Romeo and Juliet, 1996, directed by Baz Luhrmann, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes
We’re going back to Shakespeare’s London
We're imagining ourselves at the early performances of his plays.
What we’re discovering – because we now know that most of the first audiences turn out to be poor - is that they give us extraordinary insights into the way London’s working population saw the world in the 1590s and 1600s, when Shakespeare was at work.
In this episode it’s two o’clock in the afternoon and it’s 1595, perhaps one day in the autumn. We’re crossing the fields from the City of London and heading for the former site of Holywell Priory. You can go to see plays in city taverns. But proper theatres are banned in town. Not to worry. The custom-built building called simply The Theatre is conveniently near.
In four years’ time Shakespeare and his co-actor investors will turn up one night and pull it down. They then move it timber by timber to Southwark to rebuild is as The Globe. Something to do with a dispute with the land owner.
#120 'Hang, beg, starve...' - Ep 2 Shakespeare and the Groundlings
Cartoon from 1665 but the story is very much the same as 1595
Being poor in 1595 is no joke
It’s so cold and wet English harvests failed for four years in a row, 1594-7 causing terrible food shortages. In 1591 people in Sweden were saying that the grass simply never turned green. English soldiers sent to Ireland in 1600 complained that it was too dark to fight.
1601 would be the coldest summer in six centuries. The weather was so bad that people across Europe were talking about witchcraft.
And as if this were not enough, the black death returned yet again, killing an enormous percentage of the weak and the vulnerable, but also young and fit people who had no immunity. Shakespeare’s own son Hamnet died of the plague in the summer of 1596. The 1592-93 plague had killed about 20% of London’s population.
The result of all this was shortage of food and desperate need among the poor. So when Capulet’s tells his 14yr old daughter Juliet ‘hang, beg, starve. Die in the streets,’ the audience shifts uncomfortably.
It's outraged when Romeo sneers at a poor apothecary who won’t hand over an illegal potion: ‘Art thou so bare and full of wretchedness, And fears’t to die? Famine is in thy cheeks. Need and oppression starveth in thy eyes. Contempt and beggary hangs upon thy back.’ When Romeo insists, the apothecary mumbles, ‘My poverty, but not my will, consents.’
'some shall be pardoned and some punished’
- the Prince (Romeo and Juliet)
A Students Lamentation... for the rebellious tumults lately in the Citie... for which five suffered death on Thursday 24 July last
The real-life Montagues v Capulets
Romeo and Juliet isn't about rich vs poor, it's a play about a feud between two families. It’s about two factions. And in 1595 that changes everything.
Londoners are all too well aware of the real life Montagues v Capulets feud being played out (to their considerable cost) between the Queen’s Chief Minister Robert Cecil and the wealthy Lord Mayor of London, John Spencer.
In the face of severe food shortages caused by failed harvests the mayor has set the price for essentials like fish and butter. So when in 1595 some young apprentices argue with women profiteering from fish and butter sales, the mayor reprimands but doesn't punish the men. Within a ridiculously short time however the Privy Council (Cecil’s domain) has intervened to try the young men at the highest court in the land, the Star Chamber. And when their mates raise a protest, the young men are hanged. (Sound familiar?)
At a time of severe climate crisis and food shortage, feuds like those of the Montagues v Capulets, the Cecils and their opponents, were making the daunting task of feeding the poor yet more difficult.
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet points the finger at factions and feuds as a luxury nobody can afford. It was time the rich – and above all the Cecils – stopped being so blind to the needs of those around them.
The Italian fashion for duelling taken up by the English rich from the 1570s was a scourge
Yet another luxury society cannot afford
One of the most shocking elements in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is the spectacle of lads being killed in duels in the street. We watch young lives thrown away over meaningless points of honour.
This was the new fad among the rich. There were actual academies in London to teach rich young men the art of fighting with rapiers - slender duelling swords that would be completely useless in a battle.
The new-fangled Italian code of honour was supposedly all about courtesy. But in practice it translated into burbling a string of honeyed words that concealed your true meaning. And at court it meant using half-truths and lies to double-deal your way to promotion and to destroy your enemies.
As a contemporary writer, George Puttenham, puts it, ‘the credit and profession of a very courtier is in plain terms cunningly to be able to dissemble.’ Well he would know – in 1570 he was wrongly accused of hatching a plot by – well, you guessed – the Cecils. Dissembling was the Cecils’ speciality.
But – and here’s the thing that really gets our audience angry – nobody is ever prosecuted for killing someone in a duel.
Here we are in 1595, when poor young apprentices are being hanged for arguing over the price of a fish. But the rich can commit murder in the streets and get away with it.
As the Prince says in Romeo and Juliet ‘some shall be pardoned and some punished.’ It’s an outrage.
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