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London's Theatre in 1583
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Sally-Beth MacLeanScott McMillin |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The year 1583 saw the birth of an all-star troupe of Elizabethan actors. Twelve of England's finest comedians and tragedians founded a new company under royal patronage, the Queen's Men. The group was to enjoy a distinguished career, and may even have employed William Shakespeare some years later. But London's theatregoers in 1583 had heard of neither Shakespeare nor the other figure who was soon to transform English drama, Christopher Marlowe.
The golden age of Elizabethan theatre was to come in the next two decades, but there was still a thriving world of the stage, much of it centred on private acting troupes--like the Queen's Men--under the patronage of enlightened aristocrats. Scott McMillin, professor of English at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and Sally-Beth MacLean, executive editor of the Records of Early English Drama at the University of Toronto, survey London's theatrical scene at this pivotal moment. |
 e begin by raising a series of basic questions about the theatre of 1583, questions which playgoers of the day would not have had to ask, because they would have known the answers as part of their normal observation. |
Who were the recognizable actors of the day in London, the players one would make an effort to see? Which were the leading companies? To what extent were they "London" companies, and to what extent were they on tour throughout the country? In London, where did they play? Who was writing their plays? And how many of those plays could be purchased by Londoners interested in the theatre--theatregoers, that is, who could read. |
The last question is the easiest for us to answer. There were no new plays from the acting companies to be read at all. By 1583 some of the older interludes might still have been on the bookstalls, along with translations from the classical drama. Nathaniel Woodes's Conflict of Conscience and the collection of Seneca's Ten Tragedies had been published in 1581, and the second edition of Damon and Pithias, written fifteen years earlier for one of the children's companies, had appeared in 1582. |
We have just named the only plays published in London for three years before the founding of the Queen's Men, and none of them came from the large permanent playhouses--the Red Lion, the Theatre, the Curtain, Newington Butts--which had operated near London, at one time or another, to some extent simultaneously, for years. |
The Red Lion had been built in 1567. The theatre at Newington Butts may have been in business as early as 1575. The Theatre was built in 1576, the Curtain in 1577. Stages at city inns are referred to during these years at the Bull in Bishopsgate Street, the Bell and the Cross Keys in Gracious Street, and the Bel Savage on Ludgate Hill. |
Children's companies were acting at Blackfriars and probably at St Paul's. Professional theatre was a growing industry in London, and new plays must have been plentiful in such a competitive environment. But the new plays were not being published, probably because the acting companies were keeping their profitable items to themselves. The first play to be published which can be connected with the adult professional companies of the 1580s was Three Ladies of London, which came out in 1584. |
As for dramatists writing in London by 1583, the list is short. In March 1583, when the Queen's Men were being formed, Shakespeare was still a Stratford teenager, whose wife of a few months was expecting their first child in a few weeks. Marlowe was still at Cambridge, one supposes, and so was Robert Greene. George Peele, after living in London for a while (and perhaps writing plays--we do not know), was back in Oxford. Some older writers were probably living in London, but we can name no plays they had written by 1583: Chapman, Kyd, Chettle, Drayton, Lodge. |
Who had written plays for the public theatre by then? We can be fairly sure of five names: Stephen Gosson, Anthony Munday, Richard Tarlton, Robert Wilson, and Rowland Broughton. It must be noted that the first two of these, Gosson and Munday, had recently been condemning theatres as sinks of iniquity and plays as enemies to virtue and religion. They might have seemed unlikely to produce many scripts in the future (Munday actually did write more plays--he was hard to predict). |
All we really know about Rowland Broughton is that he failed to write the eighteen plays which in 1572 he promised to write. Tarlton and Wilson are the two writers on our list who would have seemed certain to write more plays after 1583 (both were named to the Queen's Men), and they were primarily known as actors. |
The companies of the 1580s
It is when we turn to theatres, companies, and actors that the answers to our questions begin to look more substantial. The London theatregoer of 1583 would have seen Leicester's Men acting at the Theatre to the north of the city, with such actors as Wilson, John Lanham, and William Johnson; and Warwick's Men acting at the playhouse at Newington Butts to the south of the city, headed by the Dutton brothers, John and Laurence, and Jerome Savage. |
Our playgoer would have been thinking back a few years to Warwick's Men because that company seems to have broken up in 1580, when the Duttons and others went over to a company under the patronage of the Earl of Oxford. So Oxford's Men should be numbered along with Leicester's and Warwick's as troupes known in London. Derby's Men and Sussex's Men had been appearing at court in recent years. Tarlton was with Sussex's Men, gaining his reputation as the first star of the London theatre. There were also three companies well-travelled in the provinces which are likely to have played in London from time to time: Essex's Men, Berkeley's Men (with Arthur King and Thomas Goodale), and Worcester's Men (with a talented youngster, Edward Alleyn). |
It would be a mistake--one frequently made--to assume that London was the "home" of the adult companies, or that they settled into certain playhouses for what we would call a "long run." These were touring companies much of the time, and our London playgoer would have been frequently aware of their comings and goings. |
London was the busiest city for theatre, of that there is no question, and the actors usually made their own homes there. But by 1583 we cannot be certain any adult company was permanently lodged in its own London theatre, not even Leicester's Men. |
Although the Theatre had been built by the leader of Leicester's Men, James Burbage, and although his company must have played there, the first thing to say about Leicester's Men in the early 1580s is that they spent much of their time travelling the countryside. They appeared in many places, including London, including the court--but they were not a London company. |
