Bear baiting was so popular that fellows roamed about the country leading a bear which they offered to be baited for so much an hour at the inns which they passed. The master of the 'King's Game' had power to seize upon any mastiff dogs, bears, or bulls for the King's service and to bait in any place within his dominions. Henslow and Alleyn, both actors, were also masters of the King's Game: they had licence to apprehend all vagrants travelling with bears and bulls.
There was another place where the refining influence of the bear baiting might be enjoyed. Its site is still preserved in the lane called Bear Garden Alley. In Agas's map of 1560 an amphitheatre is shown called the 'Bear Baiting:' a little to the west another amphitheatre is seen called the 'Bull Baiting.' Whether these places were the only buildings erected for this amusement or whether they were put up in addition to the place in Paris Gardens is a point for the antiquary. It is learnedly discussed by Mr. Ordish ('Early London Theatres'). The Spanish Ambassador in 1544 describes a bear baiting – but he does not say exactly where he saw it. 'On the other side of the town' is vague. I think, however, that he must mean Paris Gardens:
'On the other side of the town we have seen seven bears, some of them very large; they are driven into a circus, where they are confined by a long rope, while large and courageous dogs are let loose upon them as if to be devoured, and a fight takes place. It is not bad sport to witness the conflict. The large bears contend with three or four dogs, and sometimes one is victorious and sometimes the other; the bears are ferocious and of great strength, and not only defend themselves with their teeth, but hug the dogs so closely with their forelegs, that, if they were not rescued by their masters, they would be suffocated. At the same place a pony is baited, with a monkey on its back, defending itself against the dogs by kicking them; and the shrieks of the monkey, when he sees the dogs hanging from the ears and neck of the pony, render the scene very laughable.'
In the year 155 °Crowley, the author of certain 'Epigrams' against abuses, mentions Paris Gardens (see Stow and Strype, 1758, vol. ii. p. 8).
Every Sunday they will spend
One penny or two, the bearward's living to mend.
At Paris Gardens each Sunday, a man shall not fail
To find two or three hundred for the bearward's vale.
Later on there was certainly an amphitheatre in Paris Gardens, because an accident happened there.
'The same 13th day of Januarie, being Sunday about foure of the clock in the afternoon, the old and under-propped scaffolds round about the Beare Garden, commonly called Paris Garden, on the south side of the great river Thames over against the citie of London, over-deluged with people, fell suddenly downe, whereby to number of eight persons, men and women, were slaine and many others sore hurt and bruised to the shortening of their lives. A friendly warning to all that delight themselves in the cruelties of beastes than in the workes of mercy, the fruits of a true, professed faith, which ought to be the Sabbath dayes exercise.' (Stow's 'Annals,' continued by Hawes.)
The amphitheatre would hold a thousand people.
The sport had other dangers: the bear, for instance, might get loose. Once the blind bear got loose: it was on December 9, 1554, and on the Bankside, probably at the amphitheatre outside Paris Gardens. He caught a serving man by the leg 'and bytt a grate pesse away, and after by the hokyll bone, that within iii days after he ded' (Machyn).
Wherever such sports were carried on there must needs spring up a rabble rout who made their living by them: the bearward, the serving man who kept the kennels, fed the dogs, exercised the dogs, fed the bears, looked after the amphitheatre, took the money, and above all provided the drink. In the little lane now called the Bear Garden, there is a small square place which I take to be the survival of an open court in front of the circus. There is here a small tavern: the house itself is not ancient, but I believe that it stands on the site of the house which provided wine and beer for the spectators of the bear baiting. These sports, with others such as wrestling and fighting: these great crowds of people gathering together: the music which accompanied everything: caused the creation of taverns and drinking-places. Another attraction to the place may be only hinted at in these pages. Suffice it to say that all the profligate, all the debauched, all the rowdy, all the lovers of sport among the citizens of London crossed over to Bankside every evening in the summer and every Sunday in the winter, and there they frolicked, drank, sang, quarrelled, fought, and tortured animals to their hearts' content.
