Shakespeare

Lord Strange’s Men then proceeded from the Cross Keys, where they were now banned, to the Curtain, which was outside the jurisdiction of the city authorities. The Curtain was their “summer” house, but it was fortunately empty in this period. In the early months of 1590 they were performing such entertainments as Vetus Comoedia while their rivals, the Admiral’s Men, were playing beside them at the Theatre. But by late 1590 they were collaborating again. In the performances given at court before the queen, in December 1590 and February 1591, the company is officially named Strange’s in one document and Admiral’s in another. They had become indistinguishable, in other words, and together they would have had the resources to mount the large and lavish productions that were never rivalled in later years. And this combined company was the one in which Shakespeare and his principal history plays were to be found.

But where was he to be found in a more local sense? John Aubrey described the young dramatist as “the more to be admired because he was not a company-keeper; lived in Shoreditch; wouldn’t be debauched; and if invited to, writ he was in pain.” He acquired this information at second hand, but it was accurate enough. Shoreditch was the neighbourhood where actors and playwrights consorted together in the same lodgings and taverns. There were even specific streets where the actors were located. This was the pattern of habitation in sixteenth-century London, where trades and tradesmen congregated. Shakespeare lived where he worked, close to the playhouses in which he was engaged, a neighbour of his fellow actors and their families.

Among Shakespeare’s neighbours in Shoreditch in the late 1580s were Cuthbert and Richard Burbage, together with their respective families, living in Holywell Street. The comedian Richard Tarlton resided in the same street with a woman of dubious reputation known as Em Ball. Gabriel Spencer, the actor later murdered by Ben Jonson in a brawl, lived in Hog Lane. The Beeston family also lived in this lane. A few yards down the thoroughfare, in a small enclave known as Norton Folgate, lived Christopher Marlowe and Robert Greene. Thomas Watson, the playwright, also lived there.

If Shakespeare had wished to be “debauch’d” there were plenty of opportunities in that neighbourhood. The presence of the theatres attracted inns and brothels. It was in Hog Lane that Watson and Marlowe were involved in a murderous fight with the son of an innkeeper, for which they were committed to Newgate. In The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, the neighbourhood is described as one where “poore Scholers and souldiers wander in backe lanes and the out-shiftes of the Citie with never a rag to their backes” in the society of “Aqua vitae sellers and stocking menders” together with prostitutes “sodden amp; perboyled with French surfets”; there were fortunetellers and cobblers and citizens on the search for “bowzing and beerebathing.” When Shakespeare introduced the “low life” of his plays, the pimps and the pandars and the prostitutes, he knew at first hand of what he wrote. There was a row of houses along both sides of Shoreditch High Street and it is possible that the young Shakespeare lodged in one of them, within a few yards of the old stone-and-wood church of St. Leonard where were eventually buried many of the players with whom he worked. If he had not returned to Stratford before his death, this might have been his last resting place. It was famous for its peal of bells.