All the companies travelled, but Leicester's toured far and wide--as part of his lordship's political interest, it would seem. The Queen's Men were formed to travel too, and while it is right to think of them as holding an advantage among adult companies on the court schedule, it is even more important to think of them as holding an advantage across the country. |
The actors were in circulation--that is the best way to think of them. London was the centre of the circulation, with its rapidly growing population, its new playhouses, and its proximity to the court. Who would not have wanted to play London? But the city government was hostile to the theatre, and the challenge of settling near the city and building a following among Londoners was the challenge of mounting a large repertory of plays and rotating them daily. |
The demands of repertory
In feeling the attraction of mastering such a challenge, even the best companies would have noticed how many fewer plays were required on tour. Touring had its hardships too, but it did not require ten or twelve plays ready to be performed in daily rotation. That was the challenge of the London theatre, the challenge of building a repertory large enough to rotate the plays frequently and draw audiences day after day in the face of competition from other companies trying to do the same thing. |
It was during the decade of the 1580s that the daily repertory system took hold in the London playhouses. By 1592, when Henslowe's listing of plays begins, a full-fledged repertory was being rotated at the Rose, and programmes so vast do not happen suddenly or in isolation. Yet the nine years separating Henslowe's record from the founding of the Queen's Men is a long time in the life of a competitive industry, and the repertory system evident in Henslowe's Diary cannot be taken as a sign of the norm in 1583. It is better read as a sign of the intention. |
To those companies ambitious for the London market, the need for a sizeable repertory and daily rotation would have been apparent in 1583, and regular weekday performances would have been important in establishing a season of plays by the time the Queen's Men were formed. But the Queen's Men did not settle in one London theatre (they seem to have moved among the playing spaces, as though they were on tour even in London), and we do not know of any other adult company that did settle before Strange's Men at the Rose. |
One of our themes will be that the "watershed" years in the London drama were the early 1590s, roughly from 1590 to 1594, and a major development of that period was the establishment of the major companies in particular purpose-built playhouses, offering large-scale repertories. The Queen's Men did not fit into this system. They were peripatetic instead, and their palmy days in the London theatre fall on the distant side of the watershed--the theatre of 1583, but not the theatre of 1594. |
A choice of companies
What can be said of the London theatre of 1583 is that it consistently afforded playgoers a choice. No other city or town regularly offered a choice, not of professional drama. We have named ten companies--two children's, eight adult--which acted in London at one time or another during the five years before the founding of the Queen's Men. |
That does not mean they all acted simultaneously, and the list includes some little-known or short-lived organizations that may not have acted often. Berkeley's Men may not have made much of an impact in a city where Leicester's and Sussex's Men could hold forth for some weeks before taking their plays to court, or where Tarlton and the young Edward Alleyn could be seen for low prices, or where the children's companies were providing avant-garde delights for the wealthier set. But when Berkeley's Men did play London, they increased the choices available--whereas when they played Bristol or Dover they could hope to be the only show in town for their few days there. |
The Theatre and the Curtain, the playhouse at Newington Butts, the theatres at St Paul's and Blackfriars had all been built or refurbished in the past seven or eight years, joining the older Red Lion and the inn-yard stages. The theatre was building a centre in London. But that does not mean the adult companies clustered in London suddenly or rapidly. |
English actors knew how to travel. They had toured for generations. It was their tradition, and they had the routines well in hand. London and its permanent playhouses were the new market, the best market, and the hardest market in many ways, the market of the future for actors ambitious enough to think of rising to fame. But there were many well-known markets across the nation as well. |
An actors' theatre
This busy industry, circulating through the countryside, seeing London as the magnet for expansion, aiming for court performances, serving the interests of its aristocratic patrons, and above all trying to turn a profit, was an actors' theatre. Our inventory insists on this point. The evidence that remains to us concerns players and playhouses more often than writers and books. |
The information comes in small bits, of course. Nearly everything we want to know about the theatre of the 1580s has vanished over the years, and there is a risk of taking a cluster of facts for a pattern of evidence where it might more properly be called an accident. Should we imagine a writers' theatre after all, lurking behind the fragments of fact? |
We had never heard of Rowland Broughton until 1981, and we could not have guessed that any playwright would have been thought capable of writing eighteen plays in thirty months, but professional actors signed a contract for him to do that. On the other hand, Broughton failed to meet his contract--that is why his name is preserved in the legal records--and eighteen plays in thirty months sounds impossibly high, as though the contract was an act of hyperbole all round. We are reluctant to take his case as typical. |
The evidence that we have to go on produces names for actors in 1583, names for companies, and names for playhouses, and it is that kind of detail, the names of things, that one does not find for writers and their plays in the professional theatre of the same time. As far as we can tell, this was an actors' theatre. It had been vigorously on the road for decades, and now the new London playhouses, just beyond the reach of the authorities, along with the other stages within the city, were competing with one another to draw audiences. Londoners had a choice of playhouses, and a choice of famous actors. Moralists and officials were alarmed. Opposition to the stage was on the increase: and it was the actors and the playhouses they attacked, not writers and publishers. |
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