The Theater Part III: The Other Major Players Who Aren’t Named Shakespeare

Book Recommendation
Elizabethan Jacobean Drama: The Theatre in Its Time

Christopher Marlowe

Books

Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays

Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy

YouTube Links

mini biography
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CbWeIkgF-g

Bookworm History on Dr. Faustus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdAJxwxmysw

Ben Jonson

Books

Ben Jonson: A Life

Complete Works of Ben Jonson (Delphi Classics)

YouTube Videos

This original “song” about Ben Jonson is absolutely hilarious. Seriously, you have to watch it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUB9mBZtGhk

Then, on a more serious note, here’s a very scholarly bit by Ian Donaldson from Oxford Academic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO4ZJ3Dmxjw

Ben Jonson’s Road North, about the trip Jonson took to Scotland
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWLFXr5FVr0

Thomas Kyd

Books

The Spanish Tragedy (Norton Critical Editions)

YouTube Videos

Beyond the Bard: The Spanish Tragedy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr6pu9K_JZM

[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave a rating or review on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]

Episode Transcript:

Hello, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the world, and getting in touch with our own humanity.

So, I owe all of you kind and gentle people an apology. The month of May was insanity-defined for us here. Hannah has started nursery school, and nobody told me that suddenly, as soon as your kid starts daycare or nursery school, every germ in the world will attach itself to her hands and just come into your house. We have all been passing around bugs, and then the plumbing in our house went out because of a leak in a pipe under the driveway. And then an event that kind of epitomized what the past month has been like, on Friday, Hannah was fighting her nap and doing gymnastics on the bed the way many almost three-year-olds do, and when she came up from a somersault with me trying to stop it, her head collided with my eye. And now I have a black eye and an insane headache. Anyway, you didn’t need to hear the entire story of my parenting misadventures. But all that is to say that I have neglected this podcast, and I apologize.

So onwards. This month, I’m finally going to finish out this third episode on the theater, which has been long promised, and then another interview with Tudor Times about their person of the month, and then we will be moving onwards to rebellions. So let’s get started.

Just a quick reminder that this podcast is a proud member of the Agora Podcast Network and the Agora Podcast of the Month, which you should definitely check out is The History of China by Chris Stewart. Check it out, subscribe and learn more at TheHistoryOfChina.wordpress.com. Also, if you like this podcast, why not sign up for my newsletter at the website Englandcast.com. It’s totally free, I’ll never spam you! And newsletter subscribers receive an extra minicast each month, as well as discounts on my books and giveaways, and other fun things. In this month’s newsletter, I’ll have a coupon for a 50% off the audio version of my light, fun, perfect for the beach novel, Sideways and Backwards: A Novel of Time Travel and Self-Discovery, which currently has 4.8 out of five stars on Amazon. And by the way, thank you for that totally thoughtful review, which made me squeal with delight!

Alright, this episode, like I said, I’m wrapping up the trilogy on the theater by talking about the other working playwrights and actors, the other famous people in Elizabethan England, because it wasn’t all just Shakespeare. If you missed the other two episodes, you should go back and listen. The first was on the history of the theater in general, leading up to the magic of Elizabethan drama. And the second was on Shakespeare himself. So now we’re doing the other guys, because there actually were other playwrights and actors in England besides Shakespeare in the late 16th century. Because I’m going to cover quite a few of them, like five, this is meant to be an introduction, rather than any kind of in-depth look. If something here sparks your interest, I have a page on the website with the show notes, including book recommendations so that you can read further about all of these wonderful characters.

The first one I’m going to talk about is Christopher Marlowe, who were not for his early death may have been the most famous Elizabethan playwright, full stop. He was born the same year as Shakespeare, but would have a very different education and early life than Shakespeare. He was born two months before Shakespeare in 1564 in Canterbury to a shoemaker. He went to The King’s School in Canterbury, and then he received a scholarship to Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, where he received his BA in 1584. And then things get interesting.

There was a rumor that he was going to go to the English college in Rheims, which taught the Roman Catholic priests. And the University in Cambridge was hesitant about giving him his master’s degree. And then something very mysterious happened. He received his degree on schedule, thanks to an intervention from the Privy Council on his behalf, commending him for his faithful dealing and good service to the queen. The nature of Marlowe’s service was not specified. But of course, this letter has led to many conspiracy theories, particularly the notion that Marlowe was a secret agent working for Francis Walsingham’s intelligence service. No direct evidence supports this theory, although the council’s letter is evidence that Marlowe had served the government in some kind of secret capacity.

