We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr
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a piece of bacon have I had out of their balks,
In running over the country, with long and weary walks;
Yet came my foot never within those door cheeks,
To seek flesh or fish, garlick, onions, or leeks,
That ever I saw a sort in such a plight
As here within this house appeareth to my sight.
There is howling and scowling, all cast in a dump,
With whewling and puling, as though they had lost a trump.
It’s like eavesdropping on a culture that has vanished – genial, tough, robust people leading rawly physical lives. This play, as it happens, also contains the earliest English drinking song to have survived:
I cannot eat but little meat;
My stomach is not good;
But sure I think that I could drink
With him that weareth a hood. More
Drink is my life; although my wife
Some time do chide and scold,
Yet spare I not to ply the pot
Of jolly good ale and old.
Back and side go bare, go bare;
Both hand and foot go cold;
But, belly, God send thee good ale enough,
Whether it be new or old.
I love no roast but a brown toast,
Or a crab in the fire;
A little bread shall do me stead,
Much bread I never desire.
Nor frost, nor snow, nor wind, I trow,
Can hurt me if it would;
I am so wrapped within, and lapped
With jolly good ale and old …
The drinker goes on to curse sellers of thin ale, and like many pub-haunters today insists that he is all the better for a skinful the following morning. But as to his wife, happily it turns out that he isn’t quite as misogynistic as it first appears. Indeed, she’s a bit of a toper too:
And Kytte, my wife, that as her life
Loveth well good ale to seek,
Full oft drinketh she that ye may see
The tears run down her cheek.
Then doth she troll to me the bowl
As a good malt-worm should,
And say, ‘Sweetheart, I have taken my part
Of jolly good ale and old.’
And so the pictures painted of Tudor society by the courtiers, the women who have been pushed out of their houses, the religious fanatics and the burgeoning playwrights all point towards a country that is recognisably ours. It’s an unfair country, full of hypocrisy and special pleading, whose common people by and large ignore their rulers. Despite its fanaticism and brutality, and its terrible weather, it feels surprisingly warm.
* ‘Deucalion’s flood’ refers to the Greek version of the Noah flood story, and therefore simply means ‘since time immemorial’.
* A pitfall is a kind of bird trap.
4
An act of magic, we are told, requires bizarrely varied ingredients. In Shakespeare’s time, apparently clever men were still trying to combine base minerals and rare chemicals to produce gold. His witches throw ‘eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog, adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing’ into their sinister cauldron. No gold was ever produced, and today we regard the witch-fever of Jacobean Britain as a horrible excuse for the torture and burning of old women. And yet, at the end of the sixteenth century something magical, almost miraculous, did happen in these islands. It reads and sounds like nothing less than a revolution in human consciousness. It was certainly a revolution in how humans understood one another, acted out on wet and greasy wooden platforms in front of a confused but captivated mob. The miracle is sometimes described by the two words ‘William Shakespeare’, but it went a bit wider than that. Although Shakespeare was the leader and prime genius of this revolution, there were others who deserve the name of genius – Kit Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, John Webster and Ben Jonson among them.
The revolution on the stage and in words can reasonably be compared to the collision that created the English language in the first place. As we have seen, it was the collision of Germanic, Latin, French and some British tongues that produced the endlessly flexible stew of English. By the late 1500s another collision was taking place. This time it wasn’t simply about the ‘word hoard’, important though that was. At first sight, English culture wasn’t unusual: across Continental Europe there was a peasantry, trading and farming peoples speaking diverse local languages and, as in England, an elite speaking Latin and looking back to classical authors for their inspiration. In London above all – that same London Isabella Whitney described so vividly in the previous chapter – many who had been classically educated were forced to sell their skills to those who had no such education.
When Shakespeare arrived in London he soon found his way to the anarchic, wild group of Cambridge- and Oxford-educated writers now known as the ‘university wits’ – Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, George Peele and Christopher Marlowe himself, the acknowledged star of the early Elizabethan stage. As a non-university man Shakespeare would have been something of an outsider, though he was quick to collaborate and ‘patch’ plays with them. Later, starving and on his deathbed, Greene launched a famous attack on Shakespeare as a mere ‘upstart crowe’ – nothing but an actor, sans proper education, with ideas above his station. Ben Jonson, classically educated though never able to get to Cambridge because he was apprenticed to his bricklayer father-in-law, accused his friend Shakespeare of having ‘little Latin and less Greek’.
What quickly became obvious was that this provincial man, crammed with the folklore, smells, sounds and words of the English Midlands, was well able to absorb translated stories from the classical and humanist writers, as well as having a basic grammar-school understanding of the Latinists. Thus he took his part amongst a highly literate and competitive elite who found that, thanks to a new market for entertainment, if they wanted to eat and dress well, if they dreamed of owning their own homes, they had to tell stories in English that would captivate the man in the street. Some at least found that if they took their Plautus and their Terence, stories from Latin Renaissance writers in Italy, and their understanding of the Latin chroniclers of older Britain, and then reshaped the stories and adapted their training in rhetoric and argument, and salted it all with the biting, vivid language of town and country people, they could make gold. They became alchemists of language.
The gold came slowly, penny by penny. The population of London when Shakespeare arrived in the 1580s was around 200,000, many of them recent migrants from the countryside or abroad, crammed into a small space still bounded by Roman walls. The theatres opening up as he began his career could accommodate around two thousand observers, and the big innovation was that, rather than a hat being passed around at the end of a performance, as had been the case when the companies toured England, audiences had to pay to get in. A penny bought you standing room, tuppence a basic seat, and three pennies a comfy chair out of the rain. So long as just a few per cent of the population came regularly, that provided a good income stream. Although there were plenty of rival ways of spending time for the overwhelmingly youthful, plague-threatened and competitive Londoners