Theatres & actors

Plays, considered so far, are only a small part of what had been written & played until the end of the 80s of the 16^th c. The vast majority of plays did not come to us. But we must always bear in mind that the number of them was very large, & almost all of them had been played on stage. Older folk plays & newer “scientific plays” were gradually converging in style & subject matter, individual elements of both interpenetrating one another. It is a very important question now how did the audience reacted at these public performances and how did their attitude affect the further evolution of the theater as a whole?

During the period in the theater history a new phenomenon arose - the emergence of professional actor training. Prior to that time public performances of mystery & morality plays were conducted almost entirely by amateurs. Growth of professional acting was previously prevented by unusually harsh laws against vagrants, published in the interests of the landowners & manufacturers to deal with the workers escape from starvation. Actors were equated with beggars, and if they had been caught, they were punished mercilessly: with stamping & mutilation, or even prison. There was only 1 way out - actors started the service at the king or nobles court, were working in their palaces, & received relevant certificates. We find the I certain data about this fact already in 1516, when it was written that “actors of our Sovereign King” played outside London but this was of course not the I touring of such actors. The number of home theater groups of senior officials was increasing in the 30s of the 16^th c. Patents for the right to play outside London, signed by the princes, were so profitable that some actors even forged fake certificates and thus had possibility to play.

Professional actors in the vast majority came from the скфаеіьут. Educated people began to join troupeі much later, when permanent public theaters appeared in London. When the demand for theatrical performances in the 60's and 70's began to grow the London hotels became a part of the theater system. We know the names of 5 hotels located in the busiest places "Crossroads", "Bell", "Bull", "Wild Bell", "Boar's Head", the latter 2 are located outside the city walls. Performances at hotels were associated with great difficulties. The actors were exploited by hosts & suffered from the city authorities. That harassment especially increased after Leicester’s actors troupe received a Royal patent & all the actors became much bolder. The leading actor of the troupe, a former carpenter James Burbage, decided he founded a way out of the authorities & built his own theatre in 1576 with the help of fellow actors. That was the I public theatre built in Lodnon & England in general (the theatres situated outside London had been built since 1612). Burbage called his creation very simply – “The Theatre”. It became very famous & for many years remained unchallenged. Next year 1 more theatre was built also outside the city walls: Richard Farrent, a choirmaster, playwright & theatrical producer of Windzor royal chapel, reorganized an old monastic building of Blackfriars into a famous the Blackfriars Theatre that hosted children's companies.

Burbage Theatre borrowed its constructive features from hotel courtyards with the changes dictated by convenience & expediency. The gallery was divided into boxes. The scene was a firmly incorporated part of the gallery & was nonseparable. The stalls were situated in the open air, and was designed was standing audience. Blackfriars Theatre, on the contrary, was roofed & the performances were given in artificial light. The very nature of Farrant’s theater was different. It was a theatre for selected audience & was therefore called a “private” theater. There was also a Court Theatre in the capital. It has existed for a long time, since the days of Henry VIII. Theater festivals and entertainment spectacles of all kinds have had great success at court. Especially popular were masques – a form of festive courtly entertainment that flourished in 16^th – early 17^th century Europe, though it was developed earlier in Italy (a public version of the masque was pageant). A masque involved music & dancing, singing & acting, within an elaborate stage design, in which the architectural framing & costumes might be designed by a renowned architect, to present a deferential allegory flattering to the patron. Professional actors & musicians were hired for the speaking & singing parts. Often, the masquers who did not speak or sing were famous courtiers or even the representatives of royal families. Under Henry VIII masques were staged with extraordinary splendour. In England, in contrast to Italy, they were often performed in verses. Libretto for them was written by best classic poets, for plots of masques were mainly mythological. Ben Johnson later became a King of masques, and Inigo Jones became the most famous decorator of this type of art on stage. Up to the Revolution, masques remained a popular pastime at the court, they were complicated & refined & even influenced public theaters.

