I’m in the middle of putting together a season of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries to celebrate the twentieth season of the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. The Swan was built to stage the plays that had inspired Shakespeare and that he inspired: a huge canon of little-known works. So when Trevor Nunn was preparing to open the Swan, he and Judith Cook thought up the notion of producing an introduction to these neglected playwrights, which appeared as At the Sign of the Swan in 1986. Imagine my delight, then, when I received a letter from Judith asking me to write a foreword to her latest book on the subject.
Royal Shakespeare Company audiences are now more familiar with the plays that were performed alongside the works of Shakespeare at the Rose, the Globe and Blackfriars. In 2002 I produced a season of rare Jacobean plays, which went on to enjoy an unprecedented run in London’s West End, testifying to a vigorously healthy renewed appetite for this repertoire.
Since the Swan opened, we have done most of the major comedies of Ben Jonson, virtually all the plays of Christopher Marlowe, the famous Websters, alongside Marston, Massinger, Middleton, with Ford and Fletcher, and even Shirley and Shadwell. But there are huge gaps – some of the Roaring Boys in this book have hardly had a look-in: very little Dekker, no George Peele yet, and no Robert Greene.
We may know the plays a little more. Judith Cook introduces us to the characters who wrote them. And now I feel responsible. For having read Judith’s excellent survey of the period, and having been introduced to the likes of Robert Greene, in his doublet of goose-turd green, with his wild hair, pointed red beard, and his punk, Emma, sister to Cutting Ball Jack, I feel I ought to honour the acquaintance and put on his plays immediately.
Roaring Boys chronicles those dangerous decades at the end of the sixteenth and start of the seventeenth centuries when British Theatre exploded into being. Judith Cook presents its dramatis personae – Henslowe’s madcap stable of writers. She paints a vivid picture of the theatres for which they were writing, of the audience to whom they performed, and of the police state that controlled them. Her meticulous attention to detail is delightful, and her insights into the role of women, for example, the impact of asylum seekers and regime change in that society, are both revealing and resonant.
I was away on tour in Japan when Judith’s letter arrived. When I got back I accepted her invitation, only to receive an e-mail by return from her son Nick, telling me the sad news of her sudden death. I am sorry I never met her. But her book testifies to her enthusiasm for her subject, her encyclopedic knowledge of the period, and her rare gift for storytelling.
Gregory Doran
Stratford-upon-Avon, 2004