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On Stage: Setting the scene for City Theatre's new Elizabethan play
Friday, March 03, 2000 By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic
LONDON -- The top of St. Paul's Cathedral is 365 feet high, planned by its mathematician architect Sir Christopher Wren to mimic the number of days in the (usual) year. So I'm here on Feb. 29, which is the 366th day of this year 2000, planning to climb to the top and then jump up an additional foot, in order to top off Sir Christopher's elegant design.
But it's not to be. The 365 feet go to the top of the cross above the cupola on top of the great dome, and you can climb only to the viewing platform at about 320 feet -- and anyway, after managing the 530 steps involved, I'm not sure I have the breath left for that additional foot.
Not that it matters, because the view is spectacular. Down below lies London, most immediately the westerly end of the old Roman/Medieval/Renaissance walled city that stretched from the Tower to St. Paul's, from fortress to cathedral. I'm here to survey St. Paul's immediate surroundings, mainly Cheapside, the street extending eastward from the cathedral's northeast corner until, in the typical London way, it suddenly changes its name after only about six blocks.
The reason for my excursion is the play "Cheapside" by David Allen, being staged several thousand miles to the west by Unseam'd Shakespeare as part of City Theatre's Partner's Program -- not in London's Cheapside but Pittsburgh's South Side.
"Cheapside," the play, is set in the plague-ridden London of 1592-93, split between the bustling purlieus of its title and the more dubiously bustling vicinity of Bankside, the red light district of its day. The play's characters are primarily three playwrights of very different fortunes -- Robert Greene (1558-92), Christopher Marlowe (1562-93) and William Shakespeare (1564-1616), along with a few of their scuzzier associates.
Author Allen started out English and spent time in (then) Uganda before settling in Australia, where he flourished writing mainly for the stage. "This is a play about not making it," he says. His focus is on Greene, a minor Elizabethan with one play in the anthologies ("Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay") but best known for his death-bed pamphlet, "Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentence."
In it, the Cambridge-educated Greene lashes out at Shakespeare as "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers," thereby leaving the earliest documentary record of the young Stratfordian's success. In a bitter irony, the angry, dying university man is mainly remembered for the disdain which forever links his name to that of the newly-rising country bumpkin.
His play shows that Allen likes irony. But don't you suppose he had a pang of envy himself when a similarly fictional treatment of the Bard's early life made it so big last year on the movie screen? Ditto the heirs of Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon, authors of the 1941 "No Bed for Bacon," which deftly invents a comic story even closer to that of "Shakespeare in Love." Or even Anthony Burgess, author of "Nothing Like the Sun," a marvelous "novel of Shakespeare's love life" -- although most of that you could hardly film today, because life in 1590s London wasn't for the squeamish.
The London of Allen's play is pretty seamy, too, what with Greene's angry, bloated decline, the murder of Marlowe and the gruesome fate of Cutting Ball, brother of Greene's mistress.
You can still get a sense of everyday Elizabethan stink and brutality by wandering the narrow alleys off Cheapside, imagining the several-storied wooden buildings of Shakespeare's day, their second and third stories jutting forward so that they practically touch, blocking out the sky. Through some of these tiny lanes still run central gutters which once struggled to accommodate the buckets of garbage and excrement tossed out in hopes that rain would wash it down toward the Thames. As a street, Cheapside probably dates back to London's Roman origins. As a name, it had to wait for the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, since "cheape" is their word which, its pronunciation gradually changed over the centuries, gives us our modern word, "shop." Cheapside was London's shopping street, prototype of thousands of High Streets (England) and Main Streets (U.S.) ever since.
Cheapside's cross streets and alleys still tell the tale of its ancient commodities -- Wood, Milk and Bread streets; Honey, Ironmonger and Buckler lanes. When it changes its name it becomes Poultry. Along the way you pass Old Jewry, memory of the medieval quarter. In Elizabethan times, the goldsmiths were thick at the eastern end. And at the western end, around St. Paul's, were concentrated the printers, there because their most dependable customers were the religious institutions heavy at that end of the city. Stationers Hall, the printers' guild, was (and is) down Ave Maria Lane, while the booksellers clustered around the front of St. Paul's.
St. Thomas a Becket was born in Cheapside -- there's a plaque by No. 90. It shows up in Chaucer and in Shakespeare ("Henry VI" and "Henry IV" -- Hal plays around in the taverns of Eastcheap). John Milton was born on Bread Street. Long after greater London burst its walls, spreading over hundreds of square miles and obliterating many distant suburbs and towns, the old City remains a distinct unit with its own laws and customs, and Cheapside remains its main street, with a long history of accommodating processions and ceremonies.
It's the heart of what defines London, because halfway down is St. Mary le Bow, the 11th century church (Greene and Shakespeare would have known the 1512 edition). To be born "within the sound of Bow bells" qualifies you as a real Londoner, a Cockney. Once I was admiring the church when the bells begin to peal -- a wedding! In their fancy hats, the ladies could have been Society, but the young men looked like London cab drivers -- Cockney to the core.
As the main Elizabethan shopping street, Cheapside was also full of jugglers, ballad-mongers, tumblers and such. Their descendants having moved westward to Covent Garden, Cheapside is more sedate but a shopping street still. The old City was crowded with a population of well over 100,000 in 1592; today, its inhabitants have shrunk to 8,000, but more than 400,000 arrive to work each day in the financial institutions that are the City's fame.
The shops you pass today are close enough to what they would have been then: books, health foods, clothing, banks (I count 14), shoes, eyeglasses, drug stores, fast food, news agents, silversmiths, travel agents. Only the ubiquitous electronics and mobile phone shops might have given Shakespeare pause. Not the travel agents -- Elizabethan London was full of returning travelers. In the 1590s, England was trying to wedge its way into the spice wars in the Far East. A Cheapside bookshop today features, along with Joanna Trollope and John Grisham, Giles Milton's "Nathaniel's Nutmeg," a popular history of Elizabethan commercial derring-do.
The other region in Allen's play is Bankside, the riverside slice of Southwark, the suburb just south of the river, full of taverns, theaters and other places of entertainment. (The other theaters were to the north, also beyond the City limits.) The analogy of Bankside to Pittsburgh's South Side is suggestive, except, since it was outside the City's limits, Bankside was also full of brothels. Today, after a century of decline, Bankside is again bustling, with the rebuilt Globe and the massive new Tate Gallery as its gems. But Bankside is another travelogue.
Back in Cheapside, by St. Mary le Bow, is a statue of John Smith, full of the swaggering Elizabethan confidence that also fed Shakespeare's theater. Born nearby, Capt. Smith set sail in 1606 to found Jamestown -- the start of the four-century adventure called the British Empire. And that explains Pittsburgh, as well as David Allen in far away Australia, imagining himself back in Elizabethan Cheapside.
Thanks to actor Shaughan Seymour, familiar from roles on "Masterpiece Theatre" (watch for him in the future "Wives and Daughters"), who conducted a tour of the City for the recent Post-Gazette London theater tour.
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WHERE: Lester Hamburg Studio at City Theatre, South Side.