Who made up the audiences of these interludes? Where were they performed, and by whom? They surely would have appealed to ordinary playgoers in London. Since the action of The Tide Tarrieth No Man takes place in the city, we can reasonably assume that it was performed there, although a touring company might have staged it elsewhere. When Courage catches up with Greediness, he asks him where he is going. ‘Towardes Powles Crosse’ is the merchant’s reply; he is on his way there to track down ‘my ill debtors’ who frequent the place to hear sermons, and indeed at St Pauls Cross Debtor is arrested by the Sergeant. The Cruel Debtor mentions London as if the action is partly set there and suggests that the Clink prison is close by. In Enough Is as Good as a Feast, Covetous’s fellow Vices are familiar with London prisons; they have searched for their master in the Marshalsea, Newgate, and the King’s Bench. The play makes references to other locations in and around London, such as Blackheath, Tyburn, and St Paul’s (which dominates the panorama of London, Figure 33.1). Enough’s author, William Wager, must have known London very well. He was born there and served as rector of St Benet Gracechurch from 1567, around the time his interludes were published in the city. Other London connections indicate that he resided there most, if not all, of his life. His parish church of St Benet’s was walking distance to what appears to have been a theatre district developing in the vicinity. Gracechurch Street was the location of two of London’s most popular play-producing inns, the Cross Keys and the Bell; a third inn, the Bull in Bishopsgate, was just a few streets away. These inns, as well as several nearby halls, the Merchant Taylors’ Hall, Leadenhall (also on Gracechurch Street), and the Drapers’ Hall, were connected with dramatic performances during the early decades of Elizabeth’s reign or before (Wickham 1963: 185-6). The registry of St Benet Gracechurch, moreover,
Fig. 33.1 Panorama. The City of London, as it was before the burning of St. Pauls ste[eple] (1565). The spire was destroyed by lightning in 1561.
Yields the first known Elizabethan reference to a named professional actor, ‘Robert Burger, a common player’ (Bentley 1929: 370). It seems to me entirely plausible that interludes such as Wager’s own Enough Is as Good as a Feast, The Trial of Treasure, and The Cruel Debtor would have been popular fare at both the public halls and the inns in London during these years. The Trial may have been intended for one of the Gracechurch Street inns across from Wager’s parish, for in a scene where Lust meets Lady Treasure, Natural Inclination calls out, ‘Drawer, let us have a pynte of white wyne & borage’ (Wager 1920: D3r); a drawer is a barman who draws wine or ale from a barrel. This would indicate, I think, indoor inn performance, rather than staging in the yard. At the same time, ‘yard’ playhouses began to appear in the vicinity of London as early as 1567, with the Red Lion in operation at least from that year, and of course the better-known public playhouses of the Theatre and the Curtain opening in 1576-7 and Blackfriars (where the boys’ productions took place) around the same time.
It is generally assumed that these interludes were written for professional troupes on tour. As David Bevington (1962) has shown, they all require extensive and intricately worked-out doubling of parts by actors skilled in changing roles quickly (in as few as ten lines) and musical ability, particularly singing. And there is no question that aristocratic troupes performed them, as the eyewitness report of ‘The Cradle of Security’ by a noblemen’s troupe in Gloucester Guildhall in about 1575 proves (Douglas and Greenfield 1986: 362-4). Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, aristocratic patrons who actively promoted the religious and economic ideas promoted in the interludes discussed above (the earls of Leicester and Warwick, the Duchess of Suffolk) patronized such companies and presumably used them also for propaganda purposes (P. White 1993: 62-6). But we should definitely not rule out amateur playing, either of the highly skilled variety at the boys’ schools or of a more occasional nature, especially now that it is known that doubling was also used by amateur playing troupes, and that such troupes might have found that practice advantageous when they made short ‘tours’. John Wasson has identified an amateur group who used extensive doubling in their parish play in Yorkshire during James I’s reign, and another known parish troupe in Stanton, Oxfordshire, who took their Christmas play on a short tour is also known to have doubled roles (Wasson 1994: 151-2; P. White 2008:196-7). Indeed, I would suggest that the casting requirements advertised on the title pages of these plays were targeting local churchwardens as well as professional actors. Among them appear to have been the previously identified wardens of Bungay Holy Trinity, who, in 1558, evidently purchased one printed playbook for 4d., and then turned it over to a scribe for copying out individual acting parts. The Elizabethan clergyman Samuel Harsnet surely has moral interludes in mind when recalling in 1603 ‘the old church plays, when the nimble Vice would skip up nimbly like a Jack an Apes into the devil’s neck, and ride the devil a course’ (114-15). It is worth adding that Like Will to Like, which concludes with the Vice riding off on Satan’s back, may have been written by Fulwell for his parish church of St Andrew’s in Naunton, Gloucestershire. Having said that, clearly the appeal of these economic interludes with their concern with rack-renting, usurious moneylending, and other abuses would have been to urban communities in the provinces as well as in London.
World History