So as a playwright, one of his first plays performed in London was Tamburlaine the Great, and this was one of his most famous plays. He only wrote a handful of plays, and they were all brilliant. So this was about a conqueror Tamburlaine, and he rose from a shepherd to become a warlord. He only wrote a handful of other plays, like I said, but they were among the first to use blank verse in English, which was unrhymed iambic pentameter. He wrote history plays including one about Edward II, who had been deposed thanks to his overreaching support of several nobles, and it later influenced Shakespeare’s Richard II. So Edward the Second influenced Richard II. He also wrote one called The Jew of Malta, which is like a total direct predecessor to the Merchant of Venice. Doctor Faustus was one of the most notable plays to have been performed up until this time – Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.

Just imagine the theater was still quite new, and there were still people, like the Puritans, who were rallying to get it shut down because of how immoral they thought it was. And here Marlowe writes this play and performs this play, in which the lead character summons the devil. And this was like a big freaking deal. And it was really frightening to people to watch and to think about, even see this portrayed was really, really scary for people, and exciting as well and really brought up a lot of emotions.

So, Marlowe died when he was still a young man, of course, so who knows what he could have gone on to do? Well, there’s a lot of suspicion around his death as well as the rest of his life. So when he died, he was only 29. And he was killed in a bar fight. And it supposedly stemmed from a fight over the bill. That would have been clear enough, but less than two weeks before, he had been arrested for blasphemy, and was brought before the Privy Council for questioning, although apparently, the council wasn’t in session that day. So he was ordered to come back each day until it was cleared. And 10 days later, he was stabbed. The mystery over whether this was connected to the arrest is still unsolved. And it’s led to, again, a lot of conspiracy theories. There are some people who believe that Marlowe’s death was fake, and he came back to write plays as Shakespeare, basically conspiracy theories abound. It doesn’t really matter though. In the end, we have this handful of amazing plays that he wrote, which influenced playwrights for generations, and are among the richest and the most cutting edge of the time.

So the next one I’m going to talk about is Ben Jonson. Ben Jonson was another kind of bad boy, quite literally, though he was also equally brilliant. And he lived for a long time. So there’s a lot of plays, he was really prolific, and we have a lot of information about him. He was born in 1572. His father had died two months before he was born. And two years after he was born, his mother remarried a master bricklayer. He went to school at the Westminster School where he was taught by the famous antiquarian, William Camden. And he wanted to continue and go to Cambridge, but his stepfather forced him to become an apprentice. He really, really was unhappy as a bricklayer, and so he ran away to the army in the Netherlands, because that’s what I would do, if I was unhappy in my job, I would join the army and go fight a war in the Netherlands, said nobody ever except Ben Jonson. But it suited him because he’s famous for killing an enemy soldier in a single combat. Then he took the guy’s weapons as trophies. And then he returns to England to work as an actor and playwright.

One of his earliest acting gig was as Geronimo in The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd, which we’ll talk about a little bit, but it was the first revenge tragedy in English literature. By 1597, he was a regular actor, but he actually wasn’t really successful as an actor. He was taken off the stage and suddenly he became employed by the Admiral’s Men as a writer, and he began writing his own original plays. And in 1598, he was mentioned as one of the best playwrights for tragedy. Some of these, well all of these early tragedies don’t survive, though. He had another career mishap when in 1597, a play he co-wrote with Thomas Nashe, The Isle of Dogs, was suppressed after it offended the queen. It was supposedly based on life at court. Jonson and Nashe were both arrested and thrown into jailed, charged with lewd and mutinous behavior. Nashe escaped to Great Yarmouth. But two actors in the play were also imprisoned. So people were really ticked off about this. We don’t have a copy of this play, which is really a shame because I would love to read that, then you can only imagine how sensational It must have been to have brought down such rough from the queen. A year later, Jonson was back in prison in Newgate, he like wanted to make a tour or rounds of all the prisons in London. This time, he was back in prison for killing Gabriel Spenser, who was one of the two actors who had previously been arrested for the play the year before. He killed the guy in a duel. So he pled guilty to the charge of manslaughter. And he was released by benefit of clergy. If you’ve never heard of benefit of clergy, this is a legal maneuver that goes back to the Middle Ages and beyond, where anyone who could read a particular verse from the Bible, often referred to as a “neck verse” would be set free. So this dates back to the time, like I said, when clergy were the vast majority of people who could read. So somebody would say, “Well, you can’t kill me because I’m a clergy, and I need to be tried in ecclesiastical courts or in the religious courts.” And so then they would say, “Okay, well prove that you’re a clergyman and do that by reading this first.” And so then they read the verse and they prove they were clergymen. And so what people would do is brand them, and send them on their merry way. So Jonson pled this and he said benefit of clergy, and so he forfeited his goods, and he was branded on his left thumb. One notable event from his time in prison though was that he converted to Catholicism, which is likely through the influence of a fellow prisoner Father Thomas Wright, a Jesuit priest.

