Simon Hawke - The Merchant of Vengeance

“Then the sheriff’s men may very likely be arresting an innocent man even as we speak,” said Smythe.

Built to house the company of players known as the Lord Admiral’s Men, the Rose Theatre was the crown jewel of Philip Henslowe’s various enterprises, among which were also a pawnshop and a number of thriving Southwark brothels situated conveniently nearby. Originally hexagonal in shape, the playhouse was three stories high and timber framed, with thatch-roofed galleries and an open yard. At considerable expense, the Rose had recently been renovated and enlarged by pushing back the walls behind the stage, along with the stage itself and the tiring room behind it, then lengthening the sides of the building. This expansion increased the available area for the groundlings, those members of the audience who paid the cheapest admission price of one penny and stood in the open yard, the surface of which had been mortared and sloped upward, so that those who stood toward the rear could enjoy an unobstructed view. This sloping of the yard also facilitated drainage, so that rainwater and other natural fluids could run down to the wooden box drain that ran from just behind the stage to a ditch beyond the playhouse walls. This made cleanup after the performances easier and, with the regular changing of the rushes, helped keep down the smell. Now shaped like an asymmetrical polygon, the playhouse was currently home to both the Lord Admiral’s Men and Lord Strange’s Men, the company to which Smythe and Shakespeare now belonged.

They had left their first company, the Queen’s Men, though not without some regret, for they had thought of the Theatre as their home ever since they came to London. Dick Burbage, the son of the owner, James Burbage, was a fellow player and had become a good friend to them both. However, despite the Theatre’s legacy of lending its name to other stages — all playhouses in London were now increasingly being called “theatres” — the Queen’s Men had fallen upon hard times. The company had been in decline ever since the death of Dick Tarleton, their celebrated comic player, followed by the defection of their star, the celebrated Edward Alleyn, who had joined the Lord Admiral’s Men. Ned had subsequently married Henslowe’s daughter, thereby cementing his relationship to the entrepreneur and assuring his own future. To make matters worse, the Queen’s Men had then lost both of their juvenile apprentice players when one had died of the plague and the other, perhaps fearing the same fate, ran off.

After that, the company’s bad luck only continued to grow worse.

Will Kemp, for all his efforts, had never quite been able to fill Dick Tarleton’s shoes, and before long he, too, had left the company, following Alleyn to the Lord Admiral’s Men. The lengthy forced closure of the playhouses due to plague and a dismal touring season for the company had already strained the finances of the Queen’s Men to the limit. Most of the players were broke, and a number of the hired men had quit and gone in search of other work. And in a time when work in London was becoming increasingly difficult to come by, this bespoke a degree of desperation that was telling. When the playhouses had at last reopened, the powerful combination of Ned Alleyn’s bombastic acting and Kit Marlowe’s luridly dramatic writing drew most of the Queen’s Men’s audience to the Rose. The wind was whistling through the empty galleries of the Theatre, and even the ever optimistic Dick Burbage had seen the ominous writing on the wall.

“Go,” he had told them, when Will received an invitation to join Lord Strange’s Men. “Go on and join them. Never fear for me. ‘Tis true that things do not look very promising at present. The company is but a shadow of what it once had been; our audiences have deserted us, and our greedy landlord keeps threatening not to renew our lease upon the property in the hope that he may seize the playhouse for himself. But though the carrion kites may circle overhead, my friends, my father and I are far from finished. For a time, Henslowe and the Lord Admiral’s Men have us at a decided disadvantage, to be sure, but remember that fortunes ever change. We are already planning a new Theatre, much improved over the present one, and although the time is not yet ripe, our plan…ill soon come to fruition. But in the meantime, you must eat, my friends, and you must pay your rent, and though your loyalty is the very nectar of sweet nourishment to me, I fear ’tis but poor provender for you. So please, I beg you, go with my blessings, both of you. There shall yet be another time for us to play together.”

And so, with a bittersweet mixture of sadness and anticipation, they had joined Lord Strange’s Men, who in turn had combined forces with the Lord Admiral’s Men shortly thereafter due to a poor season and hard times for all the companies in London. Over the next few months, players came and went; companies fanned, disbanded, and reformed. And sadly, the Queen’s Men, once the nation’s most illustrious company of players, did not survive the various upheavals.

Bobby Speed came with them to Lord Strange’s Men, as did John Hemings soon thereafter. The departure of a second shareholder in the company signalled the end to all the others. Hemings was in due course followed by Tom Pope, George Bryan, and Gus Phillips. Will Kemp had joined their new company, as well. He had not gotten on well in the Lord Admiral’s Men, having managed to quickly raise the ire of both Ned Alleyn, their star player, and their resident poet, the young and irrepressible Kit Marlowe. Unfortunately for Kemp, when the two companies joined forces, he was once more thrown in with both of them.

Alleyn had little patience with Kemp’s ever increasing reluctance, or perhaps growing inability, to learn his lines, something he had previously covered with improvised songs and caperings. However, the conventions of the stage were changing, and Marlowe’s sensational and gory dramas had no place for such buffoonish antics. Thus, when Kemp forgot his lines and resorted to his usual comic bag of tricks, Marlowe flew into hysterical rages, screaming and throwing things at him, at one point actually drawing steel and chasing him around the playhouse with his sword, threatening at the top of his lungs to disembowel him. Had it been anyone else but Marlowe, Kemp might well have taken it for nothing more than a grandiose display of temper and dramatics, something not at all uncommon in the world of players and poets. However, this was not just any player or poet, but Kit Marlowe, whose flamboyant excesses and mad, Dionysian behaviour were legendary throughout all of London. Kemp took fright and ran to his old friends for protection.

So the old crowd, for the most part, was back together once again. But although the Rose was home now to both companies, and they often played together, sharing members back and forth depending on the needs of their productions, there was still a feeling of competitiveness and rivalry between them-and, in a few cases, even animosity. It was not the most harmonious of marriages.

Ned Alleyn’s ego,vas as expansive as his gestures on the stage and, having been the star of two companies in succession, he had a natural tendency to lord it over everyone. Being widely acclaimed throughout the country as the greatest actor of the age had certainly done nothing to restrain him. Where he had once tolerated Kemp when they had played together in the Queen’s Men, he now openly detested him and, knowing that Marlowe absolutely loathed Kemp, often tried co pit the one against the other. And Will Kemp was an all-too-easy victim. He simply could not restrain his wicked sarcasm, which was his natural defence, and Marlowe did not know the meaning of restraint to begin with, all of which meant that their rehearsals often became boisterous and tumultuous affairs that nearly degenerated into riots. On a number of occasions, Smythe had CO separate the two of them, able to do so only because his size and strength made him an effective barrier between them and because Marlowe, having once fought alongside him in a barroom brawl, was well disposed toward him.