The London that lured these two young travellers - Will Shakspere walking from the west, through Oxford and Wycombe, past the gallows at Tyburn and the palaces of Westminster; Kit Marley, riding down through Saffron Walden and Epping Forest, traversing 'villainous boggy and wild country' to approach the city across Hackney Marshes - was, from a distance, a prickle of spires. Five score parish churches poked up their steeples in a small patch around the great, looming Gothic mass of St Paul's, the predecessor to Wren's domed church, and just as awe-inspiring (despite its own tall tower having been somewhat truncated by a bolt of lightning early in Elizabeth's reign). The only non-ecclesiastical competitors for the skyline were the Tower and the tiered turret of the Royal Exchange - or perhaps as you drew closer, the forest of masts of ships on the Thames. Closer still, and the bristling plume of churches matted into a tangled, infested profusion of tenements and taverns, palaces and grim alleys, gardens, slaughterhouses, plague-pits, theatres and stews. Over 100,000 people were crammed into a tiny area within or just outside the City Walls - and the population was swelling, and not just with Englishmen. There were Germans and Dutchmen, Switzers and Danes, Protestant refugees from Flanders and France but, according to a 1580 census, only 116 Italians and (until Cromwell changed discriminatory laws) barely a handful of Jews.
Kit, of course, had seen it all before. But the parvenu from Stratford was taking his first plunge into the city's swift current, swept along by the thrust and turmoil, avoiding restless ripples of violence, gasping at the novelty and merry motley. Yet London seemed already familiar to Will, a picture the players had painted for him often before. Over ale in Stratford, he had in his mind sucked good oysters in Bread Street and drunk cups of sack at the Boar's Head in East Cheap; he had seen street jugglers and duels with rats, learned the curses and insults of the watermen who plied the Thames, and had taunted 'Sir Tom', who wore a tattered doublet, a codpiece as a hat, and howled maudlin drunk through the night near St Helen's. He expected the roar you could hear half a mile from the city, that fragmented into cries like 'Buy my great eeeels!', 'Any work for John Buckle?' and 'Sir Francis Drake His Triumph in Cadiz!'. He felt he had already reeked the tallow by Paternoster Row, and knew the stink of Pissing Alley. He had choked on the fug of sea-coal fumes, gagged at the seeping stench of the burial grounds, but also breathed in the scents of oranges and of markets in herb-time.
Not everything was filth and flying ordure. The commonplace that London was dirty and Elizabethans ignorant of personal hygiene is misleading. Kit does write of the 'stinking breaths' of the common people in Coriolanus, and 'the Rabblement' in Julius Caesar throw up their sweaty night-caps and utter 'such a deal of stinking Breath' that the great man chokes and swoons. But then Kit might very well have been writing about Rome. The German traveller Paul Hentzner, who visited London in 1598, was impressed at how 'handsome and clean' the streets were. Soap had been brought back centuries before by the Crusaders. The young lad Francis in Claudius Hollyband's sixteenth-century language-teaching book undergoes extensive morning ablutions, and in a similar book, The French Garden, the mistress of the house is scoured with paste of almonds, refuses to wear a dirty ruff support, and later sends drinking glasses back to the kitchen because they are grimy. Nor should we forget that the frequently cited instances of people being prosecuted for misplaced 'dungheaps' are records of transgressions. To deduce from these that everyone piled their faeces outside their front doors would be the equivalent of some future social historian deducing from a few twenty-first-century speeding tickets that all motorists tore about the country at 100 miles per hour. Citizens were required to burn their rubbish three times a week. It is clear that among the richer classes and in some parts of town, cleanliness could prevail, the difference from today being one of starkness of contrast. The stench of London was of the poor. The problem for people like Kit and Will Shakspere, who attempted to straddle both worlds, was of not carrying the odours of one into the other.
In London lay riches and wonders and wit. Like so many aspiring young men of his generation - a rising class that realised they could make their own future - Will wanted to grasp it all. As he walked down the Oxford road, and through the Wall at Newgate, the picture he had formed of London had to shift only slightly to adjust to the city he found. Perhaps he had underestimated the persistent grip of anxiety - the constant edge of fear of robbery, of murder, of the noises of night, of the plague which came suddenly and scythed swathes through the populace. The world beyond England, with all its dangers, seemed closer here, too. Foreign tongues could be heard in the streets, and the rumours that filtered from court were cold with the terror of Spanish invasion. Heads of traitors stared down from stakes on London Bridge; the spurting neck of Mary Queen of Scots was still fresh in the minds of people he passed.