It is pleasant to think of Bankside and the fields beyond it – the pleasure garden of London. It was easy to get into the open country on every side of the City walls, but there was no place so pleasant as the Lambeth Marsh and the Bankside: none that offered so many and such various attractions. The flag flying over the Theatre proclaimed that a play was forward: the number of those who loved the play more than the baiting increased daily: there was never a time when the citizens did not love the green fields and the woods: and these lay behind Paris Gardens and the Bank, beyond the barking of the dogs and the roar of the crowd and the blare of the music and the stink of the kennels. Every summer evening the river was crowded with the boats taking the people across to the stairs upon the Bank between St. Mary Overies and Old Barge House Stairs: innumerable were the boats. As for the watermen, John Taylor, the water poet, says that there were 40,000 of them plying between Windsor and Gravesend, while the number of people who were carried over every day to the plays on Bankside was three or four thousand. Forty thousand seems an enormous number, but we must remember that there were no docks: that ships were laden and unladen in mid stream by barges and boats: that the Thames was the highway between London and all riverside places; between London and Westminster; between London and Southwark, because even if one lived close to the bridge it was easier and quicker to be taken across by a boat than to walk over the bridge. The conveyance of three or four thousand people across the river every day would not want more than a thousand boats or two thousand watermen: at the same time the loss of their custom, which happened when the people went to Blackfriars instead of the Bank for their play, would be felt by the whole fraternity of watermen.
We have arrived at the time when the bear baiting attracted less than the play acting: when the amphitheatres were turned into theatres: and when Bankside became the residence of the poets and the players. They came; unfortunately the other people did not go away. There remained the tribe of them who made the music and found the dancers and the tumblers, the mummers and the conjurers: there remained the men – a rough and brutal lot – who looked after the bears and the dogs: the men who wielded quarterstaff and showed sword play, a swaggering and bullying company: there remained the young bloods who came over from their peaceful shops and warehouses to enjoy the sport and the conversation and talk of the place: there remained the ribald crew of men and women who naturally belong to such gatherings. There was another population at Westminster outside the King's House like unto this at Southwark: these, too, existed for the amusement of the King's courtiers and men-at-arms. The Southwark folk existed for the amusements of not the highest class of London City. The poets came, therefore, to this place in order to be near these theatres: they brought no improvement in example, in morals, or in manners: they lived among the people, and their lives were mostly as disorderly and their morals as loose as the company among whom they walked and talked.
Southwark in the early sixteenth century, it may be noted, consisted of two parts, the one wholly distinct from the other. The first part was the High Street with its four churches of St. George's, St. Margaret's, St. Olave's, and St. Mary Overies: in the High Street were the two Debtors' Prisons: in the High Street was the ancient hospital: there also was the long succession of inns, stately, ample, frequented by merchants and capable of stabling an immense number of packhorses, and of receiving as many waggons as could fill the courtyard. The Palaces were mostly gone, turned into inns or tenements. The whole place was a great House of Call. It had no industries, it had no crafts: it had no civic or corporate existence. But it was respectable.
The other part lay on the west of the High Street, stretching along the river nearly as far as Lambeth. This was the disreputable quarter, the place of amusement: the people who lived there, one and all, made the providing of amusement, pleasure and excitement their means of livelihood. It was like a never-ending fair where nothing was sold, and there were no booths except those of Ursula, with roast sucking pig, black puddings, custards, and gingerbread. From every tavern all day long came the tinkling of the guitar and the trolling of some lusty voice and the silvery notes of a girl who sang like the wood pigeon because nature taught her. Here marched along the bear rolling his head from side to side, a monkey chattering on his back, the tabor and pipe going before him. After him came the dogs straining at the chain which held them, barking madly in anticipation of the fight. Or it was a young bull who was led by two men to the ring where he would defend his life as long as the dogs allowed; or it was the arrival at Falcon Stairs of boats by the dozen, each turning out its complement of citizens and their wives, who made for the theatre where the flag was flying. On the open bank were placed tables for those who drank: the balladmonger sang his songs and sold them afterwards: the posturer spread his carpet and went through his performance: the boys cried nuts and apples: the drawer ran about and filled his cans. In no other part of London was there a scene of greater animation and cheerfulness than on Bankside, on an afternoon or evening in the summer. And then to go home again across the broad and peaceful river at full tide, when the sun was set, and the river, like the sky, was aglow, and the people sang softly in the boats, and still from Bankside came the dying snatches of music, the soft breath of the cornet, and the tingling touch of the harp, and the voices of those who sang, and the baying of the hounds from Paris Gardens.
