In the South Suburbes at the Elephant
Is best to lodge …
But this may be no more than a local joke. If he had lived in the liberty of the Clink, as the records of non-payment of property tax imply, then he would have inhabited the long street which runs beside the Thames just north of Winchester Palace Park. This was the street in which Henslowe also dwelled. In a memorandum, quoted by the eighteenth-century scholar Edmond Malone but no longer extant, Alleyn records that Shakespeare lived close to the Bear-Garden, and in fact the distance is only a few hundred yards. Edmond Malone further claims that Shakespeare lived in this neighbourhood until 1608, a residence of some ten years. For a peripatetic dramatist, that is a long sojourn indeed. He might almost have been described as a gentleman of Southwark rather than as a gentleman of Stratford.
The history of Southwark had for many hundreds of years been associated with public entertainment. A gladiator’s trident has been found here, which suggests that a Roman arena was once constructed in the vicinity of the Globe. In the years immediately preceding the late sixteenth century, however, the area was known for bull-baiting and bear-baiting, for exhibitions of wrestling and acrobatics. It was also the venue for various forms of drama. When the priests of St. Mary Overie (now known as Southwark Cathedral) were singing “Dirige” for the soul of Henry VIII in 1547, their prayers were interrupted by the noise of players performing in the neighbourhood. Thirty-one years later the Privy Council was still complaining to the Surrey justices about the prevalence of play-acting in the same vicinity. The evidence suggests that Paris Garden itself had been used as the venue for medieval “folk festivals,” under which quaint term we may include a great many crude entertainments as well as cruel and violent sports.
Chief among those sports has always been animal-baiting. It was a peculiar love of the English, and conducted with a ferocity that horrified continental visitors. A Venetian traveller noted two hundred dogs in “traps,” ready to be set upon bulls and wild bears. There was another sport in which a blind bear was tormented by men with whips; occasionally the maddened animal was known to break free of its chain and run among the crowd. When Shakespeare includes the famous stage-direction in The Winter’s Tale, “Exit, pursued by a bear,” the audience would have been able to picture the scene quite precisely.
There was a bull-ring in Southwark by 1542 at the latest, and a new bullring was being built on Bankside in the 1550s. Shakespeare would have heard the roaring from his lodgings by the Clink. The cost of admission was a penny, with an additional penny for a good place in the galleries. In 1594 Edward Alleyn secured the lease of the bear-baiting ring at Paris Garden, in the neighbourhood of the Globe, for £200. A few years later he and Henslowe purchased the office of mastership of the “Queen’s Games of Bulls and Bears.” The bear-pits were an adjunct, not a cheap alternative, to the playhouses. On Thursday and Sunday of each week, the theatres were closed and the animal-pits opened. At a slightly later date Alleyn and Henslowe built the Hope Playhouse, close to the Globe, which was both theatre and animal-pit; the bears were baited on Tuesday and Thursday, plays performed on every other day (except Sunday). It was the same business, run by the same operatives. The reek of the animals must have sullied the actors’ costumes. It is a condition of London life that the atmosphere of a neighbourhood lingers like some fugitive odour in the air; we can say with some certainty, therefore, that Shakespeare lived and worked in a parish characterised by violence and casual cruelty. That is perhaps why Southwark provided more soldiers for the realm than any other area apart from the city of London itself. More than a third of its householders were watermen, and watermen were well known throughout England for their abusive behaviour and foul language.
There was a “sanctuary” at Paris Garden from the early fifteenth century, and the neighbourhood had a history of criminal association and criminal practice. It had also been a haven for many and varied groups of immigrants, known as “aliens,” among them Dutch and Fleming. The topography of the neighbourhood is perhaps then predictable. There were larger houses and gardens for the more notable residents, such as Henslowe and Alleyn (and perhaps Shakespeare himself), but for the rest it was an area of packed tenements and swarming streets, of stables and alleys. What were known as the “stink-trades” were also congregated here, brewing and tanning among them. There was a busy ferry-crossing at Paris Garden Stairs, transporting passengers over to Blackfriars on the opposite bank. But even here the generally rough reputation of the neighbourhood intervened. A civic edict of the sixteenth century ordered wherrymen to moor their boats on the northern bank at night to ensure that “thieves and other misdoers shall not be carried”3 to the brothels and taverns of Southwark. There were indeed many brothels, some of them owned by the ubiquitous business partners Alleyn and Henslowe. Henslowe’s playhouse, the Rose, was named after a well-known house of assignation in the vicinity. They were, you might say, all-round entertainers. And Shakespeare knew them well.
It may seem odd that Alleyn and Henslowe were also vestrymen of the church of St. Saviour’s, and that Henslowe became churchwarden. Yet in a more youthful and enterprising society, established upon the active pursuit of profit, such dual allegiances were not unusual. Prostitutes had been known as “Winchester Geese,” after the Bishop of Winchester’s manor in which they operated. One inn and brothel was called the Cardinal’s Hat, not necessarily because of any ecclesiastical connection but because red was deemed to be the proper colour for the tip of the penis. The sacred and the secular were still thoroughly mingled. Only after the parliamentary wars was the effort made to separate them.
It is of course easy to exaggerate the stench and horrors of the south bank. There were fields and woods within easy reach of the busy streets, and the herbalist John Gerard was agreeably surprised by the number of flowers he observed in the water ditches of the neighbourhood. In Paris Garden Lane, for example, he found the “water yarrow” and “plentie” of “water gilloflower.”4So it was not an altogether disagreeable area. Demographic surveys also suggest that its inhabitants did not move away from it in any significant numbers; like Londoners elsewhere, they were happy to remain in the familiar neighbourhood. So life in Southwark was not necessarily insupportable, only colourful and occasionally inconvenient. It was always a lively and active area. Why else should Shakespeare choose to remain there for so long? In twenty-first century London, people do not choose to move out of Soho. Southwark, then, was the centre of genuine and teeming life.
CHAPTER 61
This Wide and Vniuersall Theatre
And so the new Globe arose. It was considered at the time to be the most splendid of all the London theatres. Its name implies that it was the theatre of the world itself and, as the arena in which Othello and King Lear, Macbeth and Julius Caesar, were first performed, it can lay some claim to that title. It has been suggested that Peter Streete, carpenter and builder, followed the precepts of Vitruvius in designing this space. The book of Vitruvius known as Architectura was available in England at the time, but it is highly unlikely that Streete ever consulted it. His immediate model is more likely to have been that of the animal-baiting ring, with which he and his contemporaries were intensely familiar. Nevertheless its design has been interpreted as a copy of the amphitheatre of the antique world, or of the holier circles of primeval Britain. That circular shape has also been supposed to suggest the womb or the embrace of encircling maternal arms. It even bears a passing resemblance to the magician’s circle, in which bright visions might appear. But no wooden building in the sixteenth century could be entirely circular. It was in fact polygonal in shape, accommodating some fourteen sides, with three galleries surrounding the stage and the open yard or “pit.”