Shakespeare's London: The City and the Court
London plays a central role in Shakespeare's history plays. The comedies and tragedies are set mostly in imaginary or distant foreign lands, and contain only a handful of references, including Twelfth Night's acknowledgement of an inn called the Elephant "in the south suburbs." Yet London was where the playwright spent almost all of his working life. His world was the mercantile city and the related but separate royal court at Westminster two miles or so up the river. London provided his audiences, his livelihood and his daily environment.
A city of wealth and spectacle
London at the time of Elizabeth's death in 1603 was a thriving commercial metropolis, with an estimated population of 140,000 or more inside its medieval walls. The figure just fifty years before is thought to have been only 50,000, immigration--both from other parts of England and from abroad--accounting for the rapid expansion. With these numbers, London was the equal of the other leading European cities, such as Paris and Naples. It was also far larger than any other English city, the nearest rival being Norwich with only some 15,000 inhabitants.
| The Bankside, Southwark, showing the Globe Theatre to the left. Reproduced from a nineteenth-century copy of a panoramic view of London engraved by Claes Janszoon de Visscher in 1616. |
The city walls with their ten gates enclosed the city itself, an area of about two square miles with a civic structure largely autonomous from the Crown. A lord mayor, elected annually, presided over an administrative corporation dominated by the guilds or livery companies into which the mercantile classes had been organised for centuries.
London was unquestionably a city of wealth and spectacle, but it was also a dirty, disease-ridden metropolis, with inadequate light and air thanks to the increasing numbers of tenement blocks built with upper stories jutting out over the street. The city's grossly inadequate system of sewers deposited only a small part of the population's waste into the Thames. Periodic visitations of the plague were one of the more serious consequences. Nonetheless, it was the river, crossed by London Bridge and by hundreds of rowing boats available for hire, which was the centre of the city's life.
London's playhouses
From as early as 1567, at least one substantial playhouse--John Brayne's Red Lion, a converted farmhouse just outside the city walls, in Whitechapel--was established as a venue for travelling players. Brayne was also a partner, along with James Burbage, in London's second public playhouse, known as the Theatre. n Shoreditch, about half a mile outside the city, and the following year another playhouse, called the Curtain, was constructed nearby.
The Theatre and the Curtain were outside the jurisdiction of the lord mayor and the corporation, an example followed by later playhouses including the Rose, completed in 1587. The Rose was located on Bankside in Southwark, on the south side of the river where the city's claimed control was disputed and ineffective. Southwark was also the location after 1599 of the most famous of the Elizabethan theatres, the Globe, the frame of which was taken from the materials of the Theatre after its closure. A second Globe was built on the foundations of the earlier theatre after the original burnt down in a fire which started during a performance of Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII.
"Southwark," according to Peter Thomson, "had, for centuries, been known as the resort of criminals and prostitutes. The brothels, or 'stews', so called because of the vapour baths through which clients tried to steam themselves free of venereal disease, had been officially suppressed in 1546, but they had soon re-established themselves in the liberties and manors of the Bankside. When Philip Henslowe, the prime mover in the playhouse project, took out his lease on the Rose, it was a brothel." ( Shakespeare's Professional Career, Cambridge, 1992, p. 69.) And indeed "Rose" was a common street name for prostitutes.
The court at Westminster
For more than a century, Westminster--with its palace begun at the end of the eleventh century and the Abbey--had been the centre of government and administration. In the 1520s Cardinal Wolsey had built a lavish mansion which Henry VIII converted into the palace of Whitehall, d Stuart monarchs lived for much of the year. Amongst the grandest of the rooms in this complex were the Great Chamber and the Hall, and alongside them was the freestanding Banqueting House. (The magnificent Inigo Jones structure which survives today was begun after a fire in 1619 burned down the earlier wooden structure erected at James I's order in 1606.)
Plays and masques were mounted in these rooms at Court during the holiday seasons. Shakespeare's company was granted a royal patent a few weeks after James I was proclaimed king and, as the King's Men, his company would have performed plays from their repertory. Shakespeare and his colleagues may also have taken roles in the court masques.
Although Queen Anne and their children are known to have loved the theatre, James I was unenthusiastic. Shakespeare nonetheless acknowledged his patron on a number of occasions. The playwright, Anne Barton writes, "may have intended Macbeth to compliment James as a descendant of Banquo, the Duke's reluctance in Measure for Measure to 'stage' himself to the eyes of the populace as a flattering allusion to James's well-known aversion to making large-scale public appearances, and Prospero's renunciation even of 'white' magic at the end of The Tempest as a concession to the monarch's uncompromising views about necromancy." (Anne Barton, "The London scene: City and Court" in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, eds., Cambridge, 2001, p. 124.)
Plays and politics
Whilst Shakespeare, together with other members of the King's Men, was honoured with the title "Groom of the Chamber" in 1604, there is no evidence that the playwright, unlike his contemporary Ben Jonson, had any direct dealings with James I. The links with Elizabeth--such as the story that she asked Shakespeare to write The Merry Wives of Windsor because she wished to see a play about Falstaff in love--are also based more on legend than documentary evidence. There are, however, clear references to Elizabeth in a number of the plays, including Henry V, Henry VIII, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor, as well as in the sonnets.
One occasion on which Shakespeare's company, then known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men, are known to have performed before Elizabeth was 24 February 1601. This was at the Queen's express command and was a consequence of an earlier performance. Just over a fortnight beforehand, the company had staged a private presentation of Shakespeare's drama of the forced overthrow of a king, Richard II. The audience was composed of supporters of the Earl of Essex who, following a failed campaign in Ireland, had fallen from Elizabeth's favour. The next day the discontented Essex led an armed uprising which ended in farcical defeat. Essex was thrown in the Tower of London and executed on February 25. Elizabeth clearly decided that if the company had played to Essex on the day before his revolt, they could play to her on the day before his death.
Unlike many of other dramatists of the time, Shakespeare largely avoided satirical commentary on the court. The history plays depict the wickedness and corruption of earlier times but, despite the folly of individuals, the royal households in, for example, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale are depicted in a benign manner. "As with the city of London in which he lived," Anne Barton further reflects, "Shakespeare seems to have been determined in his plays to reflect only sporadically, and at a distance, the two very different Elizabethan and Jacobean courts whose patronage he came to enjoy, and to do all this with a lack of social detail or animosity that was singular in his time." (Anne Barton, "The London scene: City and Court" in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, eds., Cambridge, 2001, p. 127.)
This session draws extensively on "The London scene: City and Court" by Anne Barton in 'The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare', edited by Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 115-28, and on material from 'Shakespeare's Professional Career' by Peter Thomson, Cambridge, 1992. |
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