The early history of the playhouses on the Bank involves many questions, and may be safely left to the antiquarian historian. The reader will find most of these questions raised and settled in a book, already quoted here, by Mr. T. Fairman Ordish ('Early London Theatres'). It appears, however, that there were players, if not playhouses, here as early as 1547. After the death of Henry VIII. Gardiner proposed to have a solemn dirge in memory of the King, but, he complained to the Council, the players of Southwark say that they also will have a 'solemn playe to trye who shall have most resorts, they in game, or I in earnest.'
Whether these players had a regular theatre, or whether they acted in the courtyard of an inn, or whether they had a moveable stage, I do not know. It is, however, quite certain that before the end of the sixteenth century there were four theatres in Bankside – the Rose, whose site was somewhere in Rose Alley: the Hope in Bear Garden Lane: the Swan in Paris Gardens – that is, on the west side of the Blackfriars Road, not far from the Bridge: and the Globe. The site of the Globe is generally allowed to have been at a spot 150 feet south of Park Street, close to the Southwark Bridge Road, and on the east of it. For twenty years, more or less, the stream of playgoers was turned steadily and continuously to the Theatres in Bankside, and poet and player lived beside the theatre, and the place was the pleasure resort of the people, and the haunt of sporting men, and the school of the citizens, in history at least: and the pride and glory of London for its dramatists, if the people knew: and the sink and shame of London for the iniquities and villanies practised there: the debauchery and the shamelessness of those who lived upon the Bank.
The Plague, not only of 1603 and of 1625, but those milder attacks which threatened from time to time were a deadly enemy to the players, for then the theatre must be closed and the Bear Garden too, for in crowds there was infection. Think what it meant to close these places of resort. The Elizabethan theatres maintained almost as many persons as our own: there were the players proper – the Company: there were the servants 'in the front' and the servants behind, the 'supers,' the money takers, the boys who went round selling nuts and cakes, wine and ale, new books and tobacco: there were the watermen required to carry the audience to and fro. Why, the shutting of the Theatres must have thrown out of employ many hundreds of men, and, if we consider their wives and families, many thousands of people. Can we wonder if the players, one and all, were Cavaliers, and were ready to fight for the side which allowed them their daily bread?
But Fortune was against them. The Puritanic spirit prevailed. When the Parliament conquered, the theatres were doomed. And in 1655, by command of Thomas Pride, High Sheriff of Surrey, the seven bears of Paris Gardens were shot by a company of soldiers. In the same year it is mentioned that the Hope Theatre had been destroyed to make room for tenements.
The profession of actor in a time when the Puritanic spirit was rapidly growing stronger could not possibly be held in good repute. There was dancing in it: music: mockery: merriment: satire: low comedy: all these things the misguided flock enjoyed and the shepherd deplored. The Mayor, long before the Theatres were suppressed, would never allow a theatre to be set up within his jurisdiction: had that jurisdiction extended beyond the various Bars: had there not, fortunately, happened to exist certain illogical and absurd Liberties and Precincts, in which the Mayor had no authority, there would have been no theatres in the neighbourhood of London, and therefore no Elizabethan drama, no Shakespeare, no Ben Jonson, no Massinger, no Fletcher. As things happened, we have to note the very remarkable fact that while the popular love for the theatre increased year by year; while the theatre became the teacher of history, the satirist of manners, the home of music and of poetry; the ministers and preachers thundered perpetually against it, yet prevailed not at all, until the Civil War broke out, and the power fell into the hands of the Puritans. For instance, one John Field, the father of one of the most famous players, Nathan Field, wrote to the Earl of Leicester as early as 1585 reviling him for having interfered 'on the behalf of evil men as of late you did for players, to the great griefe of all the godly,' and adjuring him not to encourage their wickedness, and 'the abuses that are wont to be nourished by those impure interludes and plays.' And the same divine, two years later, wrote an attack upon the theatre in consequence of the accident at Paris Gardens which has been already mentioned. The theatre was forcibly suppressed in the Civil War, but it was never forgotten, and the moment that the Restoration allowed it was opened again. But to our day the old Puritanism continues, in a now feeble and impotent way, to consider the Theatre as the chosen home of the Devil.