Of 3 types of theatre, the most important of course, was a public one. James Burbage’s “Theater” had worked for more than 20 years. In 1599, his sons Cuthbert & Richard broke it, & built a new theater on the south bank of the Thames due to the fact that through those 20 years this part of the city became very profitable for different entertainments as that was a centre time spending of various seamen, ship workers, dock workers, employees of warehouses, owners of river barges, boaters & city carriers, craftsmen, & their apprentices, and the rural population near the neighborhood. Up to the 70s these people were mostly entertained in taverns, pubs, public houses. One of the first theatrical owners on the southern bank was Philip Henslowe, an unusually bright personality with a dark reputation, who left us diaries, retelling the state of the renaissance theatrical business and who in 1587 together with John Cholmley built The Rose, the III of the large, permanent playhouses in London. He had a lot of money, acquired by the most unscrupulous means: it was usury, holding bars & brothels, organized spectacles, did not disdain anything. Having decided to build a theater, he was interested only in profit, & from this point of view he did not see any difference between the theater and a brothel. But he was lucky. He secured a patent from Lord Admiral, & acquired the greatest Elizabethan actor – Edward Alleyn, who later married his daughter & became his successor. He didn’t want to be brothers Burbage’s competitor so moved to the north-western corner of the city & built 1 more famous theatre – “The Fortune Theatre”, which existed up till the Puritan Revolution in 1642.

This was the beginning of famous & glorious history of the Elizabethan theatre. Nearly 20 theaters were built in London within 30 years – a fact, absolutely impossible in any other country, at that time, & in the next century. However, not all of them worked simultaneously, but there were years when11 public & private theaters were givin plays at the same time, for example, in the last 2-3 years of Elizabeth's reign & the early years of James I. The rapid growth of theatre building in London testified of theatres’ political power in the society.

“University Wits”

Come foorth you witts, that vaunt the pompe of speach,

And strive to thunder from a Stage-man’s throate:

View Menaphon a note beyond your reach;

Whose sight will make your drumming descant doate;

Players avant, you know not to delight;

Welcome sweete Shepheard; worth a Scholler’s sight.

THESE lines of Thomas Brabine, prefixed to Greene’s Menaphon (1589), follow hard upon Nashe’s involved and, to-day, obscure preface, To the Gentlemen Students. This preface is one long gibe at the poets and the writers who, either without university education had risen from the ranks, or, though thus educated, had chosen ways of expression not in accordance with the standards of the university wits. John Lyly (1554-1606), Thomas Lodge (1558-1625), George Peele (1558-1597), Robert Greene (1558-1592), Thomas Kyd (1558-1594), Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), & Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) however they may have differed among themselves, stood shoulder to shoulder whenever they were facing the “alcumists of eloquence” whose standards were not their own. Though, in the period from 1570 to 1580, the curriculum at Oxford and at Cambridge was still medieval, yet, as an addition to it, or in place of it, groups of students, from year to year, received with enthusiasm whatever returning scholars and travellers from Italy and France had to offer them of the new renascence spirit and its widening reflection in continental literary endeavour. A pride in university training which amounted to arrogance, and a curious belief, not unknown even to-day, that only the university-bred man can possibly have the equipment and the sources of information fitting him to be a proper exponent of new, and, at the same time, of really valuable, ideas and literary methods—these were sentiments shared by all the members of the group of “university wits.”

