Shakespeare’s London

As our Shakespeare’s London walks make their way along Park Street - on the south side of the River Thames from St. Paul’s Cathedral - we pass an alley called Rose Alley. On an office building nearby there is a blue plaque marking the site of the Rose Playhouse “The first Elizabethan Theatre on Bankside.”

In 1587 Philip Henslow,a carpenter turned theatrical impresario,purchased a plot of land on this site. Today just the aforementioned nondescript alleyway and blue plaque commemorate it, although its remains were re-discovered in 1989 and are now preserved under the unsightly office block.

Indeed, there is little on the site today to suggest that this is perhaps one of the most important theatrical sites in the world. Why? Because it was on this spot in 1592 that Shakespeare emerged from his so-called “lost years” and stepped into the spotlight of documented history as a playwright whose plays were beginning to pull in the audiences as well as if not better than the more established University educated playwrights such as Robert Greene, of whom more later.

Philip Henslowe was a business man to whom the takings of the various plays he staged were important. In early 1592 he had spent the considerable sum of £105 (almost £50,000 by today’s values) renovating the Rose Playhouse. We know this because he kept detailed records of his income and expenditure.

According to his diary, now preserved at Dulwich College, his newly refurbished theatre re-opened on 19th February 1592 with Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. The attendance was poor and Henslowe’s share of the takings was a measly 17 shillings and thrupence, the equivalent of 86 pence today.

Two days later another Robert Greene play Orlando fared even worse and brought in just 16 shillings and 6 pence. Things improved slightly on the 26th February when Marlowes The Jew of Malta brought in 50 shillings.

But then, on the 3rd March 1592, Henslowe records that he staged a play called Harry the sixth.

This play broke box office records and netted him 3 pounds 16 shillings and 8 pence, close to £2,000 in today’s money. Three days later another performance of the same play brought in £3, whereas another Robert Greene play A Looking Glass For London and England made just 7 shillings.

In all Henslowe would stage Henry V1 fourteen times in the next three months and would make some £30 in the process.

And we know today, although the audience then probably didn’t know - and to be honest even if they had of known they probably wouldn’t have cared much - that the plays author was William Shakespeare.

So by 1592 Shakespeare’s talent as a writer had seen him trounce some of the more established playwrights at the box office, and for Robert Greene at least the prospect of a man who he apparently considered to be an ill educated country bumpkin daring to win better audiences than him was, quite simply, too much.

Robert Greene’s is a sad story. He was an educated man who had attained a Masters degree from Cambridge University. He had a wife and a son, but he spent her inheritance and then abandoned both of them.

By 1592 he had sunk as low as any man of letters could. He was eeking out an existence churning out pamphlets on the cardsharps, the bawdy houses and the brothels of low-life London, the London that he knew only too well. He had a mistress who bore him another son and without any apparent sense of irony the destitute Greene named the infant Fortunatus.

By August 1592 Greene health was failing rapidly and he would have found himself dying in the gutter had it not been for the charity of Mr and Mrs Isam, a poverty stricken shoemaker and his wife, who took Greene together with his mistress and infant son into their lice ridden hovel here on Dowgate - a stones throw from St Paul’s Catehdral- and a thoroughfare that we cover on several of our historical City of London walks.

On June 11th 1592, following a riot of the apprentices at one of the Southwark theatres. The authorities reacted by ordering the closure of the theatres. The actors left London and went on tour around the country.

Greene though lay dying on his lice-ridden bed of straw. His thoughts turned bitterly to those actors who were off in the provinces performing his plays and profiting from his creations.

As the resentment boiled within him he focussed it on one man in particular. The young upstart who, without the benefit of a university education, had dared to trounce him at the box office.

Greene penned a letter, which was intended for Christopher Marlow, Thomas Nash and George Peel, fellow playwrights. In that letter he made a blistering attack on William Shakespeare. It read:-

Base minded men all three of you, if by my misery you be not warned. For unto non of you sought those burrs to cleave those puppets that spake from our mouths. Those antics garnished in our colours. Yes. Trust them not, for there is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers,that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide, supposes that he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you. And being an absolute Johannes Factotum is in his conceipt the only Shakescene in the country.

This is just one of the many anecdotes about the immortal Bard that you will hear on our Shakespeare in London walks.