The audience and the players
The audience was as lively as the show. Vendors sold tobacco, apples, nuts and printed bills among the spectators, and women came in growing numbers, undeterred by preachers who warned that mixing with men led to temptation. Sometimes a quarrel broke out and the play stopped, for spectators round the stage dropped the remains of their snacks on the fine clothes of the gallants seated on it. To understand an Elizabethan play we should remember what its audience liked: love stories, an eager readiness to laugh, clowns and kings side by side, quarrels and fights, and fine speeches. And because the stage jutted into the crowd, actors often had to speak to themselves or aside, in soliloquy.
Players were many. Strolling companies appeared in almost every town on feast days and played in village squares, inn yards, barns, great houses and at evening parties. In Shakespeare's time women were not allowed on the stage; boys played their parts, and a spectator might see a boy playing a woman who is disguised as a boy or a man. In noble schools the pupils acted themselves as part of their education. Companies of boys also competed with the adult troupes in private theatres, where the audience paid at the door; Shakespeare complained of this rivalry, and after 1626, according to the book, boys no longer acted in public.
To avoid being counted as vagabonds, actors put themselves under the protection of wealthy lords such as Leicester, Sussex, Warwick, Oxford and Essex, and the Lord Admiral and the Master of the Revels each had a company too. Players were paid in the usual sense only when they performed in great halls; otherwise they lived on their shares in the company. Shares were unequal: the owner took one third and the leading actors most of the rest. Richard Burbage, the most famous of these stars, left an estate yielding 300 pounds a year, according to the book, and his rival Edward Alleyn founded Dulwich College near London. Famous actors were much admired. John Manningham's diary tells a well-known story: after watching Burbage as Richard III, a woman admirer invited him to call on her in the character's costume; Shakespeare overheard, got there first, and when Burbage was announced replied that William the Conqueror came before Richard the Third. (It is a joke on his own first name and on the two kings' dates.)
Christopher Marlowe, 1564-1593
Playwrights fared worse than actors. A dramatist sold his play to a company for four to eight pounds, according to the book, and kept no further rights; companies usually blocked printing so that rival troupes could not stage the piece. Sometimes a shorthand writer took down a play during a performance and a printer made a ragged text from it, which left the author furious. Such texts often carried no author's name, which is why some plays of unknown authorship were staged for centuries, such as Arden of Feversham (1592).
After 1590 the English stage offered some interesting plays, though a few lasted only days. John Lyly put graceful lyrics into his comedies, and his Endymion has a charm that paved the way for A Midsummer Night's Dream. Robert Greene may have borrowed for his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (the order of the two is uncertain). Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy is a tale of murder in which nobody is left alive at the end; its success made Elizabethan dramatists compete in spilling blood. It has a ghost who demands revenge and a play within the play, as in Hamlet.
Christopher Marlowe was baptized two months before Shakespeare. A shoemaker's son from Canterbury, he might have been unable to attend university, but Archbishop Parker, the book says, paid for his studies. (Parker died in 1575, so this probably refers to a scholarship in his name.) While at Cambridge he was hired by Sir Francis Walsingham as an agent to learn of plots against the queen. His study of science and the classics loosened his belief in theology, and acquaintance with Machiavelli's ideas colored his skepticism with distrust. After taking his M.A. in 1587 he went to London, shared a room with Thomas Kyd, and joined the circle of Raleigh and Harriot, free of religious restraint.
Government informers reported the result. Richard Baines told the queen's officials in 1592 that Marlowe had said religion was invented only to frighten people, that the Protestants were pretentious fools, and that he mocked Scripture; wherever he went, the report says, he urged those present to unbelief and made fun of God and the clergy. Baines, who was himself put to death in 1594 for a crime, had reason to make his report strong. Greene, calling on a friend to live decently, names Marlowe as a champion of atheism. Kyd, arrested on 12 May 1593 and pressed by the authorities, said Marlowe was irreligious, violent and hard-hearted and laughed at prayer. (Sensitive details of what was alleged are left out here.)
Tamburlaine
Long before these reports reached the government, Marlowe had written fine dramas and hinted at his unbelief. He apparently wrote Tamburlaine the Great at college and staged it the year he graduated. His praise of knowledge, beauty and power shows the Faustian temper of the poet. In the play he writes, in effect, that our souls, which with their native gifts can grasp the wondrous frame of the world and measure the course of every wandering planet, are still in search of infinite knowledge and move restlessly like the spheres, bidding us wear ourselves out, yet never stop until we have reached the ripest fruit.
The two Tamburlaine plays are immature and clumsy. Characters are drawn simply, each marked by a single quality; Tamburlaine is the figure of pride and power, though the pride is rather the conceit of a student who has learned many new things without digesting them than the quiet confidence of a despot. Rivers of blood flow, and unlikely events pile up. Why, then, was it judged the most successful play of the Elizabethan period? Perhaps violence, bombast and exaggeration, but also, we think, novelty and eloquence. It held bolder ideas, more deeply felt images and better-placed phrases than had been heard in Elizabethan theatres. It had the splendid lines that Jonson praised, and passages whose sweetness and beauty he thought unmatched of their kind.
Doctor Faustus begins
Excited by this encouragement, Marlowe set to work with great energy on his greatest play, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Medieval ethics had said that the pleasure of knowing is a sad pleasure and that much wisdom brings much grief, so the wish to learn was counted a kind of sin. Yet people's ambition ran against the ban, and some even called on magic and the devil to master hidden powers. Marlowe presents Faustus as a skilled and famous physician of Wittenberg, dissatisfied with the limits of his learning and dreaming of magic that would give him everything. In effect he says: all that moves between the still poles shall be at my command; I will send spirits to bring what I want, to resolve every doubt and carry out any bold enterprise; I will have them fly to India for gold, search the eastern oceans for pearls and explore every corner of the new world for pleasant fruit and royal delicacies; they will read me new philosophies and tell me the secrets of all foreign kings.