CityReads | Shakespeare’s London

305

Shakespeare’s London

Without London, there would have been no Shakespeare.

Anthony Burgess, 1970. Shakespeare, Jonathan Cape.

Sources: https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/shakespeares-london

https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/cities-in-elizabethan-england

In 1587, at the age of 23, William Shakespeare, a young man from a small town of Stratford, came to London, the capital of England, and began a life of lodging in London that would last for more than two decades and launch his career as the world's greatest playwright, poet, and actor. In Shakespeare, Anthony Burgess describes Shakespeare’s years in London as follows: "When he was not in London, a city where the ground is always covered with water, house flies fly in the air, and epidemics sometimes prevail, he was riding on horseback and touring all over England, or returning to Stratford to look after his family and estate. In London he merely boarded in other people's homes." But It is precisely in these drifting years (1589-1613) in London that Shakespeare composed his most famous works.  One of the best known lines from As You Like It read “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances”. London provided Shakespeare with the best stage and audience in the world, and it can be said that without London, there would have been no Shakespeare. London and Shakespeare made each other.  

Then, what kind of times did Shakespeare live in? Anthony Burgess put it succinctly in his preface:

“Queen Elizabeth I came to the throne of England in 1558, at the age of twenty-five -some six years before the birth of the man whom we regard as her greatest subject. She was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Henry's determination to marry that young woman had been the cause of a royal divorce and the establishment of a national Protestant Church in England.”

Queen Elizabeth I painted by Quentin Metsys the Younger, a Flemish artist working at the Tudor court, c. 1583.

In her reign, England became a great maritime power. This was because there were men whose skill at sea was sharpened by personal acquisitiveness. There was untold wealth waiting for the brave and curious in the new worlds that were opening up. Fire such acquisitiveness with patriotism and a liking for the Cranmer prayer-book, and you could get a naval force that would mop up any number of invincible Armadas.

England had once been on the very edge of the world. Now, with America discovered and even colonised, England was in the middle of it. The islanders' sense of their new importance, as well as the discovery of their new strength, promoted a zest and an energy and a love of life that had hardly been known before. There was even a pride in their language, that remote and once disregarded dialect, and an urge to make a literature that would match modern Italy's or even approach that of ancient Rome. The language itself was in the melting-pot - not fixed and elegant and controlled by academics, but coarsely rich and ready for any adventures that would make it richer. English was a sort of Golden Hind.

The times were propitious for the birth of a great English poet”.

So, what was Shakespeare’s London like ?

London’s population grew from about 50,000 or 60,000 in 1520, to an estimated 200,000 in 1600. In the same period, the total population of England and Wales rose from about 2,300,000 to 4,109,000. No other English centre of population approached it in size. Norwich had a population of just 12,000, by the end of the century, and it was probably the next biggest. You can see the primacy of London clearly.

Hand-coloured view of London from Braun and Hoggenberg’s opulent atlas of the world’s cities, c. 1600–23.

Shakespeare’s London was home to a cross-section of early modern English culture. Its populace of roughly 100,000 people included royalty, nobility, merchants, artisans, laborers, actors, beggars, thieves, and spies, as well as refugees from political and religious persecution on the continent. Drawn by England’s budding economy, merchants from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and even further afield set up shop in London. As a result, Londoners would hear a variety of accents and languages as they strolled about the city – a chorus of voices from across Europe and from all walks of life.

The term 'court' referred both to these palaces and to the people who surrounded the monarch and travelled with her: a thousand or more servants, attendants, and courtiers. The court's frequent movements appear to have been motivated less by the queen's desire for a change of scenery than necessitated by a very basic practicality: those thousand bodies producing waste quickly overwhelmed the sanitation facilities in the palaces. Although flush toilets were invented by one of Elizabeth's courtiers, John Harrington (the American slang-word for toilet, 'john', thus honours its inventor), no indoor plumbing was installed in any of the royal castles during Shakespeare's lifetime. Thus, life at court could be luxurious, but it could also stink.

Though royalty, the court, and aristocrats may have been the most visible members of London society, a large portion of early modern London’s population worked for a living. The city’s tradesmen, artificers, merchants and manufacturers may claim much of the credit for London’s growth before and during Shakespeare’s lifetime.

The printed word was among the commodities actively produced and sold in Shakespeare’s London. Technological advances made it possible to churn out pamphlets, sermons, plays, poems, proclamations, diatribes, and jeremiads at a tremendous rate. Booksellers took these varied materials and made them available to patrons from across London – nobility, wealthy bourgeois, artisans and even the literate poor.

In Shakespeare’s time, the poor had little hope of escaping hunger, cold, damp, disease, and exposure. Beggars flooded the streets. Some were veterans – often maimed or disfigured – of the ongoing, undeclared war between Spain and England. Others were freemen who had been expelled from guilds. Still others had come up from the country perhaps hoping to find work, or trying to avoid family entanglements, or running from the law.

Because the poor were largely illiterate, they left little record of their existence. What we know about them comes mainly from government documents, such as the first legislation providing relief of the poor and the laws regarding vagabondage. John Stow’s Survey of London (1598) recounts in great detail various royal initiatives to designate refuges for the ‘leprous’ in London’s population, ‘for avoiding the danger of infection’. By 1601, poverty was so widespread that Elizabeth handed down ‘An Act for the Relief of the Poor’, which mandated local, community responses to indigent populations. The government wished to provide for the poor not necessarily out of any sense of charity or human kindness, but rather because of the plague.

