Shakespeare: A Life (18 page)

a schoolboy, dates from 1576. But we know of a free-standing theatre
of earlier date: it was built in 1567 by John Brayne, a Bucklersbury
grocer, with helpers at Whitechapel outside Aldgate. The site was near
the garden of the Red Lion, which was not, so far as we know, an inn,
but a 'messuage or farme house called and knowen by the Sygne of the
Redd Lyon'.
¹⁰
A five-foot-high stage, a thirty-foot turret, and tiers of galleries
were 'framed' (or prefabricated) by 1 July 1567, when a dispute between
Brayne and his chief builder, William Sylvester, stopped work. An
appeal to the Company of Carpenters dragged on, and though plays were
put on here, the venture never prospered. Yet the Red Lion's structure
was influential, whether or not it resembled Henry VIII's hall at
Calais, or that of the banqueting house, partly of canvas, where
Othello
was to be performed in 1604.
¹¹

Brayne, a plucky investor, must have recalled the design when he
collaborated in 1576 with his brother-in-law James Burbagc. Failing to
thrive as a joiner, or craftsman-carpenter, Burbage became a player
with the Earl of Leicester's troupe and possibly its head (or at least
its payee). He sought in the theatre a 'great profitt',
¹²
and his financial anxiety matched his ardour for the playing
profession; he was to be a close associate of Shakespeare's. Lacking
funds, he borrowed from Brayne, so that a new amphitheatre rose north
of the city -- the Theater.

Located
in the liberty of Halliwell (or Holywell) where a Benedictine priory
had stood in the Middlesex parish of St Leonard's, Shoreditch, the
Theater, too, was safe from city fathers. Its name, from the Latin
theatrum,
taunted people alert to pagan vices; a few spelled it as the 'Theatre', which was closer to the root-word
theatrum,
in order to link the enterprise with the supposed riots and depravity
of the ancient Roman theatre; but the two different spellings, in an
era of unsettled spelling, were also used interchangeably by the
literate (and, in retrospect, both are correct enough). Puritans hoped
for the playhouse's ruin, and there is evidence that Brayne had built
it in such a way that it could be dismantled in a crisis.

As a business enterprise it was wildly risky, with costs estimated at
1,000 marks (£666). Burbage hungered after profit, and the costs
agonized him. 'The Theater he built with many hundred pounds

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taken up at interest', his son Cuthbert later claimed in a very filial
tribute to Burbage's merits. But while Brayne and his wife Margaret
had worked on the building site without pay, Burbage took a cut from
assets during construction; when the structure yielded profits of about
£190-£235 per annum he was caught, it seems, with a hand in the till.
Using a secret key for two years, Burbage, it was alleged, filched
from a 'commen box where the money gathered at the said playes was
putt in', and thrust coins 'in his bosome or other where about his
bodye'. In due course, there was violence. Feeling out-swindled by his
partner, Burbage hit Brayne with his fist 'so they went together by
the eares', and later reviled Margaret Brayne, calling her 'whore',
while his sonRichard (who was to play Shakespeare's tragic roles) beat
one of Brayne's men with a broom-staff. Depending on his dutiful
sons, Burbage shouted that if he saw Brayne's allies again, his boys
would take pistols and shoot them in the legs with powder and
hempseed.

Burbage, a 'stubborne
fellow', apparently never denied that he had filched from Brayne and
the players. Witnesses supported allegations against him.
¹³
At this distance, his conduct is hard to judge -- but his warfare
with Brayne and Margaret illustrates not only rivalries, suspicions, a
knockabout atmosphere, but also a nerve-racking pressure in the
'business' which Shakespeare, as a player, was trying to enter.

