When I a verse shall make,
Know I have prayed thee
For old religion’s sake,
Saint Ben to aid me.
Candles I’ll give to thee
And a new altar;
And thou Saint Ben, shalt be
Writ in my psalter.
Robert Herrick, Jonson Verbius (1638)
During the winter of 1624–5 the King’s Men suffered a further blow with the death of their house dramatist, John Fletcher. Some sources say he was a victim of the plague since it was virulent once again during the winter of 1624–5, or possibly because of Aubrey’s reference to it:
John Fletcher, invited to go with a Knight of Norfolk or Suffolk in the Plague time of 1625, stayed to make himself a suit of clothes, and while it was making fell sick of the Plague and died. This I had from his tailor who is now a very old man, and the clerk of St. Mary Overy’s in Southwark. Mr. Fletcher had an issue on his arm. The clerk (who was wont to bring him leaves to dress it), when he came found the spots upon him. Death stopped his journey and laid him low here.1
What militates against the supposition is that Fletcher received separate burial in a church rather than being thrown into a plague pit with the rest of the victims, among whom, quite possibly, was William Rowley who died at about the same time.
But outside the narrow confines of their own world, theatrical deaths passed largely unremarked and 1625 saw a far more important demise, that of King James. The accession of his son, Charles I, was to usher in a very different kind of Court with very different tastes and interests. The new King made it clear from the start that he would not tolerate slovenliness in dress or rude or drunken behaviour from anyone. His was to be a Court of elegant sobriety and those who presented themselves before him the worse for drink received short shrift, as did those free with ‘sordid words’. He enjoyed theatrical entertainment but of a tasteful kind.
In 1626 Edward Alleyn died, releasing his young wife, John Donne’s daughter Constance, from what for her had been a deeply unsatisfactory marriage and leaving behind the enormous sum of £10,000 to endow his college. He, in turn, was followed a year later by Middleton who died at his home in Newington Butts and was buried in the parish churchyard on 4 July 1627. He died, as he had lived, in straitened circumstances and the following year his wife, Magdalen, was forced to appeal to the city fathers for financial help. She was granted twenty nobles.
During the next few years virtually all the surviving playwrights of the golden age were to follow. Chapman’s last published work appeared in 1629 under the extraordinary title A Justification of a Strange Action of Nero burying with a Solemn Funeral one of the Cast Hairs of his Mistress Poppaea; Also a Just reproof of a Roman smell-feast, being the fifth satire of the Juvenal translated. History does not record whether or not it was a success but it hardly seems likely that it was a bestseller in such changed times. He died on 12 May 1634 and was buried in the churchyard of St Giles in the Fields in a tomb designed by his friend, Inigo Jones. Marston, who had resigned his living in 1631, died in June of the same year and was buried in the Temple Church, next to his father. We do not know what happened to Webster, even whether or not he married, except that by 1634 he was bracketed with Fletcher as a dead playwright; nor is there any record of what happened to Ford.
The demise of Philip Massinger, best known for his A New Way to Pay Old Debts which has received several recent revivals, offers a little mystery. His burial is registered as having taken place on 18 March 1638. He was living on the Bankside and was apparently in good health but ‘went to bed well and was dead before morning’, whereupon his body ‘being accompanied by “comedians” [actors] was buried about the middle of the churchyard belonging to St. Saviour’s Church’. He was said to have been buried in the same grave as his friend John Fletcher, but this is most unlikely if indeed Fletcher was a plague victim. The last we hear of Dekker is that he boasted he had reached the age of ‘three score’ and was still writing pamphlets in 1638.
Their deaths or disappearances provoked little or no comment. A whole generation of theatregoers had grown up since John Burbage first built The Theatre, many of whom would never even have heard of those early University Wits, or the fates which befell Kyd and Marlowe, except as dramatists whose work they enjoyed, nor would they be able to imagine a time before there were any playhouses. That first wave of dramatists, thrust suddenly into the public eye, the roaring boys of the 1590s with their determinedly outrageous behaviour, belonged to the past. Dramatists were no longer considered remarkable and anyway tastes had changed; city satires, Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’, historical epics, wordy (and worthy) plays were now quite out of fashion. Elegant and amusing comedies and ever more elaborate masques were what people wanted to see, particularly the Court.
By the 1630s the most popular playwrights were James Shirley, Richard Brome (who had once been Jonson’s servant) and the young William Davenant, who neither confirmed nor denied the strong rumour that he was Shakespeare’s son, rather than his godson. Certainly Shakespeare had known his mother, Jennifer, when she lived in London and regularly stayed overnight at the inn later run by her and her husband in Oxford. Anyway such a piece of gossip was hardly likely to hinder the career of a would-be writer.