Although anyone who had some level of trade, craft, or artisanal skill could make a life in London, one obstacle they faced was the guild system – a holdover from a medieval mode of organizing and regulating labour. Guilds had provided valuable social and commercial structure, establishing hierarchies (from apprentice to master) based on experience and skill level. They also provided a means of excluding undesirable members. If for some reason a London tradesman fell into disfavour in a guild, he could be censured or even expelled. Such exclusion could have drastic consequences, plunging the hapless tradesman into poverty – which, in London, was a serious predicament. Early modern London was a bad place to be poor.

Well after the period of the Black Death, the great pandemic of the 14th century, the bubonic plague continued to wax and wane in Europe. London, with its rapidly ballooning population and constant flow of new arrivals, was especially vulnerable. Despite the best attempts of the government, the plague remained a part of daily life in London. The theatres, considered to be hotbeds for contagion, were repeatedly closed throughout Shakespeare’s career.

Anthony Burgess gives a vivid description of Shakespeare's first arrival in London.

“The city to which he emigrated was nothing like today's ludicrous megalopolis. It was an overgrown village not yet too anxious to expand

west. Piccadilly, named for Pickadilly Hall, where dwelt a family grown fat on the manufacture of pickardils or ruffs, was a secluded place of country estates. The city of London meant roughly what we mean today by the City of London - a crammed commercial huddle that smells the river. The Thames was everybody's thoroughfare. The Londoners of Chaucer's time had had difficulty in bridging it; the Elizabethans had achieved only London Bridge. You crossed normally by boat-taxi, the boatmen calling 'Eastward-no' and 'Westward-no'. There was commerce on the river, but also gilded barges, sometimes with royalty in them. Chained to the banks there were sometimes criminals who had to abide the washing of three tides. The river had to look on other emblems of the brutality of the age - the severed heads on Temple Bar and on London Bridge itself."

The streets were narrow, cobbled, slippery with the slime of refuse. Houses were crammed together, and there were a lot of furtive alleys. Chamberpots, or jordans, were emptied out of windows. There was no drainage. Fleet ditch stank to make a man throw up his gorge. But the city had its natural cleansers - the kites, graceful birds that made their nests of rags and refuse in the forks of trees. They scavenged, eating anything with relish. One of Will's first surprising sights may have been their tearing at a freshly severed head on the spikes by the law-courts. And, countering the bad man-made odours, the smells of the countryside floated in. There were rosy milkmaids in the early morning streets, and sellers of newly gathered cresses.

It was a city of loud noises - hooves and raw coach-wheels on the cobbles, the yells of traders, the brawling of apprentices, scuffles to keep the wall and not be thrown into the oozy kennel. Even normal conversation must have been loud, since everybody was, by our standards, tipsy. Nobody drank water, and tea had not yet come in. Ale was the standard tipple, and it was strong. Ale for breakfast was a good means of starting the day in euphoria or truculence. Ale for dinner refocillated the wasted tissues of the morning. Ale for supper ensured a heavy snoring repose. The better sort drank wine, which promoted good fellowship and led to sword-fights. It was not what we could call a sober city.

Walking through London one walked literally through death and pain - the kites pecking out eyeballs, the screams of the whores whipped at the Bridewell. In King Lear, Will was to gouge out eyes, but he was also to inveigh against the whorewhipper as the hypocrite who lusted hotly for the stripped flesh he lashed. He saw what lay behind the sadism of his age, but he did not expend ink on reformist pamphlets. He accepted. He accepted the baiting of the bears Sackerson and Harry Hunks on the Bankside, within hearing of the theatre where he worked, and of the tearing to pieces by dogs of a terrified ape. He accepted the 'hangman's hands' – and when Macbeth sees his own as those, he is not thinking of the manipulator of a rope: he is thinking of the fresh blood and the clotted entrails on fists that have plunged into the open belly of the victim. Will accepted what it was not his mission to change he was a playwright, a recorder of life. And he accepted the bestowals of a God who must have seemed as cruel as men - the diseased bodies of beggars, the periodic visitations of the plague.

London, with all its horrors, had glories enough to make it seem the most desirable place in the world. It was a true capital, not a provincial backwater of Europe. The great river flowed into Europe's rivers, and Europe's rivers flowed back. It was the capital not only of Protestant England but of Protestant Christendom.

When Will was in London during that marvellous year, he would learn more than the temper of his potential audiences, the popular themes that would appeal ; he would, if he were at Tilbury, learn something about the rhetoric proper to princes.

Will had come to this English capital at the right time. The trouble with Spain was not yet over, but a small nation had demonstrated how determination, patriotism, and the fire of individual enterprise could break the strength of a great empire. The confidence of the capital, which was the confidence of England, required its articulation in a popular art-form which Will, a man of the people, was best qualified, when he had learned the knacks of the trade, to purvey. Drama was no longer a commodity to beguile the boredom of a country town, the little occasional treat of Stratford's Guildhall. It was an aspect of the great world.”

Related CityReads

（Click the title or enter our WeChat menu and reply number ）

CityReads ∣Notes On Cities

"CityReads", a subscription account on WeChat, 

posts our notes on city reads weekly. 

Please follow us by searching "CityReads"