famous family, was forced to take his players in Leicester’s Company to the liberties outside the walls. In 1576 he built the
Theatre
in Shoreditch, the first playhouse designed and built for public performances.

Soon the
Curtain
arose nearby; then, in 1587, Philip Henslowe went south of the Thames and built the
Rose
on Bankside which became the centre of popular theatrical activity. The
Swan
appeared in 1594; four years later Richard and Cuthbert Burbage, the sons of James, pulled down the old
Theatre
and took the timber across the river to build the famous
Globe
. While the theatres were going up, the lordly companies were more and more in demand. They played by the command of the Queen at court, acting in banqueting halls and presence chambers; they played in the public theatres at Holywell, Moorfields, Newington Butts and Bankside; they went on country tours, playing in churches, parish halls, inn-yards, schoolrooms, ‘upon boards, and barrel-heads, to an old crackt trumpet’. Leicester, Pembroke, Lord Strange, the Lord Admiral, and the Lord Chamberlain were the patrons of the most notable companies; by the end of the century the last two companies were the most famous. The Admiral’s Men were led by Henslowe and Edward Alleyn, and the Chamberlain’s Men were under Richard Burbage with William Shakespeare as playwright.

The public was eager, stages were available, actors had a new-found confidence: only playwrights were lacking. Sentimental or lascivious stories from Heliodorus and Apuleius, or weak versions of the old chivalrous romances, seem to have made up the bulk of the popular fare offered to the public in the first half of Elizabeth’s reign. ‘I may boldly say it, because I have seen it’, the Puritan critic Stephen Gosson wrote in 1579, ‘that the
Palace of Pleasure
, the
Golden Ass
, the
Æthiopian History, Amadis of France
, the
Round Table
, bawdy comedies in Latin, French, Italian and Spanish, have been thoroughly ransacked to furnish the playhouses in London.’ Gosson was chiefly concerned with public morals, one of the first of the carping Puritans who later utterly condemned the theatre. But Philip Sidney, the upholder of poetry and the opponent of Gosson, also severely criticized the drama, even the more imaginative pieces that came from the academies and the Inns of Court. Writing his
Defence of Poesie
within a year or two of Gosson’s attack, Sidney could find nothing to praise in comedy, and only
Gorbuduc
—with reservations—in tragedy. Luckily, better times were ahead.

The first notable development came about through the happy conjunction of a new writer, John Lyly, with a new theatre, that
of the Children at Blackfriars. Lyly, a young man just down from Oxford, had a staggering success with
Euphues
in 1578, and confirmed that triumph with the sequel
Euphues and his England
two years later. These works of prose fiction were a new blend of careful rhetoric, romantic interest, and lively conversation. These qualities were as suitable for drama as they were for prose fiction, and since Lyly’s patron was the Earl of Oxford, a man who had both a company of children and a company of adult actors in his service, Lyly soon turned his hand to drama. On New Year’s Day 1584 his play
Campaspe
was given at Blackfriars, and then repeated at court before the Queen, by a company of children drawn from the Chapel Royal, the St Paul’s choir school and Lord Oxford’s own company. Lyly’s second play,
Sapho and Phao
, appeared at Blackfriars on 3rd March 1584, and for the next six years he continued to write plays for the children which were also seen at court. All his plays, except the
Woman in the Moon
, were in prose, owing something to
Supposes
, the prose-comedy Gascoigne wrote for the Inns of Court in 1566. But in all other respects Lyly was a true pioneer. His plays were the first successful romantic comedies. He wrote for an aristocratic audience, and his plays reflected the society of the court: the classical background of the plots complimented the learning of the Queen and her courtiers; the sparkling dialogue was taught to Lyly by the conversation in ante-room and presence chamber; the gallantry, the witty interchange between the sexes was modelled on the graces of courtly behaviour. Heywood’s rough farces and Udall’s country humour seemed now the product of dark ages. Lyly’s sun rose on a new world fashioned by knowledge, leisure and wealth. His characters in
Midas
greeted the dawn:

Sing to Apollo, god of day,

Whose golden beams with morning play,

And make her eyes so brightly shine,

Aurora’s face is called divine.

Sing to Phoebus and that throne

Of diamonds which he sits upon.

Lyly’s comedies depended largely on children’s companies for their acting and on the favour of the court for their success. Yet even while Lyly was writing for the children, their importance in the theatre was declining. The lease of the first
Blackfriairs
ended in
1586, and the second theatre at Blackfriars did not open until 1600. The boys of St Paul’s were inactive between 1590 and 1600. At the same time the adult companies under the patronage of such noblemen as Leicester, Warwick and Suffolk were preferred at court. The adult companies could, and did, act romantic comedies, and they still retained youths to play the women’s parts. But most of their work was for a grosser public outside the court who were not very interested in the polite world of manners of the court comedies. This public, making for the new playhouses of Shoreditch and later Bankside, wanted the sterner drama of tragedy, or history plays, or boisterous comedy, which the adult companies studied to provide. As the men drove the boys from the stage, so tragedy began to advance; and the first popular writer of tragedies for the public theatres was Thomas Kyd.

Born in 1558, the son of a London scrivener, Kyd went to the newly-founded Merchant Taylors’ School where he was a contemporary of Edmund Spenser. Under the headmaster, Richard Mulcaster, he had his first taste of plays and acting. He missed university, joining his father’s trade instead, but the loss to his education was no great matter for a future writer of tragedies. The interesting developments in tragedy—
Gorboduc, Jocasta, Gismond
—took place in London, at the Inns of Court. Kyd knew Seneca well from his schooling; coming from a prosperous family, he was likely to know also what was happening on the private and public stages of London. When he began to write for the public stage Kyd took the structure and the machinery of Senecan drama, which
Gorboduc
had made familiar, but added modifications out of his own originality. He was a masterly plotter with an instinctive sense of the theatre, holding his audience by surprise and expectation. The formal elements of Senecan drama—the typed characters, the action related at secondhand, the rhetorical moralizing—were cut as far as possible. Kyd liked swift action and characters who displayed their all-too-human virtues and frailties.