Roaring Boys (19 page)

Gurr then senses a marked change in Henslowe’s repertoire as his patron the Lord Admiral, Lord Howard of Effingham, becomes more powerful at Court, which might explain ‘the distinctive political allegiance which can be seen in the altered repertoire of the Henslowe companies where the plays are seen to be upholding not only English Protestant values but specifically London Protestant values. ‘However,’ he concludes, ‘how much these plays were produced under a stimulus from the company’s patron and how much they indicate an allegiance to a particular kind of audience and its values is not clear.’
¹

What is clear, however, is that during the late 1590s and the three years leading up to the death of the Queen in 1603 the increasingly tense and uncertain political situation in the capital impinged on all the companies as rival factions at Court jockeyed for position, the draconian persecution of Catholic dissidents continued, while overshadowing everything was the prospect of the Queen’s death and the succession since she had still not officially designated James of Scotland as her heir. In such uneasy and worrying times it was particularly easy to cause unintentional offence and end up upsetting one side or another as even Shakespeare was to discover.

To catch up with what he was doing, it is necessary to backtrack a little. We know little or nothing about how often (or not) he visited his family in Stratford but in August 1596 he suffered a devastating blow with the loss of one of his twin children, his son, Hamnet. The boy was only eleven and the most likely cause of his death was some summer epidemic, possibly the plague. We do not even know whether Shakespeare reached Stratford in time to see him before he died or even if he attended the funeral. Unlike Ben Jonson on the deaths of two of his children, he wrote no moving poem on the death of his only son, although it is possible that he put his feelings into the words of the grieving mother, Constance, in
King John
.

But from then on we do know he regularly visited Stratford. By this time he was doing very well indeed and, unlike most of his fellow poets, was saving his money rather than spending it. Indeed he was so well off that in 1597 he bought himself the finest house in Stratford, New Place, and a year later he was back again, adding to what we might now describe as his property portfolio. A note to that effect dated 24 January 1598 records that ‘our countryman, Master Shakespeare, is willing to disburse some money upon some . . . land or other in Shottery [his mother’s home village] or near about us. He thinketh it a very fit pattern to move him to deal in the matter of four tithes. . . . If obtained, it would advance him in deed and would do us much good.’ Over the years he would buy still more property, in the town in Chapel Street and out in the countryside near Rowington.
²

He must also have known how Stratford had suffered following a fire in 1595 which destroyed over a hundred houses and cottages and left four hundred people homeless, a disaster from which Stratford had still not recovered three years later. Now, on top of everything, the townsfolk were facing increased taxation in large part to fund the wars in Ireland, and Shakespeare’s old friend Richard Quiney was sent to London to petition the Queen for tax relief. But Quiney was kept hanging about in London so long waiting for some kind of a response that he finally ran out of money. With no family nearby to turn to, he wrote to Shakespeare ‘craving your help with thirty shillings . . . you shall friend me much in helping me out of all the debts I owe in London’. He assures Shakespeare that he will not ‘lose credit nor money by me, the Lord willing’. He had, he said, been summoned yet again to Court that very night and hoped this time to receive an answer to his petition. He concludes in haste. ‘The Lord be with you and with us all amen. From the Bell in Carter Lane the 25 October 1598, yours in all kindness Richard Quiney.’
³
It seems Shakespeare obliged and the two men must have remained on good terms for Richard Quiney’s son later married Shakespeare’s daughter, Judith.

It was also about then that Shakespeare’s brother Edmund, the youngest of the family, went to London to try his fortune as an actor, which is almost all we know of him. If he joined Burbage’s company then there is no record of it, nor is he listed among those who played at the Rose. There are only two references to his ever having worked in the playhouses, both sad ones. In the Register of Burials of the church of St Saviour’s, Southwark (now Southwark Cathedral) it is noted that there was ‘buried 12 August 1607 Edward, son of Edmund Shakespeare, player, baseborn’, and on 31 December of the same year ‘Edmund Shakespeare, player, buried in the Church with a forenoon knell of the Great Bell twenty shillings’. This would be an expensive funeral for an unknown actor and was presumably paid for by his brother. The burial took place on a day so cold the Thames froze over.

So to Shakespeare’s first inadvertent brush with controversy, one that was to spill over and later involve Henslowe and his stable of writers. If we accept the dates most frequently given, it was during the time when he was working hard in London while also visiting Stratford to buy property that he wrote the two parts of
Henry IV
. It might well be that visiting home ground inspired the funny, but also nostalgic, scenes set in nearby Gloucestershire; after all, the Vale of Evesham is only down the road from Stratford. The plays, with their combination of political intrigue, civil war and comedy, were instantly popular not least because they introduced to an enraptured audience one of the greatest comic characters in the English language, Sir John Falstaff. However, ‘Falstaff’ was not the name Shakespeare originally gave him; in the first acting scripts the fat knight was called Sir John Oldcastle. But after the first performances it soon transpired that there had been an actual Sir John Oldcastle who really had lived during the reign of Henry IV and within a very short time Shakespeare found himself in trouble, for one of that Oldcastle’s descendants, Lord Cobham, was alive and well and a prominent figure at Court.

