Free The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer

written. Over the last fifteen years of the reign Shakespeare completes no fewer than twenty-five plays, including Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream , the great historical cycle of Richard II, Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2) and Henry V, The Merchant of Venice , As you Like It and Hamlet . Marlowe composes the second part of Tamburlaine and adds The Jew of Malta, Doctor Faustus, Edward II and The Massacre at Paris to his oeuvre. George Peele writes all his plays (most notably Edward I), Robert Greene composes all his (including the comedy Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay) , and John Marston completes his first five works. Thomas Nashe brings forth his masterpiece Summer’s Last Will and Testament . Thomas Dekker writes (or co-writes) his first twenty plays, some in conjunction with Michael Drayton, Henry Chettle, John Marston and Robert Wilson. And Ben Jonson starts his headlong charge into English literature.
    Alongside Marlowe and Shakespeare, Jonson is the third great dramatist of the age. Like Shakespeare, he does not go to university but, after schooling at Westminster, becomes a bricklayer and then a soldier. By the end of the reign he has married, had two children and lost one, tried to become an actor and failed, become a playwright, been arrested for a scurrilous play and released, killed another actor in a duel, been arrested again and put on trial for murder, and escaped hanging by pleading Benefit of the Clergy. The play for which he is arrested, The Isle of Dogs , co-authored with Thomas Nashe, is so slanderous and offensive that the privy council orders the closure not just of the play, but of every theatre in London. The following year, after most of the theatres open again, he has a blockbuster success with Every Man in his Humour . This he follows up with a sequel, Every Man out of his Humour , and three more plays: Cynthia’s Revels, The Poetaster and Sejanus his Fall . As with so many Elizabethan playwrights, he is prolific: by the age of twenty-nine Jonson has completed at least six plays, comparable with Marlowe (at least six) and Shakespeare (at least seven).
    With so many playwrights at work there are plenty of plays to choose from. Each theatre shows twenty or thirty plays a year, changing the programme every day. In 1594–5 the Lord Admiral’s Menperform a total of thirty-eight plays, twenty-one of which are newly written. One in three adult Londoners sees a play every month. 58 It all adds up to a maelstrom of creative energy, theatrical delivery and personal rivalry. But if you travel around England you will notice how all this is increasingly centred on London. Whereas in the 1550s and 1560s several companies tour the country, by 1590 the principal actors stay in the city. The burgeoning population of London provides them with large audiences, especially when they become established at their respective theatres: the Lord Admiral’s Men at The Rose and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at The Globe. Only when the theatres are closed by the authorities because of the plague – in 1581–2, 1592–3 and 1603–4 – do the London companies start to tour again, from Bath to Nottingham. Ironically, although many players visit Stratford in Shakespeare’s youth, the town’s corporation prohibits travelling actors from performing there in 1602. 59
    How do you decide which theatre to go to? As with a modern production, you will be attracted to watch the best and most celebrated performers. Many Londoners flock to see the clowns. Richard Tarlton, who plays with the Queen’s Men at The Curtain, is a crowd-puller; he can reduce the audience to tears simply by putting his head out between the curtains and pulling faces. Will Kempe, who performs first with the Lord Leicester’s Men, becomes the clown with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and takes on roles such as Dogberry and Falstaff in Shakespeare’s plays. Some gentlemen and ladies who regard the theatre as brutish – and it has to be emphasised that many