And so much was new. Tall, steep-roofed houses - a cellar, a shop, two more floors and a garret - thrown up quickly to accommodate the thousands of incomers. The chronicler John Stow, well into his seventies by the time he compiled the Survey of London in 1598, lamented a city 'pestered' with new construction, the gardens of his youth suddenly sprouting tenements; hills and fields 'incroched upon by building of filthy Cottages'. Throughout the 1580s laws were passed to control new building and prevent the sardine-packing of families into old ones. But it was futile. London became a teeming press of inhabited cellars and backstreet hovels, hard up against the grand houses of the rich.
The rich were very much in evidence. Elizabeth's court was a flame that drew politics and society to London. Of course, sessions of Parliament and the law courts played their role, but it was the Queen who exercised a pull that could be felt throughout the land. She had palaces in town at Westminster, Whitehall, St James's and the Tower, and more just a barge ride away, at Greenwich, Hampton Court and Richmond. Paul Hentzner gives us a picture of her at the time, her face 'oblong, fair but wrinkled; her Eyes small, yet black and pleasant; her Nose a little hooked, her Lips narrow, and her Teeth black' (the latter, he notes, being 'a defect the English seem subject to from their great use of sugar'). He registers her 'false hair, and that red' and her 'uncovered bosom, as all English ladies have it till they marry', and especially admires her small hands, long fingers, stately air and mild and obliging manner of speaking. She is dressed in white silk, bordered with pearls 'the size of beans', with a black mantle of the same fabric shot with silver threads. Fluttering around this figure were the 1,500 or so members of the royal household, but it was not just they who spurred excitement and generated wealth. The circles that surrounded Elizabeth - the household (the lord chamberlain dealing with upstairs, the lord steward with downstairs and the master of the horse with outdoors), the Privy Council, the courts, and the exchequer - fed their influence out across London, whether or not the Queen was in residence. The royal wardrobe was in the City, the mint was in the Tower. Half the aristocracy owned London houses: a Westminster or Strand address became an exclusive one as a royal village grew around the palaces and the road that connected them to the City. Lord Burghley and Sir Walter Ralegh had houses on the Strand, Sir Francis Walsingham had one within the Walls, and the earls of Southampton and Essex lived lavishly in town. This was a celebrity culture, where fame and fortune were speedily gleaned by reflection or association. Anyone enjoying high office or royal favour had their own stable of hopefuls, alert for preferment while themselves passing down privilege for a fee. Thousands of tradesmen catered to their whims. Tailors and goldsmiths drifted westwards towards Westminster; and purveyors of silks and plate, of fine foods and entertainment filled their coffers, supplying the people that swarmed around the body of the monarch.
Fashion filtered down the line. Fynes Moryson noted that: 'All manners of attire came first into the City and Countrey from the Court, which being once received by the common people, and by very Stage-players themselves, the Courtiers justly cast off, and take new fashions'. Any courtier so misfortunate as to appear in last season's cut of doublet would find that 'men looke upon him as upon a picture in Arras hangings [tapestries]'. The practice of wearing aristocrats' hand-me-downs meant that the players presented a splendid appearance, a phenomenon marvelled at by the young Swiss student Thomas Platter after a performance of Julius Caesar in 1599. The play-actors, he remarks, were 'dressed most exquisitely and elegantly' and what's more, 'at the end of the play they danced together admirably and exceedingly gracefully, according to their custom, two in each group dressed in men's, and two in women's, apparel'. Dances, too, descended from fashionable halls to the stage, whereupon they 'come to be vulgar' and 'Courtiers and Gentlemen think them uncomely to be used'.
Kit, of course, was astutely aware of these niceties, and had the contacts and extra income to keep up with the Court. Will, in his player's finery, was happy in his delusion. But both knew the power of preferment and of the patronage these great houses afforded.