Shirley had first taken Holy Orders, gone on to become a Catholic, then transferred his interests to the theatre, writing tragedies, popular comedies and masques, always with an eye to what was fashionable and careful not to upset the authorities. He shamelessly plagiarised the works of others, although that was hardly unusual, even producing his own version of The Duchess of Malfi under the title of The Cardinal, but he was best known for his comedies like The Gamester and Hyde Park. Brome, however, possibly because of his close association with Jonson, brought with him more than a whiff of that older theatrical world, especially with The Antipode, in which a miserly, autocratic man is persuaded that he has been transported there and that in this new world everything is the opposite from that in the old: the poor rule the rich, women have the upper hand on men and masters wait on servants. He also has the doubtful privilege of having the last play, The Jovial Crew, to be given a London production before the Civil War. Davenant had some small success as a dramatist before the war but was to play a far more crucial role after it than that of a writer.
The last remaining major figure linking the age of Elizabeth to the present-day Court of King Charles I was Ben Jonson, now an increasingly isolated and unfashionable figure, although King James’s gift of a state pension for life had made him, to all intents and purposes, England’s first Poet Laureate. But his style of writing, particularly for the theatre, simply did not suit any more even when, as in A Staple of News, he chose a topical subject, mocking the new fashion for publishing ‘newspapers’, an innovation looked on by the authorities with increasing alarm. His account of its first night rings all too true to any playwright who even now finds him/herself hanging around helplessly backstage before so crucial a performance. He describes his fraying nerves, his trundling in and out of the ‘tiring house’ and dressing room to give his advice to the actors before going off to have yet another drink. Such last minute advice is never welcome and has never been encouraged, but Jonson’s interference in productions was legendary, actors complaining that he prompted them loudly if they dried, railed at the bookholder (prompter), cursed the wardrobe master, shouted at the musicians and made them sweat for every last mistake they made.2
Snubbed by the new regime, he founded the Apollo Club, its headquarters in a Fleet Street tavern, where he could surround himself with congenial company. He drew up his own set of rules for it, one of which might be welcome now since it stated that there was no music to be played by ‘a saucy fiddler presuming to intrude’, unless the musician was actually invited to do so. Another, that women were allowed to attend meetings by invitation, is more than can be said of today’s Garrick Club. In 1628 he suffered a severe stroke and was virtually bedridden for the rest of his life, describing himself as being ‘blocked up and straitened [sic], narrowed in, fixed to the bed and boards, unlike to win health or scarce breath’. He wrote to King Charles, in elegant verse, asking for an increase in his pension, but his request was ignored. He was comforted in his last years by a coterie of young men, known as the Tribe of Ben, who admired him as a poet. In spite of his physical affliction the following year he managed one more play, The New Inn, which was performed by the King’s Men at the Blackfriars Theatre, but it was not a success. He died in poverty on 6 August 1637 leaving behind a pile of unfinished manuscripts, an old wicker chair ‘such as women use’, and goods to the value of only £8 8s 6d. His estranged wife was long dead and there were no surviving children.
He did, however, achieve burial in Westminster Abbey, not in Poet’s Corner with Chaucer and Beaumont, but in the north aisle. It is said that some time previously Jonson joked with the Dean of Westminster that he could not afford to be buried alongside the other poets as he was too big and it would cost too much. He suggested, therefore, that he should be buried standing up. This was considered apocryphal until the early nineteenth century, when a Lady Wilson came to be buried in the north aisle; Jonson’s cheap coffin was there, standing on end. Carved on his stone are the simple words: ‘O Rare Ben Jonson’.
His death finally drew a line under that extraordinary era which had witnessed not only the very beginnings of professional theatre but also its greatest ever flowering of dramatic writing talent. It not only produced the towering talent of Shakespeare but also offered Marlowe, Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton in the first rank, with Greene, Peele, Kyd, Dekker, Webster, Rowley, Marston, Chapman, Heywood, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher and Tourneur following close behind. It brought into being a whole new art form and a truly professional class of actors and writers, almost all of whom were drawn from modest backgrounds and who, thanks to a particular combination of circumstances, were offered creative fulfilment beyond their wildest dreams. It has never happened again.
