Free The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl Page A

threat of Spanish invasion. The economy was stretched, inflation was running high, bad harvests drove up food prices. In London the mood was ugly, and the strangers were convenient scapegoats. ‘The common people do rage against them,’ wrote one observer, ‘as though for their sakes so many taxes, such decay of traffic, and their being embrandled in so many wars, did ensue.’ 30
    On the street, petitions having proved useless, more militant action began. In mid-April there appeared an inflammatory broadsheet, described by the Privy Council as a ‘vyle ticket or placarde, set up upon some post in London, purportinge . . . violence upon the strangers’. It is addressed to ‘you beastly Brutes the Belgians (or rather drunken drones) and faint-hearted Flemings, and you fraudulent Father Frenchmen’. It accuses them of ‘cowardly flight from [their] natural countries’, and of ‘feigned hypocrisy and counterfeit shew of religion’. It complains that the Queen has permitted them ‘to live here in better case and more freedom than her own people’. It issues a dire ultimatum:
    Be it known to all Flemings and Frenchmen that it is best for them to depart out of the realm of England between this and the 9 th of July next. If not then take that which follows, for that there shall be many a sore stripe. Apprentices will rise to the number of 2336. And all the apprentices and journeymen will down with the Flemings and strangers. 31
     
    The Council drafted an urgent letter to the Lord Mayor, Sir Cuthbert Buckle, ordering that those involved be ‘strictlie examined’ and if necessary ‘punyshed by torture’. But further placards appeared - most notoriously the ‘Dutch Church libel’, affixed to the wall of the Dutch Church on the night of 5 May, and still picked over today because of its mysterious connections with the playwrights Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe. It begins:
     
Ye strangers y t doe inhabite in this lande
Note this same writing doe it understand.
Conceit it well for savegard of your lyves,
Your goods, your children & your dearest wives.
     
    It rehearses the usual grievances against immigrant craftsmen (‘Our poor artificers starve & dye / For y t they cannot now be sett on worke’) and retailers (‘Cutthroat-like in selling you undoe / us all’), but the note of rabble-rousing violence is more strident than ever -
     
Expect you therefore such a fatall day
Shortly on you & youres for to ensewe
As never was seene.
Since wordes nor threates nor any other thinge
Canne make you to avoyd this certaine ill,
Weele cutt your throates in your temples praying
Not Paris massacre so much blood did spill ... 32
     
    This crude doggerel is signed with the nom de guerre ‘Tamburlaine’, an allusion to Marlowe’s popular play, Tamburlaine the Great (1587), about the conquests and cruelties of the medieval Tartar warlord Timur-i-Leng.
    One can guess at the feelings evoked in the immigrant community by these rabid ‘placards’. A letter sent from England on 16 May to the Catholic intelligence-gatherer Richard Verstegan in Brussels, gives the following news:
    The apprentices of London have dispersed many libels against all sortes of strangers, threatning severely that if they depart not spedely to massacre them all . . . Great fear is thereby conceyved by the strangers. Great companyes of them are already departed, and more daily preparing to follow, so it is thought the most part will away, our Councell not knowing how to protect them.
     
    Verstegan himself (writing on 17 May, and thus before receiving the above) says: ‘There are above 10,000 strangers determyned this somer to departe from England . . . for fear of some comotion to be made by the comon people against them.’ 33 The figure is exaggerated, but no doubt those who could got out of London at this time.
    It was against this backdrop of simmering xenophobia that the 1593 Return of Strangers was compiled. On 6 March, the Mayor instructed the