Elizabethan Popular Theatre

Plays in Performance

Michael Hattaway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135032654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Elizabethan Popular Theatre surveys the Golden Age of English popular theatre: the 1590s, the age of Marlowe and the young Shakespeare. The book describes the staging practices, performance conditions and acting techniques of the period, focusing on five popular dramas: The Spanish Tragedy, Mucedorus, Edward II, Doctor Faustus and Titus Andronicus, as well as providing a comprehensive history of a variety of contemporary playhouse stages, performances, and players.

Part One

The idea of Elizabethan theatre

1 • Playhouses and stages

The construction of James Burbage’s playhouse, called simply the Theatre, in Shoreditch in 1576, the first building since Roman times built in England expressly for the presentation of plays, does not, contrary to much received opinion, establish a Renaissance for English drama. Rather it defines a high point in the economic fortunes of one established company, a moment when it had the confidence to raise enough capital to erect a permanent cockpit-like structure for spectators around its stage. On this stage and on those of the playhouses that were built during the next fifty years or so were presented plays that had burgeoned from native theatrical stock that was then reaching maturity after two or three centuries of hardy growth. Unlike modern companies of actors, troupes of Elizabethan players depended neither on particular buildings equipped with technical devices to create illusion or spectacular effects nor on an audience prepared to reserve places in advance for a season that might run through the course of a year. Their plays were constructed on non-illusory principles, their performances often formed part of seasonal festivities, religious, civil, or domestic, and, as had been the case throughout the Middle Ages, they assumed that taking their plays to audiences was as much a part of their job as attracting audiences to them. Throughout the reigns of Elizabeth, James, and Charles players were prepared to present their plays in rooms of state frequented by the nobility, in halls at the universities or the London Inns of Court, in guildhalls or the great chambers of private houses, in inn-yards or inn-rooms. When the pestilence caused the playhouses to be closed and drove them out of London, they performed in ‘town halls, or moot-halls, or other convenient places’ (the stock formula from a licence issued to Queen Anne’s players in 1604),¹ on scaffolds at fairgrounds, in natural, artificial,² or, conceivably, ancient amphitheatres – or simply anywhere that an audience might congregate. Between November 1589 and February 1592, for example, Strange’s Men are known to have played at the Cross Keys, at Court, and at Henslowe’s playhouse the Rose.³ All that they needed was some space: the Latin word for a stage that occurs sometimes in medieval stage directions is platea, which means simply a ‘place’ or area. Around that, below it, on three sides, two sides, or one side, the audience disposed themselves with various kinds of provision made for their comfort or convenience.

This book examines the playhouses, stages, dramaturgy, acting, and plays of the last couple of decades of the sixteenth century, the age of Kyd, Marlowe, and the early Shakespeare. It is a study of popular drama and in this context as we have seen ‘popular’ means ‘written for whoever chose to frequent plays’: it does not designate the lower orders of society. For this was the age of ‘public’ playhouse monopoly. Although plays had been performed in the 1570s and early 1580s by children of the royal chapels in the former monastery of the Blackfriars, a place used intermittently for aristocratic revels since the reign of Henry VIII, these performances were essentially private and occasional. They ended in 1584 although the Paul’s boys performed occasionally at Court during the remainder of the decade. With regard to regular commercial performances, the distinction between public and private playhouses, between large mixed and small coterie audiences, did not emerge until about the turn of the century when the Blackfriars was refurbished, first for another generation of child players, Hamlet’s ‘little eyases’, then for the King’s Men who virtually bought them out in 1608. The companies of the 1580s and 1590s – and I do not intend to chart the immensely complicated permutations and combinations they underwent – performed to whoever could pay a penny, the minimum necessary to enter their playhouses. There was no regulation by price or by the exclusion of certain social groups.

Performances therefore did not depend upon the facilities offered by particular playhouses and, moreover, the companies with which we have to deal moved frequently between playhouse and Court. The Corporation of London complained in 1574 that the common players: ‘present before her majesty such plays as have been before commonly played in open stages before all the basest assemblies in London and Middlesex.’⁴ Two important corollaries follow from this, themes that will run through the argument of this book. The first is that I believe that the difference between staging at private and public performances, in halls and playhouses, has been over-stressed. Many historians have argued (following Chambers) that performances in the public playhouses of this period were mounted on simple stages sparsely furnished in contrast with the lavish spectacles offered at Court. Admittedly there is far more evidence for the construction of ‘mansions’ and scenic devices for Court performances, but it may well be that the equivalent playhouse evidence has simply been lost. Henslowe’s inventory of the Admiral’s Men’s properties used at the Rose does include a number of large and presumably elaborate items: it is likely too that it was as expensive to transport these up the river to Whitehall or Hampton Court or down to Greenwich as it was to make new ones when the company was summoned before the Queen. Second, it is likely that audiences could be attracted by being offered the same productions as had been seen by the Monarch and nobility. Third, many modern accounts of performances at this time have been vitiated by the deep-rooted prejudice against spectacle held even today by their authors. Aristotle’s deprecation of spectacle has penetrated deep into the European critical consciousness – spectacle, moreover, is difficult for critics to reconstruct and describe. Yet it provides one of the basic theatrical experiences. I firmly believe that the visual texture of these plays equals their verbal elements in importance.

