Shakespeare

It was already an ancient place, inhabited for more than fifteen hundred years, and it savoured of age and decay. John Stow loved to survey the ruins of ancient times in the sixteenth-century streets through which he walked; in shape and texture it was still the medieval city, with the old walls and gatehouses, chapels and barns. The sites of the monasteries and priories, some of them dismantled as a result of Henry’s “dissolution” but others put to new use, were still marked out as precincts and liberties. The palace of the Savoy, linked with the French wars of Edward III, survived. The Earl of Warwick’s house, in Dowgate between Walbrook and the Thames, still stood. The Tower of London, to which Shakespeare adverted more than to any other edifice in his plays, still watched over the city. Stone House in Lombard Street was known as King John’s House. Crosby Hall, where Richard III was supposed to have accepted the crown of England, endured. It was only to be expected that Shakespeare’s history plays would be imagined within the very heart of the city where he lived and worked.

But the miracle of late sixteenth-century London lay in the fact that it was renewing itself. Its vigour and energy came from a fresh access of youthfulness. It has been estimated that half of the urban population was under the age of twenty years. This is what rendered it so strident, so tough, so excitable. Never again would it be so young. Apprentices made up 10 per cent of its population, and apprentices were known for their high spirits and for their occasional tendency towards violence. Londoners were often compared to a swarm of bees, quick to congregate and to act in instinctive union.

There is another aspect to this youthful city. The average expectancy of life in the parishes of London, rich or poor, was very low. An early sixteenth-century diarist noted that he was “growing towards the age of forty, at the which year begins the first part of the old man’s age.”³ The expectation of a relatively short life must have affected the conduct and attitude of many Londoners. They were consigned to a short burst of existence with the evidence of disease and mortality all around them. Their experience was all the more vital and intense. This is the proper context for the growth of drama. Elizabethan Londoners acquired, or amassed, experience with more eagerness and expedition. They were quicker, sharper, more colourful, than their contemporaries elsewhere in the kingdom. The reign of Elizabeth has often been seen as that of an ageing monarch surrounded by foolish and headstrong boys; strange though it may seem, it is part of an authentic historical picture. But the boys – and girls – were also on the streets of London, buying and selling, conversing and fighting.

That is why this is properly seen as the age of the adventurer and the projector, the dreamer of vast schemes. The formation of joint stock companies and the promotion of colonialist enterprises, the voyages of Martin Frobisher and Francis Drake, were all part of the same quickening energy and activity. It was a young man’s world in which aspiration and ambition might lead anywhere and everywhere. This was where Shakespeare belonged.

CHAPTER 21 The Spirit of the Time Shall Teach Me Speed

The city was expanding quickly. It lured both the poor and the wealthy, the immigrant and the agricultural labourer. The aspiring youth of the country came to the Inns of Court, while the gentry haunted the legal courts and royal court of Westminster. The London “season,” for gentry and nobility, really only developed between 1590 and 1620. But there were also more beggars in London than in the rest of the country combined. The city was in a ferment of building and rebuilding, with tenements being erected on any and every vacant spot or spare piece of land. Proclamations of 1580 and 1593 attempted to halt the spread of new construction, but they might as well have tried to halt the tides. Houses and hovels were built away from the streets and the alleys, in gardens or in courtyards, and existing houses were divided up into smaller and smaller dwellings. The graveyards had houses built upon them. A population of approximately fifty thousand in 1520 had reached two hundred thousand by 1600. The shock of the new, for the young Shakespeare, was in part the shock of great numbers of people huddled together in a vast effusion of life.

That is why the city was pushing westward and eastward, too, beyond the city walls. The road between London and Westminster was as busy as the streets within the City, filled with litters and hackney coaches, carts and drays, wagons and pack-horses and four-wheeled carriages called “caroches.” Shakespeare may have been surprised by the narrowness of some of these streets that had not been built for the access of new traffic: the principal streets of Stratford were wider.