Nathan Field, though the son of such a father, was ready to meet all comers in defence of the stage. In 1616 one Sutton, Preacher at St. Mary Overies, denounced the Theatre and all connected with it. Field answered him manfully, telling him plainly that he, the preacher, is disloyal, in preaching from his pulpit against people who are licensed and patronised by the King. The players were at all times equal to the task of covering the preacher with derision; but derision seldom convinces or converts.
The general opinion of players remains that they have at all times been a penniless tribe, eating the 'corn in the green;' borrowing; spending their money in riotous living. This opinion is not by any means always true. The musician, the mummer, the dancer, and the tumbler were all regarded much in the same light; they were despised; they did not fight like the soldier; they did not produce like the craftsman; they did not, like the priest, say mass and forgive sins; they did not heal the sick; they knew no law; their only function in the world was to amuse; to make men laugh. It is very remarkable that directly the players ceased to be dependent on noble lords, as soon as they appealed to the public and received money from those who came to see them perform, they became prudent men of business. They may have been a cheerful tribe; they were, however, well to do, and, so far as can be learned, a thrifty tribe. They made money, not by writing plays, nor by acting them, but by being shareholders in the company with which they played. Burbage, Alleyn, Heminge, Sly, Field, Schanke, not to speak of Shakespeare, all appear to have lived in comfort, and to have died possessed of moderate fortunes.
The poets, certainly, continued, as poets have always been, penniless and in debt. By the end of the sixteenth century the earliest of the dramatic poets, Marlowe, Peele, Nash, Greene – that turbulent roystering profligate band whom everybody loved while everybody reproved – had passed away. The early extravagance vanished. The later poets, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, led more godly lives. Yet they were often harassed for want of money. Three of them, Massinger, Field and Daborne, write to Henslow asking for an advance of 5l. on the security of a play which is worth ten pounds in addition to what they have had. All those, in fact, were poor, and remained poor, who attempted to live by poetic literature alone.
The poets have had enough attention paid to them: let us consider the Company of Actors who played at the Globe and the Rose, the Hope and the Lion, and lived on and near the Bankside. The books of St. Saviour's (see Rendle's 'Southwark,' App. p. 26) are full of references to the actors who died and were buried here, whose children were baptised here or buried here. The name of William Shakespeare, unfortunately, does not occur. Among the actors, and first and chief, was Richard Burbage – like Shakespeare, a Warwickshire man. In person he was under the middle stature, and grew fat and scant of breath. But no actor of the time had so great a power over his audience. It was his father who built the very first permanent theatre – called The Theatre at Shoreditch. In consequence of a dispute with the landlord, he pulled down the house, carried the timbers across the river to Bankside, and set up the Globe.
There was Kempe, the low comedian, who succeeded Tarlton in that line. He was a great dancer: on one occasion he danced all the way from Norwich to London, taking nine days for the work: he was accompanied by one Thomas Sly, who played the tabor and the pipe for him. As he passed through the villages the girls came running out to dance with him along the road till he tired them out. He was a fellow of infinite drollery, with jokes and acting such as pleased the 'groundlings' well. There was a kind of entertainment popular at the time called a jig. It was a monologue for the most part, but might be played by two or more, in which the words were interrupted by songs and dances: the jig was like the farce which used to be played after the tragedy. This worthy lived in Bankside, but I believe there is no record of his death.
Another excellent player was John Lowin or Lewin. He also lived in the Liberty of the Clink. But he lived too long. He survived the suppression of Theatres, and in his old age had no craft or art or mastery by which to earn his bread save that which was proscribed. He wrote for assistance to a patron, and he quoted the lover's words applied to the beggar:
Silence in love betrays more woe
Than words, though ne'er so witty;
The beggar that is dumb, you know,
Deserves a double pity.