Will, with an arriviste's characteristic over-reaching, first took wholly unsuitable lodgings in Westminster, nearer to court than the theatres and in too ambitious a social milieu. A copy of a legal textbook (published in 1568) in the Folger Library is inscribed with the name 'Wm Shakespeare', with a note added in an unknown later hand: 'Mr Wm Shakespeare lived at No 1 Little Crown St Westminster NB near Dorset Steps, St James's Park' - though of course we have no way of knowing whether this later note-maker was telling the truth, nor even talking of the same Shakespeare. Our Will was registered at baptism as 'Shakspere', and this is the name used for the baptism of his three children, the burial of his son and marriage of his younger daughter. He was licensed to marry one Anne Whatley under the name 'Shaxpere', and the following day was engaged to Anne Hathwey using 'Shagspere'. All the signatures we have appear to use different spellings, but it would seem that once in London, he began to soften the hard West Country 'shack' of the first syllable for a more cultivated 'shake', as references to him as an actor in London show. All in all there are fifty-seven documented varieties of the family name.
Kit was more canny in choosing somewhere to live, lodging as he had done before with his friend Thomas Watson in St Helen's, before the two moved a step north to Norton Folgate, the area beyond Bishopsgate and the Bedlam hospital, just outside the 'liberty' of the City of London. The City Corporation disapproved of actors and their ilk, and by living a step beyond the liberty, Kit and his friends could shrug off their control. Norton Folgate was close to the delights of town, yet also home to the Theatre and the Curtain - the leading playhouses of the day, also conveniently beyond City jurisdiction (the Swan and Globe had not yet been built across the river, in the liberty of the Clink, where the Rose was just beginning its life). Together with Shoreditch, its neighbouring liberty, Norton Folgate was a lively den of poets and players, wits and wicked malcontents - the names of the two liberties are sometimes used interchangeably, and often associated with court records of rumpus and mayhem. Robert Poley, Sweet Robyn, was a resident. Realising his mistake, Will very soon moved there too.
If his residence in Westminster was short-lived, his work with the Queen's Men hardly lasted longer. Queen Elizabeth's Men (as they were properly known) were, quite literally, the pick of the bunch, having been formed in 1583 from twelve top players poached from other companies. Once back in London, the star troupe had little need for the inexperienced player employed out of desperation in Stratford. By early 1588 one John Heminges had married the murdered actor William Knell's widow Rebecca, occupying not only Knell's bed but his buskins, as he took over the dead man's roles as well. As his subsequent career shows (he later joined the Chamberlain's Men and became their leading actor after the great Richard Burbage's death), he was a player of superior talent. Even though he edged Will out of his job, the two became lifelong friends - Will leaving him a legacy of 265 8d to buy a mourning ring.
A 'Lamentable Tragedy' entitled Locrine, printed in 1595 gives a clue to the direction Will's career was taking in the late 1580s. On the title page we read that the play has been 'Newly set foorth, overseene and corrected, By W. S'. Biographer Katherine Duncan-Jones suggests that Will began to work as book-keeper and stage-keeper for the Queen's Men. As stage-keeper he had to make sure performers were ready on cue, that all ran according to plan, and perhaps to prompt when necessary. As bookn keeper he would have to copy out the 'parts', with single-line cues from the previous actor's speech, to be learned by individual players. It then naturally fell to him to prepare, from prompt-books, 'parts', the author's 'foul papers', and whatever other material happened to be at hand, plays intended for publication. At the same time he was still playing whatever small roles he could garner. It is no wonder, as Duncan-Jones points out, that he was soon to be mocked as 'an absolute Johannes factotum , a 'Mr Do-it-all' by Kit's friend Thomas Nashe. But it does indicate that the boy from Stratford must indeed once have benefited from the services of a passing scrivener, and was skilled enough to read and to copy, probably in a neat Secretary Hand - though admittedly, the quality of Will's hand is guesswork. It is well-known that apart from the five (perhaps six) scrawled signatures, no proven examples of his handwriting exist.
It would also seem that early on he had ambitions to write plays as well as act in them. In the same passage in Greenes Groats-worth of Witte that marked him out as a Jack of all trades, he would be derided by the playwright-poet as an 'upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tyger's hart wrapt in a player's hyde supposes he is well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you' - a pushy young actor, who not content with deriving his glory from words written for him by others, has the gall to think that he can do it himself.
