Roaring Boys

Chapter emblem
: the ghost of Robert Greene,
woodcut, 1598

First published in 2004 by Sutton Publishing Limited

Paperback edition first published in 2006

This edition first published in 2007

The History Press
The Mill, Brimscombe Port
Stroud, Gloucestershire,
GL
5 2
QG
www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

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© The Estate of Judith Cook, 2004, 2013

The right of Judith Cook to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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EPUB ISBN
978 0 7524 9509 5

Original typesetting by The History Press

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

I
would like to thank the helpful staff of the British Library, Bodleian Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, the Courtauld Institute, Dulwich College, Dulwich Picture Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Library for their assistance, and Walter Hodges for allowing me to use his drawing of the Rose Theatre. Also Jaqueline Mitchell for her help and encouragement.

Judith Cook
Newlyn, Cornwall, 2003

T
he 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.

Six days after these were burned to death
God sent us our Elizabeth.