Free Roaring Boys by Judith Cook

sixteenth-century map of London, showing the theatres on the South Bank.
    But while popular audiences continued to increase, there were still those who criticised either the content or, more often, theatre in general. Sir Philip Sidney, who considered himself a cut above the fare being presented to the populace (although he had actually stood godfather to Tarlton’s son), was a stern critic of popular drama. The new playwrights, he complained, no longer always observe ‘the rules of honest civility nor skilful poetry’ as set down by Aristotle, where all the action must take place within ‘the compass of a single day and in one place’:
    Now [he grumbles] one side of the stage may be Asia, the other Africa, along with so many underkingdoms that the Player, when he comes in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived [understood]. Then there shall be, say, three ladies who walk to gather flowers, and then we believe the stage to be a garden. By and by we hear news of a shipwreck in the same place, and then we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock upon the back of which comes out a hideous monster with fire and smoke . . . meanwhile two armies fly in, represented with but four swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched battle? Next comes the love interest in which a gallant young prince marries, is then lost leaving his wife to bear him a son who, in turn, grows up and falls in love and so on and so on and all this in two hours space. 4
    The real loathing shown by those who hated the whole idea of professional theatre is well summed up in a pamphlet published by the Bristol cleric, John Northbrooke, in 1577, which was still being reprinted and circulated in London as late as 1592. For Northbrooke the stage was ‘a spectacle and a school for all wickedness’ for those who went to the playhouse:
    if you will learn how to be false, and deceive your husbands, or husbands their wives, how to play the harlot to obtain anyone’s love, how to ravish, how to beguile, how to betray, flatter, lie, swear, foreswear, how to allure to whoredom, how to murder, how to poison, how to disobey and to rebel against Princes, to consume treasures prodigally, to move to lusts, to ransack and spoil cities and towns, to be idle and blaspheme, to sing filthy songs of love and speak filthy. 5
    Few, however, were listening.
    Many of the dramatists and actors were still living north of the Thames in the late 1580s and early 1590s, although gradually they would move over the river with the building of the Hope and Globe theatres and the demise of The Theatre. A mid-sixteenth-century map of the city of London and its environs, with the streets in which they lived, shows a wide variety of green spaces open to those living north of the river, of which the most prominent is Finsbury Fields with its windmills, beside which are little figures carrying bags of grain. It was also a popular place for women to hang out the laundry not, as today, on washing lines but over bushes. ‘The white sheet bleaching on the hedge’, the rogue and petty thief Autolycus sings in
The Winter’s Tale
as he stuffs one into his bag, prompting Simon Forman, on returning from a performance of the play, to note that he must ‘beware all such thieving fellows’. It was a good place too for the exchange of gossip for there is a drawing of women sitting on the grass chatting while behind them two young men struggle along under the weight of a full basket of garments which is slung on poles between their shoulders, the sort of laundry basket later used by Shakespeare in the
Merry Wives of Windsor
. To the east are the Spital Fields where young men went to practise sword fighting and archery or even fought duels.
    Few of the dramatists were making large sums of money from their trade but their flamboyance, increasing reputation and high profiles, with their names posted on playbills, ensured that they