John Lyly, born in 1553 or 1554, was an Oxford man. He graduated B.A. in 1573, and M.A. in 1575, and, in 1579, was incorporated M.A. at Cambridge. By precedence in work and, probably, in actual historical importance, he is the leader of the group. Indeed, Lyly is typical of the university-bred man whose native common-sense & humour just save him from the pedantry which conceives that the summum bonum for man lies in books, & in books only. His remarkably receptive & retentive mind had been open at the university to all influences for culture, both permanent & ephemeral. Blount, the compiler of the I collected edition of Lyly’s plays (1632), declared:

Our nation are in his debt, for a new English which hee taught them. Euphues and His England began first that language: All our Ladies were then his Schollers; And that Beautie in Court which could not Parley Euphueisme, was as little regarded as shee which now there speakes not French. These his playes Crown’d him with applause, and the Spectators with pleasure. Thou canst not repent the Reading of them over; when Old John Lilly is merry with thee in thy Chamber, Thou shalt say, Few (or None) of our Poets, now are such witty companions.

Moreover, as has now been clearly demonstrated, the style of Lyly, even with all his additions & modifications, is but a stage of the evolution, in Spain, Italy, France & England, of a pompous, complicated, highly artificial style, derived from the Latin periods of Cicero, to which each decade of the Renaissance & each experimental copyist had added some new details of self-conscious complexity. Lyly had 2 models: 1, partly for style but mainly for material, & the other almost wholly for style. The I was The Dial of Princes of Don Antonio de Guevara (1529, with English translations by Berners in 1534 and by North in 1557 3); the II was George Pettie ’s The Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure (1576). What Lyly specially develops for himself is the elaborate & irritatingly frequent punning & the constant citation of the “unnatural natural history” of Pliny. Nevertheless, Lyly was 1 of those—perhaps the chief among the prose writers of his day—who had a genuine feeling for style. He felt, “the need of and consistently aimed at what has been well denominated the quality of mind in style—the treatment of the sentence, not as a haphazard agglomeration of clauses, phrases and words, but as a piece of literary architecture whose end is foreseen in the beginning and whose parts are calculated to minister to the total effect”.

In 1632 Blount published Six Court Comedies, the I printed collection of Lyly's plays. They appear in the text in the following order; the parenthetical date indicates the year they appeared separately in quarto form: Endymion (1591), Campaspe (1584), Sapho and Phao (1584), Gallathea (1592), Midas (1592), Mother Bombie (1594). Lyly's other plays include Love's Metamorphosis (though printed in 1601, possibly Lyly's earliest play — the surviving version is likely a revision of the original), and The Woman in the Moon, I printed in 1597. Of these, all but the last are in prose.

George Peele (born 1558) graduated B.A. at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1577, and M.A. in 1579. Either he must have made rapid advance as a dramatist during his I years in London, 1580–2, or, during his long career at the university, some 9 years, he must have developed genuine dramatic ability. This is evident because, in July, 1583, he was summoned from London to Oxford to assist William Gager, author of Rivales, in an entertainment which the latter was arranging for the reception at Christ Church of Albertus Alasco, Polish prince palatine. Certainly, The Araygnement of Paris, Peel’s “I encrease,” as Thomas Nashe called it, shows a writer who would seem to have passed the tiro stage. This play, entered for publication in April, 1584, is evidently influenced by the dramatic methods of John Lyly, owing to the fact that, like Lyly’s plays, it was acted before the queen by children. When we consider that Peele’s activity covered 16 or 18 years (he was dead by 1598), at a time when dramatic composition was rapid, his dramatic work remaining to us seems not large in quantity. Syr Clyomon and Clamydes, tentatively assigned to him by Dyce, is no longer believed to be his. It is clearly of an earlier date, and, very possibly, was written by Thomas Preston. Of Wily Beguiled, sometimes attributed to Peele, Schelling rightly says: “There is nothing in this comedy to raise a question of Peele’s authorship except the simple obviousness with which the plot is developed.” Besides The Araygnement of Paris, we have, as extant plays assigned to Peele, The Old Wives Tale, Edward I, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe and The Battell of Alcazar. The last of these plays is attributed to Peele only because a quotation from it in England’s Parnassus (1600) is assigned to him & because of certain similarities of phrase; but the play is usually accepted as his. The Hunting of Cupid, a masque extant only in a slight fragment, and The Turkish Mahomet, which we know only by its title and some references, complete the list of Peele’s plays.

