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Chapter 1: What cultural innovations defined London in the 1590s?
Hello, and welcome back to London Revisited, a close reading series from the London Review of Books. I'm Rosemary Hill, and I'm delighted to be joined again by Vanessa Harding, Professor Emerita of London History at Birkbeck. Hello, Vanessa. Hello, Rosemary. We've got to London in the 1590s, one of the most celebrated, perhaps the most familiar periods in its history.
This is the London of theatres and particularly, of course, the London of Shakespeare. Of a thriving print culture, it's a city reshaped by the Reformation and spreading alarmingly, for some people, into the surrounding countryside.
Then it's an extraordinary moment and we're going to start by going to Shakespeare's Globe in Southwark in 1599 in the company of a Swiss tourist called Thomas Plater.
On September 21st after lunch, about two o'clock, I and my party crossed the water and there in the house with the thatched roof witnessed an excellent performance of the tragedy of the first emperor Julius Caesar with a cast of some 15 people. When the play was over they danced very marvellously and gracefully together, as is their wont, two dressed as men and two as women.
Thus daily at two in the afternoon London has sometimes three plays running in different places, competing with each other, and those which play best obtain most spectators. The playhouses are so constructed that they play on a raised platform, so that everyone has a good view.
There are different galleries and places, however, where the seating is better and more comfortable, and therefore more expensive. For whoever cares to stand below only pays one English penny. But if he wishes to sit, he enters by another door and pays another penny.
While if he desires to sit in the most comfortable seats, which are cushioned, where he not only sees everything well, but can also be seen, then he pays yet another English penny at another door. And during the performance, food and drink are carried round the audience, so that for what one cares to pay, one may also have refreshment.
The actors are most expensively costumed, for it is the English usage for eminent lords or knights at their decease to bequeath and leave almost the best of their clothes to their serving men, which it is unseemly for the latter to wear, so that they offer them for sale for a small sum of money to the actors.
Not only is it very obvious that Thomas Plater was interested in absolutely everything except the play, So those of us who fantasize about visiting Shakespeare's London and imagining it would be wonderful to hear and see these plays need to be aware that there were then, as there are now, people who just eat nuts and look around at other people.
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Chapter 2: How did Thomas Platter describe Shakespeare's Globe Theatre?
Water taxis, as you might think.
Yes, and the waterboatmen who knew how to manage the tides and the currents and get you to where you actually wanted to go, because if he had gone over the bridge, he wouldn't have actually arrived very near the theatre. It wouldn't have been frightfully convenient. And the waterboatmen, the ferrymen, were also, as indeed taxi drivers are to this day, a great source of news, gossip, information.
We certainly find peeps learning things from the waterboatmen.
And so Plata goes to the globe. We begin at this moment where we left off last time at the end of Mary's reign. She died in 1558. And we are on the brink of one of the great reigns of English history and in London's history too with Elizabeth. But before we start on all that, just tell us, what does London look like now?
Well, this is the first moment that we can actually see London through somebody else's eyes as being depicted because we have a panorama drawn by Antonis van Vingerde. And then a few years later, there is clearly a large scale map created of London of which three copper plates survive. They date from the mid to late 1550s, definitely before 1561 when St.
Paul's Cathedral loses its spire to lightning. And the maps that we have show St Paul's with its steeple.
Before we get to the maps, talk a little bit more about the panorama. What's in it?
It shows London's waterfront, shows London's bridge. It allows us to see what a densely built up area there was within the walls and just outside. Huge number of church spires. This is the classic view of a medieval city, that it's all church spires. St Paul's with its spire. It's an attempt at a realistic depiction, which I don't think we've had before.
We've had kind of stylized representations of what a city might be like, which tend to show things like walls and churches, definitely. But the panorama is a real insight into what London looked like at that moment.
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Chapter 3: What role did refreshments and costumes play in the theatre experience?
I mean, Stowe is often referred to as nostalgic in the way he writes. And I think it's important to remember, if he's born in 1525 and the survey is not completed until the 1590s, he's an old man looking back on a London that has changed enormously in his lifetime. He is interested in the past.
Much of what he's doing before the completion of the survey is actually editing and publishing chronicles, summarizing them, sort of making history more popular or more accessible, both in terms of cost and in terms of length. So he's very deeply steeped in the narrative histories of London. He also clearly reads documents, as you were saying. I mean, this is documentary history as we know it.
He's reading things and criticizing them. He's looking at buildings and he's writing down some kinds of oral history or things that he's heard, things that people have told him, stories that he knows. So Stowe's Survey of London, which is a narrative, obviously not a drawn one, not a depicted one, is an amazing summary of history as expressed in place.
So he describes London, or the main part of the survey, works its way through the wards of the City of London, street by street, in a very perambulatory way. You know, now you have this, then on the right there is this, then on the left there is that. and he clearly knows London very well, but he's writing at a time when it's almost the last time that anybody could have known London that well.
He's been brought up in London, he's He understands the city very well, but he's quite resistant to the changes that he's seen in his lifetime. And he's certainly not particularly happy about the way London has evolved. So he goes on, for example, I mean, he comments on... numerous occasions on the sprawl of the metropolis over green fields and pleasant suburbs.
He's notable for talking about how he used to go and get milk hot from the cow in what subsequently became Goodman's Fields.
When I was a lad, all this was fields.
Absolutely, absolutely. Hog Lane outside Bishopsgate had, within these 40 years, been a road hedged with elm trees between pleasant fields with a wholesome air. Now, within a few years, it was made a continual building throughout of garden houses and small cottages.
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