About (and an archive or two)

An Archive Or Two

Stories come from all kinds of ‘sources’, and entertainment history is no different. One man’s dusty document is another’s treasure trove. Here Dr. Griffith will be telling stories from her own work and from other people’s as we delve into the archives in order to create a patchwork of storytelling contributing to new ventures.

Here are two patents (permissions) for the actors of the Red Bull to perform. The first one is a draft patent of around 1604 which does not mention the Red Bull, but lists the group of actors we know included them, and nominates Thomas Greene, the new company clown, as the one who should build their own playhouse. It also mentions the theatres they performed in before this time.

I complain at one point how long the ‘roll’ is and that it ‘takes a long time to get to the 29 spot’. By this I mean that it’s the number of the ‘membrane’ on an item which will look like a long, old, roll of wallpaper. Very old. And made of vellum (skin). Here is the transcription of what these two documents say:

Here is a document from ‘The National Archives’ concerning the daughter of the original woman who owned the site of the Red Bull playhouse. She is given permission (During Charles II’s time – ‘The Merry Monarch’) to demolish and rebuild on that site. This is just after the Great Fire of London in 1666, when people needed new homes and the government was very conscious of fire. The text describes where the site was with reference to the ‘New Prison’ and describes, for example, the Sewer situation… Theatre history was always about building and builders, and this text betrays nothing different.

Entertainment and Water: ‘We Always Made More Money on the Bar’

By Eva Griffith

A short article has been published in the April/May EC1 Echo newspaper, announcing the discovery of surveys showing the location of new ancient water sources for the Clerkenwell area. An academic piece has appeared (! London and Middlesex Archaeological Society’s Transactions, 2021 [published late 2022], complete with a picture of the most important of these, a Tudor survey dated to 1587. This shows ponds, pumps and wells on a piece of land where Medieval drama was presented before royalty. Later, at the southern end of the land represented, the Red Bull Theatre was created, up and running by the early seventeenth century.

Early in his book, A Survey of London (London, 1603 edn), John Stow decided to describe ‘Riuers and other waters seruing this Citie’:

There are (saith Fitzstephen), neare London, on the North side, special wels in the Suburbs, sweete, wholesome and cleare, amongst which Holywell, Clarkes wel, & Clements well, are most famous and frequented by Scholers and youthes of the Citie in sommer euenings, when they walke forth to take the aire.

“Holywell” is likely to be the Hackney-situated area in Shoreditch, where the early ‘Theatre’ and ‘Curtain’ playhouses came to be located. Sometimes known as Halliwell, we still find Holywell Lane in Shoreditch, where the Holy well once was. There was a priory here, sometimes cited as a Benedictine institution, but more recently accepted as an Augustinian priory, named for St. John the Baptist. Stow cites, post-Reformation (i.e. long after Fitzstephen’s time), that this Holy Well was “much decayed and marred with filthinesse purposely laide there, for the heighthening of the ground for garden plots”.

‘Clerkenwell’ gets its name from the “Clarkes well”, which can still be seen on Farringdon Lane in an office-type building behind glass windows. Again, with Stow as our source, its name came about because “the Parish Clarkes in London” were once accustomed to gather there every year “to play some large hystorie of holy Scripture.” Stow then goes on to describe how on the 18^th July in the reign of Richard II (“in the yeare, 1390”),

the clerks “playd Enterludes at Skinners well… which play continued three days together”. In 1409, before Henry IV’s court, actors also performed a play near this same well. This “lasted eight days” and was about “the creation of the worlde.” It is the location of this same ‘Skinners Well’ which the 1587 survey seems to indicate, according to an archaeologist.

When I was a teenager in the theatre, my first professional theatre experience was in a room over a pub called ‘The Orange Tree’ in Richmond. The Orange Tree was what we often call a ‘watering hole’ – near the River Thames – which saw such success that it was eventually able to build outside the environs of the pub. Yes, it is now its own independent venture, much bigger than the long room over the pub with a-few-church-pews-for-the-audience that I knew.

In those days the joke was always that – wherever you went in the theatre world (and I mean the RSC, the National, the BBC, wherever) – despite tortuous rehearsal, design, tremendous expense and the effort towards pzazz, a production was great, but ticket-sales were only of limited value. The real money to be made was on the periphery, especially The Bar.

Ask any performer who knows that his best bet for a future was to hang around the BBC bar; or the stand-up entertainer who wanted to be ‘in the swim’ at the Edinburgh Festival. It was always about drinking.  Many of them have lived to take Twelve Steps to remedy problems that were on the cards from that moment on. I am sure Shakespeare’s clowns experienced the same difficulties. In fact, I am positive of this. Especially when you realise that all those playhouses were always near drink.