In 1598, Jonson produced his first great success Every Man in His Humour. William Shakespeare was actually among the first actors to be cast. And Jonson followed this in 1599, with Every Man out of His Humour, an attempt to imitate Aristophanes at the beginning of the reign of James I. In 1603, Jonson joined the other poets and playwrights in welcoming the new king, and he quickly adapted to the additional demand for masks and entertainments and pageantry introduced with this new reign. He also enjoyed the patronage of aristocrats, such as Elizabeth Sidney, who is the daughter of Sir Philip Sidney, and Lady Mary Wroth.

But he continued to have trouble with the authorities, he just couldn’t stay out of trouble. In the second week of October 1605, he was present at a supper party attended by most of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators. After the plot’s discovery, he seems to have avoided further imprisonment because right away he volunteered everything he knew of the affair to the investigator Robert Cecil and the Privy Council.

At the same time, Jonson was pursuing a more prestigious career, writing masques for James’s court. So he wrote The Satyr in 1603, The Masque of Blackness in 1605. Those are two of about two dozen, which he wrote for James or for Queen Anne. And many of these projects he collaborated with a very famous designer, Inigo Jones. And Jones, one of his most famous works is the Banqueting House in Whitehall. He was a brilliant designer, an architect. For example, Jones designed the scenery for Jonson’s masque Oberon, the Faery Prince, which was performed at Whitehall on January 1, 1611, in which Prince Henry who is the eldest son of James I appeared in the title role. And thanks to all of this new success, he stopped writing plays for the public theater.

Something that he did in 1618 was he set out for his ancestral Scotland on foot. He spent over a year there, and he stayed with a Scottish poet William Drummond in April 1619, which was on the River Esk. Drummond recorded as much of Jonson’s conversation as he could in his diary. And we have aspects recorded of Jonson’s personality that otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to see as well. So Jonson talked about his opinions, and a whole lot of stuff. Drummond noted that “a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others”. So he had a lot of self-confidence.

In the 1620’s, his productivity began to decline, but he’s still remained popular. His later plays aren’t actually that good. But they’re important because they show a side of Charles I of England that we don’t normally see. One is The Staple of News, it’s a play that looks at the very nascent beginnings of English journalism. And then another one, The New Inn was a complete failure. And it led Jonson to write a poem condemning his audience for not getting it and he called it The Ode to Myself. So yeah, this guy really didn’t have any kind of doubt about how awesome he was. He had a fairly famous rivalry with Shakespeare. And there are several recorded instances where Jonson made fun of Shakespeare, including one where he learned that Shakespeare never blotted or crossed out lines when he wrote, and supposedly Jonson responded, “Would he had blotted a thousand!” That takes some guts to say that about Shakespeare. Although in fairness to Jonson, it was he who said when Shakespeare died, “He was not of an age, but for all time!”, which of course, is one of the most famous rememberings of Shakespeare that we have.

So now I’m going to move ahead to Thomas Kyd. This is going to be shorter, thanks to the fact that we just don’t know that much about him. But he was super important. He was born in 1558. And he’s important if only because he’s the author of The Spanish Tragedy, which is one of the most important plays in the development of the Elizabethan drama. He was really famous in his own time, but then he fell into obscurity for like 200 years until 1773. When Thomas Hawkins, who was an early editor of The Spanish Tragedy, discovered that Kyd was named as its author by Thomas Heywood in something he wrote called his Apologie for Actors. In that book, he named Kyd as the author of The Spanish Tragedy.

So 100 years later, at the end of the 19th century, scholars in Germany and England began to shed light on his life and his work, including the very controversial finding that he was probably the author of a Hamlet play which predated Shakespeare’s, which is now known as the Ur-Hamlet.

So he went to school at a new school in London, the Merchant Taylors’ School, he got a well-rounded education there. And there’s no evidence though that he went on to any university. Evidence does suggest that in the 1580’s, he became an important playwright, but like I said, very little is known about his activity. He was placed among the best for tragedy, and he’s known as Famous Kyd. And Ben Jonson mentions him in the same breath as Christopher Marlowe, with whom in London Kyd at one point shared a room.