Will Shakspere was indeed leapingly ambitious and determined. He was startlingly confident of his own abilities (as Nashe tells us) and had a greedy eye for gold. It is no chance that the book bearing his Westminster address is a legal textbook - Will was to prove litigious and acquisitive throughout his life. The Queen's Men were often on tour, and it seems he did not join them but instead hawked himself out to other troupes. The two companies that dominated the London scene were Lord Strange's Men, and the Admiral's Men, and it was probably while working for the latter that Will first met the sensational young Christopher Marley (or Marloe, as he now increasingly styled himself, in yet another of the name shifts that seem to accompany each move into a new phase of his life). Though just the same age, Kit already embodied what Will Shakspere wanted to be. His play Tamburlaine the Great had been a huge success. The rhythmic blank verse he wrote it in was revolutionising the way other playwrights worked, and by the time Will came to London Tamburlaine already boasted a sequel and was beginning to spawn imitators. The man Marloe had both lustre and a little mystery. He had not only travelled with players abroad, but was rumoured to have visited Italy - quite an achievement for a Protestant Englishman, as much of Italy was in Spanish hands and so virtually at war with England, and what's more, the country was the core of Catholicism. It was forbidden territory. Going there for pleasure would find a modern parallel in a 1950s American going on holiday to the USSR.
This Marloe dressed richly, had aristocrats as friends and all the trappings of a gentleman. It was said he had tumbled with Lord Hunsdon's mistress; there was talk that he dabbled in the occult, that he had once assisted the 'Queen's conjuror', the great Dr Dee, and that in Sir Walter Ralegh's house on the Strand together with the 'Wizard Earl' Northumberland, he courted moral danger and blasphemy. Later, Kit would be suspected of using real spells and necromantic formulae in Doctor Faustus and Macbeth, and the accusations of atheism would stick.
When in London Kit worked furiously and lived hard (by his own admission he 'conversed more with the buttock of the night than the forehead of the morning'). But he was frequently out of town, and therefore much in demand during the periods he was back. Here was a fat pie for Mr Do-it-all's ambitious finger. By the end of the 1580s, Will 'Shakespere' (as he was now careful to call himself) was helping the busy Christopher Marloe as scribe, transforming his 'foul papers' into fair copy, writing out parts, and transcribing Marloe's work into playhouse prompt-books.* But all the while his eye was firmly focused on collaboration, on an easy vault straight to the top. Fortune was to raise him higher than he could have dreamed.
The theatre managers were hungry gobblers of new plays. London companies operated a repertory system, performing (when not prevented by plague or the authorities) every afternoon except Sunday and during Lent, and offering a new play daily. Of course, works were repeated - the Admiral's Men typically performed fifteen different titles over twenty-seven playing days - but this meant players worked at a tumultuous tilt. As a bit player Will had to keep some thirty different roles in his head, learning them from handwritten 'parts', seldom reading a play in entirety. Mornings were spent in rehearsal, afternoons in performance, hustled on and off stage by the stage-keepers (or himself making sure players were on cue); nights disappeared writing out parts or making some sense of Marloe's scrawl. In between he got on with his theatrical oddjobbing 'setting forth overseeing and correcting' other men's words. Though he desperately wanted to bombast out a blank verse of his own, there was precious little time in which to do it.
This does not mean that Kit sat aloof in a garret quilling masterpieces. The notion of a solitary author, dreamily drawing on his own inspiration is another creation of the Romantic era. Kit, as playwright, was very much part of the hurly-burly of Elizabethan theatre, and his plays changed shape with every turn. Even today, the words an audience hears on the first night of a new play are not exactly those the playwright delivered to the theatre on the first day of rehearsal. The text will have been tweaked at by the director, subtly altered by actors, cut, added to, rewritten. An energetic theatre company will continue this process throughout the run. They are the theatrical equivalent of a good editor. Similarly, in the hectic environment of the Theatre, the Curtain and the Rose, the making of a play was an ongoing, collaborative effort. Of course, behind each work there was what Wallace Stevens calls a 'presiding personality', but plays were hybrids of other personalities, too: parts created for a star actor, scenes ad-libbed by clowns, songs added for musicians or slipped in to cover scene-changes, passages inserted to make a contemporary political point. Inspiration came from many sources. The subsidiary ghosts of Richard Burbage, Will Kemp and a host of leapers, jiggers and lute-players, jostle with the dominant spirit of the author of Othello, King Lear and Hamlet.