Robert Greene, born at Norwich in July, 1558, took his B.A. at St. John’s, Cambridge, in 1578, & his M.A. at Clare hall in 1583. He was incorporated M.A. at Oxford in 1588. Apparently, between the times of taking his B.A. & his M.A. degrees, he travelled, at least in Spain & Italy. Certainly, then or later, he came to know other parts of the continent, for he says in his Notable Discovery of Coosnage, “I have smiled with the Italian … eaten Spanish mirabolanes … France, Germany, Poland, Denmark, I know them all.” That is, by the time he was 25, he had had his chance to know at I hand the writings of Castiglione, Ariosto & Machiavelli—the Italian authors to whom his work is most indebted. He had had, too, his chance of contrasting the newer learning of Italy with the traditional English teaching of his time. A man of letters curiously mingling artistic & Bohemian sympathies & impulses with puritanic ideals & tendencies, who had been trained in the formal learning of an English university, he was greatly stimulated by the varied renascence influences, &, by them, in many cases, was led, not to greater liberty, but to greater licence of expression. As novelist, pamphleteer & playwright, he is always mercurial, but always individual & contributive.

Now, most recent opinion does not favour the conclusion that, before 1589, Greene had produced any surviving work besides Alphonsus and, in collaboration with Lodge, A Looking Glasse for London and England. Even in 1589, Nashe, in his preface to Menaphon, was looking for evidence to elevate Greene above the writers of blank verse plays, &, therefore, would hardly have counted the 2 plays mentioned, or even Orlando, against such overwhelming successes as The Spanish Tragedie, Tamburlaine & Faustus. For A Looking Glass was written in collaboration; 1 or both of the others may have been merely burlesque of the new high-flown style; & there is more than a suspicion that Alphonsus was a failure. The dramatic work remaining to us which is certainly his is small. A lost play of Job is entered in the Stationers’ register in 1594 as his. The attribution to him of Selimus on the authority of the title-page of the I edition, 1594, and of 2 quotations assigned to him by Allot in England’s Parnassus, 1600, which are found in this particular play, is not accepted by either A. W. Ward or C. M. Gayley; and Churton Collins says that his authorship is “too doubtful to justify any editor including [it] in Greene’s works.” The 2 modern researchers of Greene, C. M. Gayley in his Representative Comedies and Churton Collins in his Plays and Poems of Robert Greene, working independently, agree that the order of Greene’s plays remaining to us should be, Alphonsus, A Looking Glasse for London and England, Orlando Furioso, Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay and James IV.

Thomas Lodge, born 1558, was educated at Trinity college, Oxford. He was a man of manifold activities. As pamphleteer, he wrote against Stephen Gosson in defence of the stage as well as Sidney. He began his play-writing as early as 1582, and his novel writing as early as 1584 with The Delectable Historie of Forbonius and Prisceria. He took part in the expedition to Tercer & the Canaries in that year, & whiled away the tiresome hours of the voyage by writing the source of As You Like It, namely Rosalynde. Euphues’ golden legacie. On his return home, he published a book of verse, Scillaes Metamorphosis. Just before setting out on a voyage with Cavendish in 1592, he had published an historical romance, The History of Robert, second Duke of Normandy, surnamed Robin the Divell; during his absence, Greene published for him his Euphues Shadow, & immediately on Lodge’s return, he printed another historical romance, The Life and Death of William Longbeard, and his book of sonnets called Phillis. There followed on these the publication of his 2 plays, The Wounds of Civil War & A Looking Glasse for London and England, 1594, though the latter play was undoubtedly written much earlier; & some other works.