So The Spanish Tragedy was probably written in the mid to late 1580’s. It’s the first modern revenge tragedy and it’s one of the first tragedies ever written in English. The earliest surviving edition was printed in 1592. The full title was The Spanish Tragedie, Containing the lamentable end of Don Horatio, and Bel-imperia: with the pittifull death of olde Hieronimo. However, the play was usually known simply as “Hieronimo” after the protagonist. It was arguably the most popular play during the entire Elizabethan period. And it basically set the bar for plots, for character. And the success of the plays went all the way to Europe, versions of The Spanish Tragedy, and his Hamlet were popular in Germany and the Netherlands for generations. And the influence of these plays on European drama was a big part of the reason for the interest in Kyd among the German scholars in the 19th century.

On May 11 1593, the Privy Council ordered the arrest of the authors of “diverse lewd and mutinous libels” which had been posted around London. The next day Kyd was among those arrested. He would later believe that he had been the victim of an informer. His lodgings were searched, and instead of evidence of the libels, they found a tract that was described

“vile heretical conceits denying the eternal deity of Jesus Christ found amongst the papers of Thos. Kydd (sic), prisoner … which he affirmeth he had from C. Marley. (sic) ” (Who was Marlowe.) It’s believed that Kyd was brutally tortured to get this information. Kyd told authorities that the writings found in his possession belong to Marlowe, who was his former roommate. And Kyd accused his former roommate of being a blasphemous traitor, an atheist who believed that Jesus Christ was a homosexual. Marlowe was summoned by the Privy Council after these events, and of course, that was this trigger that happened. And then two weeks later, he was killed mysteriously in Deptford over this reckoning of the bill in a bar, who knows?

Kyd was eventually released, but he wasn’t accepted back into the service of his Lord and patron. He believed he was under suspicion of atheism himself, and he wrote to people protesting his innocence. The last that we hear of him was a publication in early 1594. He talked about the “bitter times and privy broken passions” he had endured. And he died later that year, he was only 35. So it was a very sad life that both he and Marlowe led in the end.

So now we’re going to quickly look at a few other important people, namely Will Kemp and Richard Burbage. First Burbage, Burbage was basically the first great actor of English theatre. He was the most famous actor of the Globe Theatre of his time, and he was also a theater owner and entrepreneur. His father was a joiner, who became an impresario in the early days of the theater. He also founded the first theater in the city, and Richard became a popular actor by his 20’s.

He was in all the various theatrical companies, the Admiral’s Men, Lord Strange’s Men, the Earl of Pembroke’s Men, but most famously, he was the star of Shakespeare’s theatrical company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which became the King’s Men after James I ascended to the throne in 1603. He played the title role in the first performances of many plays, including Hamlet, Othello, Richard III, and King Lear. He was in great demand as well. So he was also in plays by other contemporary writers like Ben Jonson. He was a huge box office draw. Of the hundreds of plays and thousands of roles for actors that date from 1580 to 1610, here’s a statistic, there are only 20 or so roles that are longer than 800 lines. This was mostly due to the fact that plays were constantly in rotation, they wouldn’t have a run on one play before starting another the way we do now. They were constantly changing and rotating in and out, and so it’d be really hard to keep up with that many lines. Edward Alleyn was the first English actor to manage these roles. It was in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and the Jew of Malta that he did that.

But the majority of these star roles 13 of the 20 were acted by Burbage. He was the first Englishman to live a really kind of wealthy Hollywood-like life, living off of acting. He was earning income from owning two playhouses, being the primary person involved with two playhouses, a sharer in the King’s Men, a lead actor, and also, oh yes, he painted. So he had a lot of talents.

He’s born in 1568. Like I said, his father became very involved with the theater and introduced him to it at a young age. And when his father died in 1597, Richard and his brother Cuthbert stepped in to try to rescue the family’s interests in two London theaters. They ended up tied up in all kinds of lawsuits. The Blackfriars Theatre they kept but they leased to a lawyer and impresario Henry Evans, who used it for a troupe of child actors.

