'For proof whereof, but mark the flocking and running to Theatres and Curtains, daily and hourly, night and day, time and tide to see plays and interludes, where such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches, such laughing and fleering, such kissing and bussing, such clipping and culling, such winking and glancing of wanton eyes and the like is used, as is wonderful to behold. Then, these goodly pageants being done, every mate sorts to his mate, every one brings another homeward of their way very friendly, and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play the Sodomites, or worse.'
Regarding the strange gender of the spirit behind the ecstasy of the playhouse, Stubbes is also on to something real when he associates the practice of cross-dressing with the power of women over men:
'I never read or heard of any people except drunken with Circe's cups, or poisoned with the exorcisms of Medea that famous and renowned sorceress, that ever would wear such kind of attire as is not only stinking before the face of God, and offensive to man, but also painteth out to the whole world the venereous inclination of their corrupt conversation.'
I have just the one more pamphlet in this box. It is the most arresting of them all - the Histrio-Mastix of William Prynne, published in London in 1633. Prynne sees that boys dressing as girls not only excites the boys 'to self-pollution (a sin for which Onan was destroyed) and to that unnatural sodomitical sin of uncleaness to which the reprobate Gentiles were given over', it also transforms them into women:
'And must not our own experience bear witness of the unvirility of playacting? May we not daily see our players metamorphosed into women on the stage, not only by putting on the female robes, but likewise the effeminate gestures, speeches, pace, behaviour, attire, delicacy, passions, manners, arts and wiles of the female sex, yea, of the most petulant, unchaste, insinuating strumpets that either Italy or the world affords?'
This is the finest critique I ever had! That Mr Prynne in his youth had seen me in the part of Cleopatra I have no doubt, especially since elsewhere in his Histrio-Mastix he works himself into another lather over such matters as Cleopatra's clothing herself in the habit of Isis during the course of that play, not to speak of her dressing her lover in her own 'tires and mantles' whilst she straps on his sword:
'A man's clothing himself in maid's attire is not only an imitation of effeminate idolatrous priests and pagans who arrayed themselves in woman's apparel when they sacrificed to their idols, and their Venus, and celebrated plays unto them (which as Lyra, Aquinas, and Alensis well observe was one chief reason why this text of Deuteronomy prohibits men's putting on of women's apparel as an abomination to the Lord), but a manifest approbation and revival of this their idolatrous practice. Therefore it must certainly be abominable, and within the very scope and letter of this inviolable Scripture, even in this regard.'
Before I leave the subject, ladies and gentlemen, picture to yourselves for a moment a pretty page boy pulling on a pair of Queen Elizabeth's black silk stockings when his mistress's back is turned. Then think of the boy's prick nestling in a pair of the Queen's warm discarded satin drawers, and being stirred perhaps to tumescence by the touch of their texture and the thought of Her. These images, I submit, excite both men and women. They are indifferent in their sexual excellence. It is the silk excitement makes us hot. It is the mixture of identities and tokens of sex: the Queen, the young boy, the soft and private petals, the sharp, upthrusting thorn. It is the silken confusion - that element of the forbidden, the perverse, the opposites kissing as they cross - which so fascinates and engrosses our senses. The dress is female, while groin and fist are male. This is the ultimate and primal image, the mystery enacted in that theatre of the soul which our bodies will avow before our minds. This is the play of all plays, the drama that Mr Shakespeare could not write, but which he wrote over and over by not writing it. All the secrets of creation can come down to this little scene. It is the secret dream in the darkest chamber. This is what happens in Lucy Negro's seventh room.
Chapter Eighty-One In which Mr Shakespeare is mocked by his fellows
William Shakespeare was now so famous and successful that his rivals started mocking him. Such was ever the way of the world. They envied him his fluency and his facility, as well as the great popularity of his work with all manner of people. By this time our upstart crow had produced eight comedies and twelve tragedies. He had also published two much-reprinted poems that everyone was talking about on account of their high erotic content and mellifluous versification. And besides all this, he had been responsible for adapting and reworking at least a dozen old plays, and was always being asked by the Company to spice up and improve the plays we had in stock.
Given this acclaim, and the spite that comes naturally to certain poets, it is not surprising that some of Mr Shakespeare's contemporaries found fault with him. Ben Jonson, in particular, was very jealous.
There was a deep difference of temperament between the two men. I can best suggest this by remembrance of the few occasions when Mr Shakespeare was persuaded to the Mermaid tavern by his friends (his usual habit, as I have said, being to avoid attendance by sending down a note that he was 'in pain'). Jonson held court in the Mermaid, he was its uncrowned king. His sycophants danced attendance on him there, hanging on his every word, laughing obedience to each laboured joke that fell from his lips, licking his arse as if his shit was nectar. He would sit there sweating in his own carved chair, a mountain of flesh with pock-marked face and albino hair and eyes, wearing a coat like a coachman's, with slits under the arm-pits. He had once been a brick-layer, then he had fought in the wars in Flanders. A mediocre actor, in truth he was at first not much more successful when he turned playwright. During these difficult years, Jonson quarrelled with an actor of Henslowe's company, a man called Gabriel Spencer, and killed him in a duel in Hogsden Fields. He only escaped hanging by invoking the 'Benefit of Clergy' clause, calling for a Bible and reading in Latin the verses of the 51st psalm. This proof of erudition reduced his punishment, but his thumb was branded with a T for Tyburn.
Down at the Mermaid, he met more than his match in Shakespeare. In their wit-combats, Jonson was like a Spanish great galleon, while our hero was an English man-of-war. Jonson, that is to say, while physically more impressive, and giving every impression of being built higher out of the water in terms of Learning, was but solid and slow in his performance. Shakespeare, our English frigate, lesser in bulk, could outmanoeuvre him in any exchange, being lighter in sailing, and able to turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention.
Needless to say, this pleased Mr Jonson no more than the fact that it was only when Mr Shakespeare got our Company to perform his Every Man in His Humour with Shakespeare himself in the part of Knowell Senior that he started to get merit as a playwright. The two rival writers passed for the best of friends, and nowadays when people who knew neither of them read Jonson's fulsome eulogy they quickly conclude that this was indeed the case. However, I can tell you that relations between them were always in fact more complicated, on account of Jonson's jealousy. This came out in his losing no opportunity to mock Mr Shakespeare's pretensions to the rank of gentleman. In his satire which appeared the year a coat of arms was accorded to Mr John Shakespeare, Jonson parodies both the 'falcon brandishing a spear' and the device 'Non sans droict', giving to one of his characters, the upstart Sogliardo, similar armorial bearings with the motto, 'Not without mustard'. As for the magnificence of his tribute to Shakespeare in the shape of that ode which Mr Heminges and Mr Condell (in their wisdom) placed as heading to the Folio of 1623, permit old crazy Pickleherring merely to point out that this came only when Jonson's great rival was safely dead and buried, and that then the note of praise seems strained and forced, perhaps out of guilt that he had put the man down when alive.