The Theater or Theatre cost its entrepreneurs more than they had
planned, and while expenses soared, rival venues multiplied. Two
hundred yards to the south, the Curtain opened at Moorfields in 1577.
Its builder Henry Lanman, or Laneman, a Londoner who rented land at
Curtain Close, had financial worries himself, until the Curtain became
an 'easer' to the Theater with profits at the two houses pooled. Late
in the 1590s, it would serve as a venue for Shakespeare's company,
the Chamberlain's men, who were then winning what Marston calls
'Curtain plaudities' for
Romeo and Juliet
.
¹⁴

Within two years of Burbage's opening, plays were regularly performed
at eight or more London venues. Troupes were using converted inns, such
as the Bell and Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street, the Bull in
Bishopsgate Street, the Boar's Head near the Red Lion in Whitechapel,
and the Bel Savage on Ludgate Hill. With stands for

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spectators and changing-rooms for actors, innyard theatres were not
then a novelty -- nor were they obsolete. The boy companies, made up
of children from élite schools, had also found a good year-round
market for stage spectacles. By going to school for a few hours a day,
the boys kept up the fiction they were performing not for money, but
to show off their educational skills. Intermittently for a decade and a
half after 1575 (and later from 1600 to 1606) the choristers of Paul's
School drew people to a small, indoor hall-theatre near their Chapter
House. Their little rivals of the Royal Chapel held indoor shows at
their own hall -- in Blackfriars -- until 1583-4.

But somewhat nearer the time when Shakespeare was starting in London,
much fiercer competition for Burbage (and for all northern theatres)
began south of the river on Bankside. Watermen, for decades, had
ferried people over to watch bull- and bear-baiting; the animal arenas
were in Paris Garden and the Clink, south-west of London Bridge, and so
beyond the city's jurisdiction at St Saviour's parish, Southwark.
That parish was oddly split into three administrative areas: its eastern
district of the Boroughside was in Bridge Ward Without (one of
London's twenty-six wards) but its two liberties of the Clink and
Paris Garden were subject to Surrey authorities.
¹⁵
Famous for its prison, the Clink was on low, marshy land within the
river's flood plain, and protected by earthwork embankments. Fiftyeight
acres were taken up by Winchester Park with its chestnut trees, and
there were ponds for pike and carp, some orchards and bowling greens, a
bear garden, and bordellos (despite attempts to close them).

Here Philip Henslowe, a former dyer's apprentice who had married his
master's rich widow, took a lease on the Little Rose estate, near Rose
Alley and Maiden Lane. Once the site of a rose garden, the lot had
been charitably bequeathed to the parish of St Mildred, Bread Street,
and Henslowe saw money in it. With John Cholmley, a grocer, he planned
a theatre, and his deed, of 10 January 1587, refers to 'a playe howse
now in framinge and shortly to be ereckted'.
¹⁶
(This seems to mean that the Rose playhouse, like the Red Lion, was
prefabricated before it was set up.) Possibly Cholmley died or opted
out of the project. But the Rose flourished. So did Henslowe, who became
the age's greatest theatrical landlord, not above lending money to
impecunious

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players and poets who did not always thank him. He jotted wryly in a famous account book, or
Diary
:

when I lent I wasse A frend & when I asked I wasse unkind.
¹⁷

Henslowe, too, had miseries. A theatre may have seemed to him (as to
Burbage) a costly sink, with the Rose empty for months while playing
companies favoured other sites, disbanded, or fled by road because of
civic riots or plague. We lack lists of performances at the Rose until
1592, when Shakespeare
1 Henry VI
(if it is 'harey the vj')
reached its boards, by which time Shakespeare had possibly acted
there. Arguably it was one birthplace of Elizabethan tragedy, since
Kyd
The Spanish Tragedy
and all of Marlowe's plays must have been
staged there. It was a training ground for Shakespeare as a poet (its
landlord notes a showing of 'titus & ondronicus'
¹⁸
). And the Rose is important in another way. The discovery and
unearthing of its foundations near Southwark Bridge, in 1989, has given
us more exact, reliable data about the design of Shakespearean
playhouses than we had had from all other sources in three centuries.

Henslowe's builder, John Griggs, used a beautiful design. Under its
thatched roof, the Rose had a polygonal shape. Its stage was a small,
neat trapezoid, only fifteen feet six inches deep, with a curving back
wall or
frons scenae
. That was unlike the big, rectangular,
jutting stages which are sometimes said to be the only kind
Shakespeare knew. Critics, before 1989, often based ideas about his
theatres on a vague, unreliable copy of a sketch of the Swan playhouse.
The Rose's sheltered stage, with its actors' changing-room or
tiring-house, was wide at the back, but it tapered to a width of less
than twenty-five feet at the front. Actors overlooked the
'groundlings', or standing spectators, who cracked hazel nuts and
drank bottled ale in a firmly mortared yard, sloped or raked to the
front. There was room for 600 people in the yard, another 1,404 in the
galleries (three tiers or storeys of them with benches), so the Rose
could accommodate audiences of 2,000.
¹⁹

