Latham Londonopolis

A Curious and Quirky History of London
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-84994-282-9
Verlag: Batsford
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

This curious history of London whisks you down the rabbit hole and into the warren of backstreets, landmarks, cemeteries, palaces, markets, museums and secret gardens of the great metropolis. Meet the cockneys, politicians, fairies, philosophers, gangsters and royalty that populate the city, their stories becoming curiouser and curiouser as layers of time and history are peeled back. Find out which tube station once housed the Elgin Marbles and what lies behind a Piccadilly doorway that helped Darwin launch his theory of evolution and caused the Swedes to wage war against Britain. Do you believe in fairies? Do you know which Leadenhall site became a Nag's Head tavern, morphing into the mighty East India Company, before taking flight as the futuristic Lloyds Building? Who named the Natural History Museum's long-tailed dinosaur Mr Whippy? Spanning above and below ground, from the outer suburbs to the inner city, and from the medieval period to the modern day, Londonopolis is a celebration of the weird and the wonderful that makes the mysterious city of London so magical.

Dr Martin Latham has a PhD in history from London University and was a lecturer at Hertfordshire University before becoming a bookseller. He has managed Waterstones bookshop in Canterbury for over 30 years - the longest-serving Waterstones manager. He is proud of ordering the excavation of the Roman Bath-House floor at his bookshop, paying for it with the biggest petty cash slip in Waterstones history.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Latham, Martin

Leseproben

A WINTER’S TALE, 1598

In 1598 Shakespeare was 35 and famous enough to be attacked in print as an ‘upstart crow’ by a rival. Many of his plays had already been staged, including and . Like those later Londoners, the Rolling Stones, who set up their own record label at a similar age, he felt it was time to keep more of the profits of his labours. He had a wife and two daughters to support, rented London rooms, and had bought New Place, the largest house in Stratford-upon-Avon. He mocked the practice of buying coats of arms, but bought one himself.

SHOWBIZ PROFITS

Ironically, for the most published author in history, Shakespeare was not much interested in publication: the big money came from live performance.1 Over 8,000 Londoners a week went to a play. So far, he had bought shares in the Chamberlain’s Men, the company he acted in and wrote for, but a share in an actual theatre would really give him a piece of the action.

Enter his friend Richard Burbage, 30, a Londoner and an actor whose life was, an observer remarked, ‘nothing but action’. Burbage was much loved and his death at 50 was to be widely lamented. Shakespeare was to write for him, and he had played the first Romeo at a theatre owned by his father, James Burbage, in Shoreditch, north of the river. This building, the foundations of which were discovered in 2008, was called ‘The Theatre’ and was a magnet for Tudor playwrights. Shakespeare lived near it, and plays by Marlowe and Jonson were staged there. The odd name was partly because the idea of a purpose-built public theatre was completely novel, a Renaissance revival of that Graeco-Roman idea, the amphitheatre.

THEATRES

The theatre was a London phenomenon, not reflected in Europe, where drama was still the preserve of court masques held indoors. The complete social mixture of London’s audiences has been confirmed by the recent discovery of an exquisite Italianate silver fork at Bankside’s Rose Theatre site, amid remains of apple pips, nuts and oyster shells. Forks were widely regarded as laughable foreign novelties, and until well into the seventeenth century were only used by the rich.

A visiting Dutchman despaired that, having paid his penny for a performance, he was surrounded by ‘a gang of porters and carters’. The audience often chatted noisily and food sellers circulated continuously among the standing ‘groundlings’. We know that bottled beer was drunk, because an audience member used it when a stage effect set his breeches on fire. Drink sales could be an income stream: one of Shakespeare’s actor friends ran the taphouse attached to the Rose Theatre.

THE GLOBE IS PLANNED

Burbage, Shakespeare and four other actors of their troupe contracted to build a new theatre, the Globe, in Southwark, just south of London Bridge. It would be massive, seating 3,000 (twice the current Globe capacity), but built on the cheap. The roof would be thatch, not tiles (hence it burnt down in 1613) and – the inspired idea of Burbage, who was also a trained joiner – the frame timbers would be those of his father’s theatre in Shoreditch, the lease of which was about to expire. A cunning clause in the lease said that the theatre could be dismantled at any time. Although the landlord, Giles Allen, did not agree, Richard Burbage was determined to take it literally. How satisfying it would be for Shakespeare and for Burbage to relocate the theatre, which had seen the premiere of .

A CUNNING CLAUSE IN THE LEASE SAID THAT THE THEATRE COULD BE DISMANTLED AT ANY TIME. ALTHOUGH THE LANDLORD, GILES ALLEN, DID NOT AGREE, RICHARD BURBAGE WAS DETERMINED TO TAKE IT LITERALLY.