Among the low comedians Robert Armin must not be forgotten. He attracted Tarlton's attention when a mere boy. The veteran comedian adopted him and taught him. I know not whether he, or Kempe, was the true successor to that unrivalled buffoon. He is described by some rhymester as —
Honest gamesome Robert Armin,
That tickles the spleen like a harmless vermin.
I have already mentioned Nathan Field the player: he was also Nathan Field the dramatist. He brought into the latter profession the carelessness about money that belonged to the former. There are indications – only indications, it is true – that there was in him something of the temperament of a Micawber, or a Harold Skimpole, a constitutional inability to understand the meaning of addition and subtraction or the translation of money into its equivalent in eating and drinking. He took a wife when he was no longer quite young, and he became jealous. Hence the epigram, 'De Agello et Othello:'
Field is, in sooth, an actor: all men know it;
And is the true Othello of the poet:
I wonder if 'tis true, as people tell us,
That like the character he is most jealous.
If it be so, and many living sweare it,
It takes not little from the actor's merit,
Since, as the Moor is jealous of his wife,
Field can display the passion to the life.
Who remembers John Schanke? He, like Kempe and Armin, carried on the traditions of low comedy. He was great in the invention of 'jigs.' A notable 'jig' was that called 'Schanke's Ordinary,' in which several performers took part. There is an odd story told by Collier of a 'Schanke, a player.' It was in the year 1642. There came galloping to London three of the Lord General's officers with the news that there had been a great battle in which the London Companies had been cut to pieces, and 20,000 men had fallen on both sides. They spread their news as they rode through the villages: they spread it abroad in the city. It was ascertained on inquiry that there had not been any battle at all, but that those three men – Captain Wilson, Lieutenant Whitney, and one Schanke, a player – were simply runaways. Therefore they were all clapped in the Gatehouse, and brought to undergo punishment according to martial law 'for their base cowardliness.'
One remarks that the race of comic actors or low comedians never becomes extinct. That power of always seizing on the comic side in everything, of always being able to make an audience laugh throughout a whole piece, is never, happily, taken away from a world which would be too sad without it. Great poets do not occur more than once in a century: great novelists not more than twice: but the low comedian, the comic man, whose face, whose voice, whose carriage, are as humorous as his words, never fails us. Tarlton is followed by Kempe, Kempe by Armin, Armin by Schanke. So Robson follows Liston, and Toole follows Robson, with lesser lights besides.
There are many other actors. The painstaking Collier finds out what parts they played and where they lived. Alas! He tells us no more. Perhaps there is no more to tell. The rank and file of the theatrical company are never a very interesting collection. Underwood, Toovey, Eccleston, Cowley, Cooke, Sly, Argan – they are shadows that have long since passed out, made an exit, and so an end. They were forgotten by the audience the day after they were dead. Why seek to revive their memory when there is not a single solitary fact to go upon? A bone would be something: out of the skull of Yorick we might perhaps reconstruct his life, with all the adventures, love-making, disappointments, distresses and triumphs.
We know the place where they all lived; the place of a continual Fair without any booths, yet everything offered for sale: the music to cheer your heart – you could command it had you money in purse; the wine to raise your courage – you could call for it; the dancing to charm your eye – any girl would dance for you if you paid her; the new play to fill you with lofty thoughts – but you must pay for your seat; the jig to bring you back to the level of earth – or perhaps a little lower – you could buy it; the eyes of Dalilah at the sign of the Swan in the Hoope were directed to your purse; the ruffians belonging to the kennels and the bear garden; the drawers of the taverns and the sack and the tobacco, the boats and the boatmen, were all at your service. The players lived in this riot and racket, themselves a part: we catch glimpses of them, we can discern them amid the crowd: sometimes one of their women is ducked for a shrew; one of them is clapped in the Clink Prison: some are haled before the Bishop for acting in Lent – these unreasonable people really object to starving in Lent! And the place and the people and their manners and customs are deplorable but delightful; they are picturesque to the highest degree, but they are equally reprehensible. I wish we could go back four hundred years and see and listen for ourselves: but with all our admiration for the Elizabethan drama, I do not think that I should like to be one of the Show Folk or to live with them in that jovial colony on the Bankside in the days of the Globe and the Rose, the Hope and the Swan.