Thomas Nashe, though younger than Lodge, turned aside, like Peele, from his real bent into drama, but not, like Peele, to remain in it. He left St. John’s, Cambridge, in the III year after taking his B.A., because of some offence given to the authorities, & visited France & Italy. Returning to London, he published his Anatomie of Absurditie & his preface to Greene’s Menaphon, both of 1589. The long series of politico-religious & maliciously personal pamphlets poured out by him for some 7 years made him so noteworthy that it is not surprising he should have taken advantage of his reputation by writing for the stage. Whether he worked with Marlowe on Dido Queene of Carthage, published 1594, or finished a manuscript left incomplete by the former, is not clear. Nor is it safe to base judgment of his dramaticability on this play because of the contradiction by critics in the apportioning of authorship. Of the lost Isle of Dogs, he says himself that he wrote only the induction and the I act. When the play bred trouble, & Nashe was lodged in the Fleet for a time, he maintained that he was not really responsible for the contents of the play. But any reader of his pamphlets will need no proof that even an induction & a I act, if by Nashe, might contain much venom. Summer’s Last WillandTestament, acted at or near Croydon in 1592, gives little opportunity to judge Nashe’s real dramatic quality. Nashe here shows himself ingenious, at times amusing, satirical as always. But to know Nashe at his best in what is really individual to him, one must read his pamphlets, or his Unfortunate Traveller of 1594, the I of English picaresque novels. The dramatic work of Nashe suggests that he has stepped aside into a popular form rather than turned to it irresistibly.

The dramatic career of Thomas Kyd covers a shorter period than Marlowe’s, despite the great popularity & influence of his The Spanish Tragedie, it lacks both the range & sustained interest of the work of his junior & associate. He was the son of one Francis Kyd, a city scrivener, & was educated at Merchant Taylors’ school, in which, from 26 October, 1565, he was a fellow pupil with Edmund Spenser. For the rest, we must rely on the interpretation of the well known passage in Nashe’s preface to Greene’s Menaphon (1589) & of certain cryptic entries in Henslowe’s diary. The former, by the elaboration of its satirical anger, acquires the value of a biographical document. Even if we had not the punning reference to the “Kidde in Aesop” (a reminiscence of the “May” eclogue of The Shepheards Calender) we should recognise, with due allowance for the extravagance of the attack, that the series of allusions constitutes strong circumstantial evidence as to the victim’s career down to 1589. From this passage, therefore, we assume that Kyd had early forsaken his apprenticeship to his father’s “trade of Noverint”; that, being weak in Latinity, he had turned to play making and had “bled” Seneca through its “English” veins; that, in this barber surgeon enterprise, he had interested himself in the story of Hamlet; & later he had fallen to the task of translating from Italian & French. The earliest known dated work ascribed to Kyd is The Householders Philosophie, a version of Tasso’s Padre di Famiglia. This volume, by “T. K.,” printed in 1588, probably represents the “2penny pamphlet” work from the Italian to which Nashe refers towards the close of his depreciation. The French enterprise, also amiably described by the same hand, may remain to us in Pompey the Great, his faire Corneliaes Tragedie, which appeared under Kyd’s name in 1595 as a translation of Garnier’s Cornélie, & in the record of his intention to follow with a rendering of that author’s Porcie. This intimation of Kyd’s interest in the French Senecan brings him into immediate touch with lady Pembroke and her coterie. The translation of Cornélie, a pamphlet on The Murthering of John Brewen, Goldsmith, & perhaps another on The Poisoninge of Thomas Elliot, Tailor (both printed by his brother John Kyd in 1592), appear to be the latest efforts of Kyd’s short career, which came to an end about December, 1594. In the short interval anterior to this hackwork, between 1585 & the publication of Nashe’s attack in 1589, the public were probably in possession of the works on which his reputation rests, his Hamlet, The Spanish Tragedie, and The Tragedie of Solimon and Perseda. These, and the discredited First Part of Jeronimo, still supply some of the thorniest problems to Elizabethan scholarship.