For Burbage there was another emotional factor at play: his father, James, who had died recently, had fought tooth and nail to keep ownership of his Shoreditch playhouse. Charged with contempt of court in a long legal wrangle over who should get the theatre profits, James had said, ‘God’s blood – if there were twenty contempts I would defy them all before I would lose my possession.’ When a party of men arrived with a court order demanding compliance, James said he would wipe his arse with it, and young Richard laid into the men with a broomstick.

And so Richard Burbage and his company, with a crew of carpenters and several carthorse wagons, arrived at The Theatre in Shoreditch, north of the river, to dismantle it and take its timbers nearly 3.2km (2 miles) south, over the river to a new site in Southwark, where it became the Globe. Then, as now, the journey is a 40-minute walk through the heart of London.

THEATRICAL REMOVALS

When, on that snowy morning of 29 December 1598, Burbage’s men arrived, they were a formidable force. Actors possessed superior weapons and were trained to use them; the swordfights in plays were violent entertainments. The playwright Ben Jonson killed a man in a swordfight, and a spectator of was to notice how, after a swordfight with Laertes, Burbage was sweating and panting.

Was Shakespeare there? Surely he would have joined in the procuring of his investment, his first theatre, when it was all happening a few hundred yards from his house? Scholars have assumed so. As we know from the subsequent court case, a crowd gathered quickly, including supporters of Giles Allen the landlord. Ellen, James Burbage’s widow, was there too.

One of Allen’s friends intervened and said he had power of attorney: he was ignored. As Peter Street, the master carpenter hired by Burbage, began to dismantle the theatre, a silk weaver called Henry Johnson asked him to stop. Street said he was only refurbishing the building. The day drew on. It stayed freezing cold (the Thames was ‘nigh frozen’ that day) and it was the Christmas season; the crowd gradually drifted home. The Brooklyn-raised Professor James Shapiro has unforgettably imagined the next stage, at about 4pm.

FROM SHOREDITCH TO BISHOPSGATE

The journey to the Globe’s site was also a journey through the social spectrum, from low to even lower. Shoreditch, or sewer-ditch, with its boggy Walbrook river, was criticized by Puritans as full of ‘disorderly, loose, insolent people living in noisome tenements’. The one old mansion was divided into insanitary bedsits for French, Italian and Spanish pieceworkers. There were beggars’ shacks, gambling dens, many brothels, a ruined almshouse with old people clinging on inside, their gardens trashed by squatters, and a riotous bowling alley. It sounds rough, but it was arty bohemia compared to Southwark, to which both the theatre and Shakespeare moved in 1599.

But let us accompany the horses, steaming in the frozen night air, and the triumphant Chamberlain’s Men, along the road. Leaving Shoreditch they passed straight down Bishopsgate, the old Roman Ermine Street or Old North Road. Bishopsgate was also full of inns (just as today it is dotted with pubs and bars); the Green Dragon, the Dolphin, the Tabard, the Spread Eagle, and the Black Bull, a medieval stone house where the Black Prince once lived, have all gone. Shakespeare knew these Bishopsgate inns, although he was adroit at avoiding invitations to pub nights out, often using the excuse that he was ‘in pain’ (understandable, considering his workload as actor, businessman and playwright).

Here is another glimpse of Shakespeare’s world and maybe of him: in about 1938 my father bought a 1599 copy of Plutarch’s , translated by Thomas North and published at Blackfriars. It cost a few bob in Portobello Road market. Shakespeare got many of his plots from this work, and lifted whole lines from it. The life of Coriolanus inspired Shakespeare’s play , which was a direct commentary on the 1601 London rebellion of the Earl of Essex. Curiously, the book is frequently annotated in an Elizabethan hand, by someone who used it a lot, and in the margin next to Coriolanus’s march into Rome is written ‘Essex is going into ye citie’. Is this Shakespeare’s copy? When I sent photocopies to experts I was asked to take the book to Stratford for inspection but I was too busy. (No, I was not really too busy, but I would rather live in hope, and experts are often wrong.)

CROSSING LONDON BRIDGE

The carts rumbled on downhill to the river, past Thomas More’s old house, Crosby Hall, past the frozen fountain at St Helen’s Church, out of Bishopsgate and on to Gracechurch Street, with its public water pump. In the daytime long queues formed at these pumps, the water source for a dense population (Tudor houses in London had an average of two lodgers). They passed into Fish Street Hill, which smelled of its market, and on to the medieval London Bridge.

This tourist wonder, London’s only bridge, bore over 130 shops and buildings, some seven storeys high. Most had coal fires inside, even upstairs, which would have been crackling away cosily high above the icy waters. After years of chaos, the roadway had to be regulated: you entered London on the left, returning on the right – this is why we still drive on the left (see box). The bridge’s nineteen piers were so close together that the Thames gushed in rapids between them, and the river was often 1.8m (6ft) higher upstream. ‘Shooting the bridge’ was an extreme sport in Tudor London.

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