When it came to publication, even more hands shaped, shaded and changed the text. The focus of public interest at the time was on performance. Playwrights did not own their works; these belonged to the company that had paid for them. Plays were published in retrospect, often anonymously and many years after they had been on stage. The first collection of the so-called Workes of William Shakespeare, for example, was printed only in 1623, decades after some of the plays had first been performed. A haze engulfs the chronology of Kit's early work - we have to rely on diary entries and second-hand reports to date most first performances, or on when they were first shown to the licenser of plays.
Nor do we have any original manuscripts, though this is not unusual. Although in Elizabethan times autographed manuscripts were sometimes the printers' source material, these were often cut or doctored by the company book-keeper, and plays were frequently published using prompt-books, the author's 'foul papers', scraps of hand-written 'parts' or, notoriously, compiled by dictation from actors' fusty-brained recollections of roles they once played. There are two very different versions of Kit's Doctor Faustus; and one of the most famous soliloquies in English comes down to us thus:
To be, or not to be, that is the question,
Whether 'tis nobler in the minde to suffer
The slings and arrowes of outragious fortune,
Or to take Armes against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them, to die to sleepe
No more, and by a sleepe, to say we end
The hart-ake, and the thousand naturall shocks
That flesh is heir to; tis a consumation
Devoutly to be wisht to die to sleepe,
To sleepe, perchance to dreame, I there's the rub . . .
(Hamlet, Second Quarto)
and thus:
To be, or not to be, I [aye] there's the point,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes . . .
(Hamlet, First Quarto)
There it goes, indeed. We can almost hear the scatterbrained actor's ramblings, as a scribe witlessly writes them down verbatim. What obfuscates matters more is that we cannot always be entirely certain who wrote what - especially as the absence of copyright laws meant that poets plagiarised each other relentlessly. A neat phrase or a nifty plot spread faster than the pox. Also, one writer might be called in to re-jig another's work, or to add a few scenes - leaving a spoor of personal stylistic imprints through the play to confuse literary bloodhounds for centuries to come. We cannot even be sure that all of Kit's work is his own. Certainly, it seems that bold Will Shakspere ('a slipper and subtle knave, a finder of occasions') persuaded Kit to allow him to collaborate on parts oi Henry VI, sometime before 1592. And it is possible that the rather nondescript King John, probably written a little later in the 1590s, is almost entirely Will's work.
The first loops of the knot that would inextricably bind the names 'Marloe' and 'Shakespere' were beginning to form. According to Norlet Boyd, the two men appear to have got on fairly well, though at first Kit kept his distance.* The sparsely educated glovemaker's son from Stratford, flaming with aspiration yet socially unconnected, was, after all, a little too close to what Kit might himself have been. The two even looked alike similar wispy beards, domed foreheads and luminous, engaging eyes - though Will Shakespere had more of the burgher in him, and a tendency to run to fat. This is most evident in the only two representations of Shakespere approved by people who knew him, the Droeshout engraving on the title page of the First Folio, and the rather vacant, open-mouthed bust commissioned by his son-in-law for the monument in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford, described by Anthony Burgess as resembling a 'self-satisfied pork-butcher'. The 'Chandos portrait', which was mistakenly said to be of Shakespere in the eighteenth century is, as shall be seen, of Kit, and when compared with the Droeshout rendering highlights differences rather than similarities - Kit's wilder hair, darker eyes and slighter chin.
There is little evidence, though, that the two men socialised together. Kit, like Tom Watson and Tom Nashe, was an habitue of the Nag's Head in Cheapside, and one of the group of poets and intellectuals that later became known as the 'University Wits', who frequented the Mermaid tavern in Bread Street a sedate and respectable tavern, run by 'the precisest man in England', one William Williamson, who did not even allow musicians to play there. Despite his aspirations to play-writing, Will was more at ease with tumblers and players and was most often found in their company in earthier taverns such as the Garter or the Boar's Head. It was only much later in life that Will ascended to the smarter Mermaid.
