Free Roaring Boys by Judith Cook Page A

were noticed. Both playwrights and actors acquired followings, not least among the wives of respectable artisans and merchants, some of whom were prepared to pursue the objects of their admiration. Both Greene and Peele, in spite of their appalling lifestyles, were sufficiently attractive to women to marry money, even if Greene’s marriage proved short-lived after he moved in with Emma Ball, the sister of ‘Cutting Ball Jack’, the notorious highwayman. His nickname derives from what he threatened to do to those gentlemen who would not pay up. As for Shakespeare, his earliest lodgings were just off Bishopsgate which we know because at some stage he went off to live elsewhere without paying the equivalent of his rates and was pursued by the authorities for its recovery. It was during this time, depending on which academic’s view you accept, that he was taken up with his passionate affair with the Dark Lady of the Sonnets.
    Marlowe, whose proclivities were somewhat different, was either sharing lodgings with his friend, the poet Thomas Watson, in Norton Folgate, or was his close neighbour, although he was exceptionally fortunate not only to be able to bask in success but also because Thomas Walsingham’s fine mansion out at Scadbury was always available to him, along with financial assistance should he need it. It also gave him something really precious: privacy and quietness in which to write. The others had to make do as best they could, the worst off having to share bedrooms and even beds. It is hard to imagine what it must have been like to try and write a five-act drama by hand, using only ink and a quill pen, on any flat surface available and most likely surrounded by constant noise and interruption, not to mention having to rewrite and change whole scenes backstage at the theatre during rehearsal when Burbage or Alleyn felt something had not worked properly or whole pages to fit in with a particular production.
    But for all of them the theatrical world had provided more than any could have imagined as schoolboys. From being just another anonymous boy growing up in the City or the son of an artisan craftsman in a small town or rural village, known only to immediate friends and neighbours, they were caught up in the excitement of creative activity, working with actors on a drama and finally seeing their work in production, able to stand inside and watch the reaction of a live audience to their latest play. It must have been heady stuff. Not to mention strolling into the nearest tavern or ordinary afterwards to accept the praise or criticism of those who had spent the afternoon in the playhouse, while looking across at the young women whose eyes were full of promise. Actors and writers had finally come together at the right time and in the right place, not only in the playhouses, but also in the society in which they moved, providing them with the opportunity to spark ideas off each other as they met up in the ordinaries, inns and taverns of Shoreditch and the Bankside.

FOUR
Men About Town
    See you him yonder who sits o’er the stage.
With the Tobacco pipe now at his mouth?
    Everard Guilpin,
Skialetheia
(1598)
    I t is left to two popular playwrights to tell us something of what it was like to live in their London, the London of the theatre, the underworld (with the denizens of which they freely mixed), and how to get around and cut a dash even if hard up: Robert Greene and Thomas Dekker – Greene for his streetwise advice to an innocent abroad on the perils awaiting him, Dekker for his wonderfully funny description of a day in the life of an indigent writer about town. Both Greene’s supposedly cautionary pamphlet and Dekker’s hilarious advice to his protégé offer a picture of the capital during the last decade of the sixteenth century that no amount of academic research or learned surmise can possibly surpass. Greene’s
A Notable Discovery of Cosenage, Conie-catchers and Crossbiters 1
was published in 1592,