Not only that, the names of ‘Oldcastle’ and ‘Cobham’ were linked because the original Sir John had also taken the name ‘Cobham’ by virtue of his marriage to a Cobham heiress. To upset an influential courtier by giving the name of one of his ancestors to a lecherous rogue and liar was bad enough, but there was worse to come. It seems that the original Oldcastle’s career had ended in disgrace after he had fallen out with the King and given his support to the great Welsh leader Owen Glendower (who also appears in
Henry IV Part
I), in his rising against the English. Oldcastle was further accused of aiding the Scots but when he was finally captured and brought to trial, the worst crime with which he was charged was that he had embraced the Protestant religion through the teaching of the heretic Lollards. Whether or not Shakespeare might actually have had a whiff of all this when he invented the character cannot be proved either way, but it does at least seem something of a coincidence that Oldcastle, as well confessing his guilt for his various misdeeds, also acknowledged that he had been much given to ‘pride, gluttony and lechery’ and that his subsequent treasonable behaviour was due to his having lately been cast off by the King, to whom he had once been very close, much as Falstaff is by Prince Hal at the end of
Henry IV Part II
.

Oldcastle was duly hanged, then burned (hanged for treason and his body burned for heresy), but over the years the Cobham family had played down any suggestion of treason, along with his ‘pride, gluttony and lechery’, and reinvented and rehabilitated their relative as an early Protestant martyr. Cobham’s displeasure was made clear to Shakspeare and to ensure that no further trouble or offence was given, as well as changing the name of his knight to ‘Falstaff’, he also inserted a note at the end of the first Quarto of
Henry IV Part II
drawing attention to the fact that this had been done ‘for Oldcastle died a martyr and this is not the man’.

However, in spite of the change of name, the character seems to have remained ‘Oldcastle’ in the minds of those who had seen the first performances of the plays which is why, some two years later, the whole business was to erupt again. Henslowe, envious of the tremendous success of the
Henry
plays in general and Falstaff in particular, decided he too wanted a Falstaff play. But such a character could hardly be called ‘Falstaff’ without bringing down on him the wrath of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men so, either unaware of the trouble this caused previously, or having forgotten about it, he commissioned a new play based on the adventures of the fat knight, reverting to the previous name of Oldcastle. An entry in his company’s accounts for 16 October 1599 reads: ‘received Thomas Downton, of Philip Henslowe, to pay Mr. Monday, Mr. Drayton, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Hathway for the first part of the
Lyfe of Sir John Ouldcasstel
, and in earnest of the second part for the use of the company, ten pounds, I say received’.
⁴

We know little or nothing now of Henslowe’s Oldcastle play but there is plenty of evidence of its effect. News of what was afoot immediately reawakened the wrath of the Cobham family. Lord Cobham, who had considered the matter dealt with once and for all, was furious at the very idea of yet another portrayal of his martyred relative as a roistering, bragging, ale-swigging monster. But his reaction was mild compared to that of his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Cecil, who also claimed a relationship with the original Oldcastle and was now finally confirmed in his position as Secretary to the Privy Council and one of the most powerful men in the country, if not
the
most. He was the very last person anyone would willingly want to cross. Cecil’s main antagonist and enemy at Court was the young, rash Earl of Essex. It seems that Essex had first picked up the relationship between Cobham, Cecil and ‘Sir John Oldcastle’ when the character first appeared in Shakespeare’s play and had made the most of it. Indeed in the Essex household it had become a family joke to the point that when the Earl was away from home his wife wrote to him with amusing references to that effect. Thus Henslowe’s notion of cashing in on the success of Shakespeare’s Falstaff came rapidly unstuck as he and his writers found that they had not only offended Cobham but were in danger of being caught up in the power struggle between Cecil and Essex. Sir John Falstaff, therefore, remained triumphant and without rivals. There was, in fact, another, anonymous Oldcastle play that attempted to put the record straight. Published in 1600, it was entitled
The True and Honourable History of the life of Sir John Oldcastle, the Good Lord Cobham. As of hath been lately acted by the Earle of Notingham his Servants
.

However the theatre world was already changing. Not only were new writers taking the place of old, there were also new actors and one of the two who had dominated the theatre scene for the last decade and more, Edward Alleyn, was now bowing out. He had been appearing on stage less and less often; it is not obvious why. Possibly he found the roles he now played no longer as rewarding as those of the heady days of Tamburlaine and Faustus, but whatever the reasoning behind it, in 1597 he sold his stock in the Lord Admiral’s company (although cannily retaining his share of the theatre profits), and began buying land in Dulwich. Only Alleyn and Shakespeare in the theatrical profession of the day were that careful. However Alleyn did not entirely give up what might be termed the entertainment industry. Henslowe had spent years lobbying to become the Queen’s Bearmaster and when he finally achieved his ambition, Alleyn joined him as Joint Master of the Bears, a strange choice for a man who had been such a great actor. He also became a churchwarden at St Saviour’s and from then on devoted his time to setting up a Foundation in Dulwich, almshouses, a chapel which was consecrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury in person, and finally the College which still exists today. It is easy to imagine that what he would have cherished beyond anything was the accolade of knighthood, something quite impossible at such a time. It would be nearly 300 years before a young man from the village of Halsetown in Cornwall, born Henry Brodribb, was to become the first theatrical knight under the name Sir Henry Irving.

But in spite of the difficult political climate, the theatre scene at the turn of the century was much enlivened by what became known as ‘the Poets’ War’. Its main protagonists were Ben Jonson (naturally), John Marston and Thomas Dekker. Jonson could never be described as a team player and throughout his life would be quick to give and take offence, which is what happened in 1599 when Marston presented his latest offering. In fact it was not an original piece but a rewrite of an old play called
Histriomastix
which he had resurrected. Actually he rather admired Jonson so he gave one of the leading characters, Chrisoganus, some of Jonson’s best-known characteristics and habits, attributes which he was later to swear had been intended only as a compliment. That said, however, he must have realised he was taking something of a chance, given Jonson’s choleric disposition. The result was as might have been expected: it is an understatement to say that Jonson took his portrayal as anything but a compliment.