The second corollary involves the relationships between plays and audiences. If, as I have argued, the same plays were performed before noble and common audiences and if the audiences at particular performances were more heterogeneous than used to be thought (see Ch. 2), it follows that it is not possible to postulate a simple connection between the social composition of its audience and the sophistication of a dramatic text. Certainly there must have been groundlings who loved nothing more than inexplicable dumb shows and noise, wits from Court who set down the intricate verbal conceits of the plays in their ‘tables’. Equally certainly there must have been nobles whose taste ran only to jigs or tales of bawdry, illiterate but intelligent commoners whose sole access to literature lay in the playhouses. No playwright of the period can therefore have written for the instruction or delight of a particular class.

Seven playhouses

Between 1576 and 1600 seven playhouses were built on the outskirts of the City. The first, as we have noted, was called simply the Theatre and was situated north of the river in Shoreditch at the corner of Curtain Road and New Inn Yard about a mile north of Bishopsgate at the east end of the city. It was surrounded by open ground, the scene of several recorded frays (Plate 1).⁵ It was built by James Burbage, a joiner as well as a player and the father of Richard Burbage, one of the greatest actors in Shakespeare’s company. Most of what we know about the Theatre unfortunately is limited to the records of squabbles between the Burbages and leaseholders: other documents reveal at least that it was round, had three galleries for spectators, and was used by most of the important troupes of the time. The clown Tarlton played there, Doctor Faustus and the plays Shakespeare wrote before 1597 were performed there. At the end of 1598 the Theatre was pulled down and its timbers carted across the river to Bankside to be used for the construction of the Globe during the next year.

Adjacent to the Theatre stood Henry Lanman’s Curtain, built within months of the Theatre and used until 1627. Like the Theatre it was used by a large number of companies. Another famous clown and singer, Robert Armin, played there and it was probably used by Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, between the demolition of the Theatre and the erection of the Globe. As with the Theatre, the Curtain was used for ‘activities’ – for fencing and later prize-fighting. The epilogue of a Curtain play, The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607) speaks of its ‘round circumference’ (it may in fact have been polygonal) and it was there that the Swiss traveller Thomas Platter saw ‘tents’ used on the stage during the performance of an unknown play in 1599.⁶ Of the next playhouse at Newington Butts, a village a mile south of London Bridge, mentioned from 1580 to 1594, we know very little. It may have been owned by Philip Henslowe, the greatest Elizabethan impresario, for it was at Newington that the Admiral’s and Lord Chamberlain’s Men mounted a combined season after the plague of 1592–4 and before they went their separate ways to the Rose and the Theatre respectively.⁷

Henslowe’s main playhouse, the Rose, built south of the river about 1587, was the first of the Bankside playhouses and one of the most prestigious of its age. It was situated within the Liberty of the Clink – like all the other playhouses outside the jurisdiction of the City. There the companies associated with Henslowe, Strange’s Men, Sussex’s Men, the Queen’s Men, and, notably, the Admiral’s Men, performed. The Admiral’s Men transferred to the Fortune in 1600 and about 1605 the Rose was pulled down. There, however, Titus Andronicus was played together with most of Marlowe’s works and plays by Kyd, Chapman, Dekker, Drayton, Greene, and Lodge.

To the west, immediately opposite Blackfriars, stood the Swan, built about 1595 by a goldsmith called Francis Langley who leased the playhouse to the Earl of Pembroke’s men. A performance there in 1597 of The Isle of Dogs (lost), claimed by the City to be seditious and slanderous, prompted the order by the Privy Council to close and pull down all public playhouses. The order was never put into operation but the Swan never recovered its status although it continued in existence, used for entertainments like prize-fights and an extemporal versifying contest involving Robert Wilson (1598) until about 1637. The prime piece of visual evidence for Elizabethan playhouses, the copy of a drawing by Johannes de Witt who visited London probably in 1596, is of the Swan – I shall examine this shortly. Like the Rose it was more lavish than the playhouses built north of the river. Unfortunately the suggestiveness of de Witt’s evidence is unmatched by details drawn from playtexts: only one extant play, Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611–13), is known to have been performed there. Views and maps of the period confirm the de Witt drawing and indicate that like its predecessors the Swan was round or polygonal (Plates 2–4). It was to the Swan that a trickster and poetaster called Richard Vennar attracted a crowd of spectators to a fictitious entertainment called England’s Joy. The plot promised such spectacles as Queen Elizabeth ‘taken up into heaven, when presently appears a throne of blessed souls, and beneath under the stage, set forth with strange fireworks, diverse black and damned souls, wonderfully described in their several torments.’ As the admission prices were ‘two shillings or eighteen pence at least’ – they usually ranged from one penny upwards – Vennar must have been expecting a highly privileged auditory. In the event he eloped with the takings, whereupon the audience, ‘when they saw themselves deluded, revenged themselves upon the hangings, curtains, chairs, stools, walls, and whatsoever came in their way, very outrageously, and made great spoil.’⁸

It was to the Globe, which was built in 1599 and which stood until it was destroyed by fire in 1613, that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later the King’s Men) moved from the Curtain. There the plays of Shakespeare’s maturity were performed. It stood to the east of the Rose, and was the nearest of the playhouses to London Bridge. Unfortunately again the richness of the dramatic fare offered there is unmatched by a richness of detail concerning the playhouse itself. It was round and its stage with canopy above was the model for the last of the Elizabethan p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface and acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One The idea of Elizabethan theatre
• Part Two Plays
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index