Though Kit in his plays paints us a delightful picture of the more rumbustious taverns, it was not until this century that we were given an intimate view of the Mermaid. A document recently discovered by Dr Bernard Rosine, of the Bernhardt Institute in Paris, affords us the rare privilege of being able to eavesdrop across four centuries on conversations at the Mermaid.* Coming upon some empty pages bound in with miscellaneous documents pertaining to the Cerne Abbas Commission (a 1594 investigation into Sir Walter Ralegh's supposed atheism), Rosine was put in mind of the conspiracy of the 'Spanish Blanks'. In this affair a Scottish Catholic en route to Spain was found to be carrying mysterious blank sheets of paper each signed by a Scottish nobleman and addressed to the King of Spain, but with space left presumably for the monarch to have written in at his pleasure whatever professions of loyalty or promises of support he required. Rosine had always wondered whether these blanks had in fact not been blank at all, but had contained messages in invisible ink - urine, onion juice and milk all being commonly used as such at the time. He began to consider whether his blank sheets might not also bear a hidden message - one never read, or since faded. After some considerable battle with the archivist he was allowed to treat chemically a small corner of one page. Writing appeared. The pages (once fully treated) were revealed as reports on the Mermaid milieu, written, Rosine suspects, by a spy placed in the tavern by Sir Robert Cecil early in 1591 (a mark '33 E' on one of the sheets could refer to the regnal year). Cecil was probably hoping for damaging information on his rival the Earl of Essex, who had friends among the wits.
The papers are incomplete, and apparently written over a number of weeks. Like an eavesdropper, we do not hear everything said in the busy tavern, but pick up on tantalising snippets through the hubbub. The Mermaid might have been music-free and respectable, but it certainly was not stuffy. We can hear the toasts: 'Be merry!', 'Here's to you!', 'Here's to thy better fortune and goode stars!'. Tom Nashe in one corner argues vehemently with Kit, 'bounsing with his fist on the board so hard' that the tapster with an 'Anon, anon, sir, bye and bye' brings them more ale by mistake. When someone complains of the 'foul stinke' of Kit's pipe he quips (perhaps not for the first time) that 'all they that love not Tobacco & Boies are fooles'. The overeager eavesdropper speculates (incorrectly) that 'Marley' commits this 'beastlie sinne of sodometrie' not just with boys, but with Tom Watson, and perhaps also another playwright, Thomas Kyd, with whom 'he will soone share a chamber in Sourdich [Shoreditch]'. He picks up on a rumour (correct this time) that Robert Cecil has been knighted, and meticulously records some disparaging comments on this, and praise for Essex. There is some further scoffing about a 'King John' - perhaps not coded conversation, but a dismissal of the play published anonymously that year. Tom Watson derides 'the man Shacksper' as 'a slipper and subtle knave' and later 'a finder of occasions' (an opportunist). There are 'jests' and 'news', and the eavesdropper notes 'combats of wit', but either his shorthand or his brain cannot keep up with them. Once or twice drink dilutes caution, and conversations veer into perilous ground: a snort from somewhere that 'all protestants are Hypocriticall asses'; 'one Chumley', who comes across as a loudmouth and a braggart, falls to 'swearing and cursing, interlacing his speeches with curious terms of blasphemy'; 'Marley' again, jesting that the New Testament is 'filthily written' and that 'if he were put to it to write a new Religion, he would undertake both a more Exellent and Admirable methode'. We are given the sense of a 'deep' crowd that needs to be watched, of 'jesting that is not our jesting', dangerous cleverness, malcontent, whiffs of treachery.
The tavern tattler mentions another name, one as yet unknown to Will Shakespere but closely associated with Kit - a young man who for a while has been on the edge of our tale, and who is about to move centre stage. The eavesdropper notes him as 'a careful friend' of Kit's, and to pick up his trail we must go back a few years, to the late 1580s. He is Oliver Laurens.
* Keaton, Luvvies' Labours, p. 412.
* Norlet Boyd, Two's Company, p. 18.
* Laurens box, folder 15.