The scene: a busy early afternoon sometime in October 1591. The place: the Bankside, its gambling dens, brothels, ordinaries (the Elizabethan equivalent of fast food cafés), taverns, the Clink prison (one of five gaols in Southwark), the Bear Pit and the Rose Theatre, built by the businessman and entrepreneur Philip Henslowe four years earlier and now, after several months of closure, reopened, enlarged and improved.
The cast: the people of London, the merchants, cheapjacks, cutpurses and whores (the latter known as ‘Winchester Geese’), the young bloods on the make, the merry wives (some seeking assignations), the bands of apprentice boys out looking for trouble, the hundreds of ordinary folk who have come to see a performance at the Rose of the most popular play of the day, The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. Both before and after they cross the Thames they are at risk, as they battle through the capital’s congested streets, of being run down by the increasingly heavy traffic. As John Stow grumbles: ‘The world now runs on wheels with many whose parents were glad to go on foot.’
Further along the Bankside and going in the opposite direction, his feet squeezed into fashionable boots, is one of the theatrical world’s prime self-publicists, the poet and playwright Robert Greene. His wine-stained doublet is in his favourite colour, ‘goose turd’, a virulent yellowy-green. His red hair is greased into a cone shape behind his head while his beard, according to fellow-poet and wit, Thomas Nashe, ‘is long and red like a steeple, which he cherished continually without cutting, whereat he might hang a jewel, it is so sharp and pendant’. Behind him trudges his mistress, Emma Ball, who has recently discovered that she is pregnant. Her brother is the notorious highwayman Cutting Ball Jack. Several people stop Greene to ask whether he is intending to see The Spanish Tragedy that afternoon, but Greene tells them in an offhand way that he has better things to do with his time.
The real reason is that he dare not show his face at the Rose after having palmed off on to Henslowe and the company of the Lord Admiral’s Men his play Orlando Furioso, assuring them it was a completely new work, for which Henslowe had paid him the substantial sum of twenty nobles – only to discover, after it had been rehearsed and given a public performance, that he had already sold the same script to the Lord Pembroke’s Men who were now touring it around the country.
Meanwhile in the lodgings he shares with Kyd when he is in town, Christopher Marlowe is working on his own new play, Edward II. Currently there is a vogue for historical epics following the success of Henry VI (in which he had had a hand), and Richard III, the tale of Crookbacked Dick written by the newcomer from Stratford-upon-Avon and a play which is rapidly catching up with The Spanish Tragedy in terms of popularity. Not that Marlowe need worry; his very first offering, Tamburlaine, was a smash hit – making him an instant celebrity. However, hardly anyone who will sit, or more likely stand, to see the first performance of Edward II will have any idea what they will be in for. They will soon learn. Marlowe reads over the lines he has given Edward when he tells his favourite and lover, Piers Gaveston, the nature of the entertainment he is proposing for him:
Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape,
With hair that gilds the water as it glides,
Crownets of pearl about his naked arms,
And in his sportful hands an olive-tree,
To hide those parts which men delight to see . . .
Kit Marlowe, the first of the gay Cambridge spies, is giving the world his own take on the subject of kingship.
The later years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I ushered in what can only be described as the explosion of a new art form: that of professional drama – and professional drama required professional writers. What follows are the stories of some of those hopeful young men, often from very ordinary backgrounds, who were to find themselves caught up in the excitement, fame and dangers of the London theatre scene.