Yet Shakespeare was to find that this theatre afforded intimacy. It
was so designed that, in roofed galleries, which began thirty to
thirtysix feet from the stage, people were close enough to catch the
actors' nuances of tone and facial expression. The Rose's properties
included

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screens, painted objects, and backcloths such as 'Hell Mouth' or 'the
City of Rome', and audiences were close enough to savour the gorgeous
costumes of performers in their velvet, satin, or taffeta. The theatre
was lavishly, stunningly painted -- as was every London amphitheatre
-- but here, close to the stage, audiences were all the more likely to
react to the assault of colour and to dazzling and cunning visual
effects. Indeed, Shakespeare's extraordinary use of visual stagecraft
was to be influenced by the Rose, where audiences were trained to see
and to remember what they saw.

Acting
was not always skilful or restrained, but at its best it had become
highly sophisticated, and it was the more brilliant at the Rose
because of the sensible proportions of the theatre. Lifelike realism
combined with the utmost stylization; players could make use of stock
reactions or stock attitudes, as Alan C. Dessen has shown, inasmuch as
stage directions can ask the actor to enter 'as robbed', 'as from
bed', 'as from dinner', or 'as newly come from play', and the
psychology of impersonation was not yet well developed. In his own early
plays Shakespeare could rely on audiences' reactions to very standard
types of characters. But even so, at the Rose at least, effects on
stage did not need to be exaggerated or crude. An actor hardly needed
to roar, declaim, or 'tear a passion to tatters'; Hamlet's advice to
the Players is proof enough that Shakespeare had known a theatre where
naturalness was possible.
²⁰

The Rose's yard and galleries were extended in 1592, and later this
theatre served other uses and then decayed -- but it may have been
standing when Edward Alleyn ( Henslowe's son-in-law, who inherited his
interest in the Rose) paid a tithe due 'for ye rose' in 1622.
²¹

One reached a slightly older theatre at Newington Butts, a mile to
the south of London Bridge, along the road continuing from Southwark
High Street. Playing at Newington is first mentioned on 13 May 1580.
Twelve years later the Privy Council admitted Newington was remote,
but Londoners knew its playhouse well enough to call a bad pun
a'Newington conceit'.
²²

These, in brief, were the main theatrical venues Shakespeare would
soon have heard about. By around 1588, Burbage's and Henslowe's

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major playhouses were enhancing London's life -- though a Londoner
such as Stow, the chronicler, was aware of civic loss, and little
compensated for what had been lost in the lasting changes of the English
Reformation. Many older, religious, festivals which had once deepened
the people's lives had ceased, and church attendance in urban
parishes was low. The Catholic menace within the country seemed to
fade after Mary Queen of Scots' trial and execution in 1587, and war
with Spain aroused fervid patriotism; but Londoners were not relieved
by a heady, nationalistic sentiment. Though not on the verge of
rebellion, London was riotous and less stable than it had been.

No one, at any rate, better knew its mood than the Queen, who usually
began her royal year in mid-November when she returned to London by
way of Chelsea. She rode in by night, for a torchlight welcome.
Ambassadors, the Lord Mayor, and citizens in chains and robes of
office assembled for her. As she passed on dark streets, the people
greeted their Virgin Queen with a depth of feeling that also responded
to the tenuous beginnings of the greatest drama the world has known.

But in the late 1580s the quick rise and fall of playing companies,
with financial troubles and changing members, made theatrical life
chaotic. The troupes split, reorganized, and to save themselves often
left the costly city to perform in the provinces. Trudging in mud,
rain, or sleet behind a players' wagon and hoping for a few more
pennies at a distant town, actors yearned for London. Shakespeare may
hardly have reached the capital before he was out on the road; if he
did travel, he returned when he could. But for a few years he is not
traceable in our records, and the likeliest reason for this is that he
began as a 'hireling' of other actors. Until he became a 'sharer', he
would not be listed among a troupe's principal men.

He could not have begun at any time without soon learning about a
company's organization, about patrons, repertoires, and 'poets' (not
yet called playwrights) and their valuable but lifeless scripts or
playbooks. He may have known the ache of a traveller's bones over-

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