The theme of The Spanish Tragedie is the revenge of “old Hieronimo” for the undoing of his son Don Horatio & the “pittiful death” of the former in accomplishing his purpose. Though contemporary satire fixed upon the play, & made it out-Seneca Seneca in passion for blood, the essence of the drama lies in the slow carrying-out of the revenge. In this, rather than in the mere inversion of the roles of father & son, is there analogy with the Shakespearean Hamlet; as there is, also, in certain details of construction, such as the device of the play within the play, the presence of the ghost (with all allowance for Senecan & early Elizabethan habit), & the co-ordination of 3 stories in 1 plot. Consideration of this analogy helps us to define Kyd’s position in regard to both the English Senecan tragedy & the Shakespearean: the more immediate matter is that Kyd’s interest in this “variant” of the Hamlet story supports, rather than condemns, the conjecture that he had already been engaged on the tragedy of the son’s revenge. Such recasting by 1 hand of a single & simple dramatic motif is credible; &, in Kyd’s case, likely, when we recall the alleged relationship of Solimon and Perseda with The Spanish Tragedie. Kyd’s authorship of a Hamlet which served as the basis for the Shakespearean Hamlet is more than a plausible inference. As the arguments in support of this are too lengthy for discussion in this place, only a general statement may be made. In regard to the date, we conclude, from the passage in Nashe, that the Saxo-Belleforest story had been dramatised before 1589. As there is no evidence that it had attracted attention in England before the tour of English actors on the continent, &, as they returned from Elsinore towards the close of 1587, we may very reasonably fix the date of production in 1587 or 1588. The assumption that Kyd is the author rests on these main bases: that the I quarto of the Shakespearean Hamlet (1603) carries over some sections of an original play, & that there are many parallelisms between the Shakespearean play & The Spanish Tragedie, in construction, in phrase & even in metre, & between it & Kyd’s other works, in respect of sentiment.

The interest of Kyd’s work is almost exclusively historical. Like Marlowe’s, it takes its place in the development of English tragedy by revealing new possibilities & offering a model in technique; unlike Marlowe’s, it does not make a II claim upon us as great literature. The historical interest lies in the advance which Kyd’s plays show in construction, in the manipulation of plot, & in effective situation. Kyd is the I to discover the bearing of episode & of the “movement” of the story on characterisation, & the I to give the audience & reader the hint of the development of character which follows from this interaction. In other words, he is the I English dramatist who writes dramatically. When we add to this talent for dramatic surprise the talent for displaying character, rooted in the plot, & growing in it we describe Kyd’s gift to English tragedy, more particularly, to Shakespeare himself. Direct references in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, though they be many, count for little beyond proving the popularity of The Spanish Tragedie. From the straggling data, we surmise, not only that Shakespeare knew & was associated with Kyd’s work, but that the association was more to him than a chance meeting in the day’s round. Yet the fact is worth record in the story of Kyd’s influence, that his work is found in direct touch with that of Shakespeare & Jonson.

As a group, then, the “University Wits” illustrate well the possible attitudes of an educated man of their time toward the drama. Midway between Lyly & his successful practice of the drama, which for the most cultivated men & women of his day, maintained & developed standards supplied to him, at least in part, by his university, & Thomas Lodge, who put the drama aside as beneath a cultivated man of manifold activities, stand Nashe, Peele & Greene. Nashe, feeling the attraction of a popular & financially alluring form, shows no special fitness for it, is never really at home in it & gives it relatively little attention. Peele, properly endowed for his best expression in another field, spends his strength in the drama because, at the time, it is the easiest source of revenue, & turns from the drama of the cultivated to the drama of the less cultivated or the uncultivated. Greene, from the I, is the facile, adaptive purveyor of wares to which he is helped by his university experience, but to which he gives a highly popular presentation. Kyd became one of the forerunners of pure English tragedy, though its father absolutely truly was Christopher Marlowe. Passing through their hands, through the hands of Lyly, Greene & even Peele, it comes to Shakespeare something quite different from what it was before.

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