In 1642 the curtain came down with the passing of the Edict stating that all stage performances were banned. It was a catastrophe for the players. For sixty years they had been licensed to perform. It had always been a hazardous profession, playhouses could be closed at short notice because of the plague, play-acting continued to be castigated by critics, they were at risk of offending the authorities even if it was unintentional and it was always a hand-to-mouth existence, but the professional theatre had survived it all. But the frantic pleas of actors and writers fell on deaf ears and after the end of hostilities, worse was to come. On 9 February 1648 a new Ordinance was enacted ordering the demolition of all the playhouses, the arrest of any actors found performing anywhere and substantial fines for each and every person found attending any kind of dramatic presentation. Indeed all forms of public entertainment were banned, even dancing round the maypole.
For eighteen years theatre went dark in England. Only towards the end of the Commonwealth was anyone brave enough to try again, and that person was William, now Sir William, Davenant. Having returned from France where he had been in exile with Prince Charles, he returned to London determined that one way or another he would bring back theatre and to this end set about ingratiating himself with Cromwell. He actually persuaded the Protector to allow him to write a little entertainment for his daughter’s wedding, along with a patriotic piece geared to promote the government line on its relationship with Spain. It was a major breakthrough.
With the Restoration in sight, actors started to trickle back to London from exile either abroad or in the country and quietly start to rehearse. With the return of the King, theatre was back in business. But it was theatre of a very different kind. Charles II and his Court, used now to the continental way of doing things, demanded playhouses with the new ‘picture frame’ stage, distancing the audience from the actors and completely altering the English style of acting. Not only that, women were finally allowed on stage even if the general belief was that they were no better than they should be and only doing it to attract the attention of a wealthy keeper, an attitude reflected in the Restoration Comedies, amusing as many of them are. As for the rest, nobody wanted the old plays, not even those of Shakespeare. Antony and Cleopatra was supplanted by Dryden’s Love for Love and until the time of Edmund Kean it was Colley Cibber’s version of Richard III to which audiences flocked.
Adrian Noble, a previous artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, says:
during the thirty-year period in which these plays were written, enormous political shifts were taking place. All that was reflected in the drama. The plays alert audiences’ imagination and edify it, not in a smug way, but because they are truly big experiences, great epic public experiences and the greatest single experience of the age is Shakespeare where you can have a laugh, followed by a love scene, followed by a battle, followed by political intrigue in a council chamber, followed by a rough street scene and all within twenty minutes.
He might have added that this was possible because of the big open space which was the stage and also because the action was not held up in those early days by the trundling in of elaborate scenery on trucks or flying sets down from the roof. Parts of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra read almost like a film or television script with scenes only a few lines long during which the action moves between Rome and Egypt. The audience would know which part of the stage represented each country and all an actor had to do was to walk across it. The speed added to the excitement.
Noble continues:
This is the thread which runs through all these plays and the measure of their continuing success in their impact on the public. What we see are big public issues debated in big public plays. They have the freedom of form because these playwrights virtually invented their own, even though they stole ideas from all over the place, but they were thieves who invented as they went along, saying to themselves ‘I’ll talk to the audience at this point’, or ‘I think I’ll bring a ghost in here’. In terms of reality it didn’t worry them at all because they were creating, play by play, their own worlds. The audiences would have applauded them at the end and then, quite possibly, gone off and cheered a public hanging!3
It is impossible to surmise what the fate of the sixteenth and early seventeenth-century dramatists would have been had there not been a William Shakespeare, although it was not until nearly two hundred years after his death that he actually received the theatrical respect he deserved. But there is no doubt that so towering a talent totally overshadowed that of his contemporaries. Productions of their plays, other than Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and Volpone, were rarities until well into the middle of the twentieth century. The building of two new theatres, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and the new Globe on the banks of the Thames, close to the site of the original, has happily changed the situation for the better and new audiences have laughed at Marston and Jonson’s Eastward Ho!, Jonson’s The Devil’s an Ass and Middleton’s A Mad World My Masters. Like their Elizabethan counterparts they have been thrilled and pleasantly horrified by Tourneur’s Revenger’s Tragedy, Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, Webster’s Duchess of Malfi and White Devil. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Edward II have both had productions in recent years. While a proportion of the plays written to fill the playhouses were potboilers which have rightly sunk with little trace, there remains a large body of work on which to draw.
Perhaps we should leave the last word to ‘I.C.’, the anonymous author of Two Merry Milkmaids who, in his Prologue, wishes on his audience then what we hope they will find in that same body of work today:
We hope, for your own good, you in the yard
Will lend your ears, attentively to hear
Things that shall flow so smoothly to your ear,
That you returning to your friends shall say,
How e’er you understood it, ‘T’was a fine Play’.