The other one was simply called The Theater. And this one is that famous story where it was dismantled when they couldn’t resolve the terms of a new lease with the owner, Giles Allen, he was the landowner, and I talked about this in the episode about Shakespeare. It was when in the middle of this dark night in December, when Allen was away celebrating the holidays, The Theatre troupe comes in and completely dismantles the theater. They claimed that their lease was for the land, but they owned the building itself. So they come in, in the night, they take everything apart in one night, and they moved it to a new location on the south side of the towns, and that would then become The Globe.

Interestingly, Burbage was performing at The Globe on June 29, 1613, when it caught fire and burned down. He survived,  though he did die in 1619. Obviously, he’s not still alive. He did die eventually. But he did remain a huge draw even when other younger actors came about. He was a box office draw for 35 years. He acted with the King’s Men until his death in 1619. And his death had so much outpouring of grief that it actually threatened to overshadow the official mourning for the death of Queen Anne, which had happened just 10 days prior. Of the many elegies that followed his death, the most striking is simply the brief “Exit Burbage.”

Our final character is Will Kemp (Kempe). Will Kemp is the first very famous English comedic actor who likely played the great comic role Falstaff in Shakespeare’s plays. He was also one of the actor shareholders in the Lord Chamberlain’s men, along with Shakespeare and Burbage. But a short time later, he actually left the group, they had some kind of a falling out. And he wound up dying in poverty within like five years. Not very much is known about him again.

He was raised supposedly it appears in Kent. He first enters the record as a performer with Leicester’s Men at Leicester house in May 1585. He then went to the Low Countries to take part in the war there and worked for Leicester’s nephew, Philip Sidney, delivering letters for him back to England. Sidney said that he sent letters home by way of a man he called “Will, my Lord of Lester’s jesting player”, and it’s generally accepted that this was Kempe.

After a brief return to England, he also then accompanied two other future Lord Chamberlain’s Men, George Bryan and Thomas Pope to Elsinore where he entertained Frederick II of Denmark. His whereabouts in the later 1580’s are not known. But his fame as a performer was growing during this period. And that’s indicated by Thomas Nashe’s An almond for a Parrot. He dedicated this work to Kempe. And so there’s a couple of different title pages from the time period that dedicate books to Kempe, talked about Kempe and how good he is. And entries in the Stationers’ Register indicate that three jigs (short comment plays) perhaps written by Kempe published between 1591 and 1595. And two of these have survived. He was one of Lord Strange’s men by 1592 and that was along with Burbage and Shakespeare. He joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and he remained in that company until early 1599, like I said, when a still unclear sequence of events removed him from the company, they had a fight of some sort.

After his departure from the Chamberlain’s Men in early 1599, he continued to pursue his career as a performer. He did some publicity stunts, he morris danced from London to Norwich, which was over 100 miles. And he did a couple of things like that. But he suddenly became really obscure, he never really made it. He tried to do another European tour, but by 1601, he was borrowing money from Philip Henslowe. And the last undoubted mention of him occurs in Henslowe’s diary in late 1602. Parish records record the death of “Kempe, a man” in St. Xavier Southwark in late 1603. This is not necessarily the comedian but it fits his departure from the record.

In his time, Kempe was as famous for his stage jigs, and for his acting in regular drama. The jig was a kind of rustic cousin to the commedia dell’arte, featured as many as five performers in a partially improvised song-and-dance routine. Jigs had plots, they were often quite bawdy but the emphasis was on dancing and physical comedy. And as an actor, Kempe is associated with two roles: Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing and Peter in Romeo and Juliet. And from these hints, a list of Kempe’s parts has been deduced which, if conjectural, is not improbable. He supposedly would have been Costard in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Lancelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, and Cob in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour So that’s a little bit about Will Kemp.

Now the book recommendation, which is Elizabethan Jacobean Drama: The Theatre in Its Time edited by Blakemore G. Evans. Remember to go to the website Englandcast.com for the show notes to get a link to buy the book. And to sign up for the newsletter. You can also get in touch with me with any comments either on Facebook at facebook.com/englandcast on Twitter at @Teysko or by texting the listener feedback line at 801 6TEYSKO (6839756) I think it is. Thanks so much for listening everybody! The next episode will be the interview with Tudor Times like I said, on their person of the month. That’ll come out in a couple of weeks. And then after that, we’re going to move on to our little spill on rebellions. We’ll be looking at the various rebellions that plagued our 16th-century monarchs. And while I won’t be able to hit them all in-depth, we’re going to talk about what led people to rebel at different times, how they were dealt with, and then look at some specific famous ones. Until then, have a great few weeks and I will talk to you soon!

[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave us a rating on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]

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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast,  the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.

She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).