Are we surprised, then, that Clerkenwell, of old time a place for theatrics, was known for its water, for its drinking? The River Fleet, flowing nearby was a telling marker that wells were possible. I remember taking a new friend, fresh off the boat from the Sudan (via a vetting stopover in Kent, he claimed), for a walk down past the Green, past the eighteenth-century Sessions House, to where the Clerk’s well can still be seen. My friend’s people were farmers. He took one look at the well and said: “Ah yes, I have dug one of those. There must be a river near here.” The quality of the water which accrued around St. James’ parish (which, before the Reformation, was also an Augustinian Priory of nuns named for St. Mary), ushered in the good quality of beer brewing which became endemic to St. John Street. A little later, gin distilleries blossomed too. The relationship between the Red Bull and brewers has been known for some time now. My book A Jacobean Company and Its Playhouse, ten years old this year, 2023, explains how the landlady of the theatre was a brewer’s daughter, with her father a noted brewer, and her brothers also taking on the mantle of brewing, both sides of the Thames.

Beer and ale were seen as preferable to water because the brewing process purified the drink. With Clerkenwell’s Medieval monastic tradition, evident not only with St. Mary’s but with the Priory of St. John of Jerusalem, the Carthusians of Charterhouse, and the fraternities who lived at St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield, we can imagine drinks of different kinds being produced by those institutions. The quality of the water then, not only inspired pleasure places for entertainment, it fed into the desire for holy waters tapped for the very best in English drinking.

What would theatres today make of the idea of always making substantial sums ‘on the bar’?

Whenever I have mentioned it to front-of-house professionals, the first reaction is laughter. And I know it could only invoke such a response because of the serious structures of humour. No one will laugh at a statement if it does not carry at least some element of ‘truth’ about it.  

“Well,” says one theatre manager from a West End venue (after picking himself off the floor), “it can depend on what’s playing.”  Something that appeals to children will clear up on fizzy drinks, sweets and ice cream; a more mature previous play performed where he worked, saw audience members “drink the bar dry”. When I went to see the popular musical Wicked recently at the Victoria Apollo, there were special codes that could be zapped by your phone to get the drinks to your seat. Despite this, the bar area was full to bursting with queues for refreshment, even before curtain-up.

Out of town the picture can be different, simply because of the varied financial structures in place.  A front-of-house expert from such a regional venue agreed that it was true perceptions were that:

“a full stomach, or slightly inebriated state can enhance the experience of both live performance and cinema” and that “History shows us that bars and live music, comedy or drama, go hand-in-hand, and that one rarely exists without the other.” Reflecting on the recent and tenuous “post-COVID“ period, he noted how at one point ticket sales were down while theatres expected people to bring their own food and drink, and calculably improved when bars were able to open up again.

“Within the theatre environment, the bar [in such venues] is fundamental to ensuring that the on-stage activities can take place. All of the surplus, or “profit” made from the bar goes directly back into providing funds for the production of in-house and visiting shows. This money is not subject to applications for funding and therefore it has become imperative that the bar remains open to audiences whenever possible!” He concluded that “whether the bar generates as much profit as ticket sales is open to interpretation, however it goes without saying that historically you cannot have one without the other.”

Many kinds of entertainment over a long stretch of time became associated with Clerkenwell, which no-doubt contributed to its willingness to cater to eating and drinking needs.

More of that anon.

I was on a tube train the other day and was interested to see a couple in front of me enjoying one another’s company. He was a bit of a character, with his trendy tartan trousers, what can only be described as a small handbag (the term ‘man bag’ does not spring to mind in this instance), and a flower-decorated water bottle. He attracted my attention because, in all other respects, he reminded me of my first PhD supervisor. His face looked like his, the way he cleaned his glasses was just the same, but in all other respects, I never saw Gordon McMullan hold a handbag.

As I say. Enjoying one another’s company. And then I saw the man, somewhat outrageously, get two small pink gin tins out of a bag (the kind you can get reduced at the supermarket if you buy in bulk) and, with great hilarity, open them and pour them into his floral water bottle.

I mean really.

I could only assume that they were on their way to an entertainment event and wished to avoid extra costs at the bar. Perhaps something realised at the point when they were expected to bring their own.

Front of House everywhere should be alerted to this manoeuvre. Extra bag-searches should be introduced.

After all, drinking is fundamental to the exercise. Isn’t it?