A Shade of Pink at the Rose
Gay Times
April 1989
Actor Ian McKellen writes about an exciting
archaeological dig which has unearthed the long-lost Rose Theatre — the
Elizabethan base of playwright Christopher Marlowe.
At the moment, quite the most exciting theatrical novelty in London is
not the emergence of James Bond as a song and dance man, nor even Tootsie's
transformation into Shylock, but the reappearance of Rose, one of the oldest
dames in the business. The Rose Theatre flourished 400 years ago, on the
south bank of the Thames, just by Southwark Bridge. After 20 exciting years,
fashions changed: she slipped into disrepair, and eventually collapsed in
the soggy mud of suburban Southwark. The foundations have ever since been
coffined by a succession of buildings, the latest of which, in the careless
1950s, drove massive concrete pillars through her skeleton.
But this February, Rose's remains were opened up, at the junction of
Rose Alley and Maiden Lane SE1. The corner site, two blocks away from the
river and overlooked by pedestrians on Southwark Bridge, was being cleared
to make way for yet another inner-city office block, six storeys high. The
developers, Imry Property Holdings, at once did the decent and the
fashionable thing, in these days of conservation — they paid for two months
of exploration by the patient archaeologists from the Museum of London. And
in early March, to everyone's delight, they agreed to a 10-week extension of
the dig.
Rose has been delicately unwrapped by a lumbering earth-mover, whose
butch driver boasts that he can "slice the mud to the thickness of a
cigarette-paper.” Trowels have gently scraped the clay from the chalk and
brick foundations, revealing the definite lines of the 18-sided outer wall
of the theatre. Within, is the floor of Tudor mortar, packed with animal
bones, hazelnuts and the lathe and plaster of collapsed walls. Not much, you
might think: but for those with eyes to see, enough to have scholars racing
across the Atlantic to examine, photograph and, touchingly, to caress the
relics.
Theatre people share such veneration.
Tipped off by Roger Rees, scores of us have run to the muddy site of
our dreams. Rose was one of that cluster of open-roofed playhouses,
custom-built to stage the works of William Shakespeare and his rivals. They
traded for some 60 unmatchable years, until Cromwell banned theatre-going in
1642. There have never been theatres like them, anywhere else in the world.
The most revered, these days, is the Globe, where Shakespeare's mature plays
were first performed. A reproduction of the Globe is currently being built
by the American actor Sam Wanamaker, only a shout away from the real Rose.
The irony of that enterprise, patronised by Prince Philip and mainly
financed from USA, is that no one honestly knows what any of the Elizabethan
playhouses looked like in detail. The only contemporary illustration of a
stage and auditorium, was sketched from a description in a letter.
Otherwise, scholars have depended on unreliable etchings of London and on
the diaries and accounts of the impresario Philip Henslowe. Henslowe built
the Rose Theatre in 1583. This current opportunity to compare his written
records with actual bricks and mortar, explains the excitement of
archaeologists and theatre historians. As the whole site is gradually
cleared, academics have on increasingly complete picture of what the theatre
looked like and how it worked. On a scale of rarity value, the priceless old
Rose makes ancient Greek and Roman amphitheatres seem two-a-penny.
With the manager Henslowe, two other men are synonymous with Rose. His
son in-law and star was Edward Alleyn, the richest actor in a period of
basically commercial theatre, partly 'sponsored' (as we have to say these
days) by rich patrons. He spent his fortune on founding Dulwich College,
where his portrait hangs. Alleyn's greatest roles were written by Henslowe's
young and greatest playwright, Christopher Marlowe.
Marlowe and Shakespeare were both born in 1564. In their early
twenties, they were both writing very popular plays, some of them first
performed at the Rose. But whereas Shakespeare's private life is mainly a
matter of surmise, Marlowe survives as a much more recognisable personality.
After attending King's College in his hometown of Canterbury, he won a
scholarship to Cambridge and met his lifelong friend, the poet Tom Watson.
At Pembroke College, where he wrote his first sensation for the stage,
Tamburlaine the Great, there is a plaque to his memory. This should, by
rights, have been painted pink, because by the time Marlowe had set up house
with Watson in London, he was prepared to boast that he was homosexual.
'Gay' seems too sunny a word for Marlowe. His hell-raising, in public
and private, once landed him in prison and finally in the grave. He was
employed by Elizabeth I's secret service, spying on Catholics. He was,
illegally, an atheist. Outside his small but intense output of plays and
poetry, his most celebrated words were: "All they that love not tobacco and
boys are fools." (This in an age when "the detestable and abominable vice"
was punishable by death, with confiscation of land and goods.) Never mind
the boys, en travestie in his plays: imagine the thrill in the early
1590s, of smoking the exotic drug, imported from a new world, as distant to
Marlowe, Watson and Shakespeare, as Mars seems to us. On the floor of the
Rose Theatre, they have found a dozen, broken, Tudor pipes with tiny, clay
bowls for the precious tobacco.
Marlowe's ploys are still attractive to flamboyant actors and
directors — not all of them gay. The Royal Shakespeare Company's current
repertoire has his Jew of Malta and Dr Faustus. Less
frequently seen, is his most complete, and surely his most personal play
The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward II, King of England . .
. and also the life and death of Piers Gaveston . . . mighty favourite of
King Edward II. Piers is Edward's lover. Queen Isabella understandably
takes offence; and so do the noble barons, who feel their power over the
throne to be in jeopardy. But their main objection to Gaveston is that he is
a baseborn foreigner, rather than that he is gay. And in words, likely to
curl the lip of Section 28, a senior statesman pleads: — would that Thatcher
had such advisers —
Thou seest by nature he is mild and calm, And seeing his mind so dotes
on Gaveston,
Let him without controlment have his will.
The mightiest kings have had their minions:
Great Alexander loved Hephaestion,
The conquering Hercules for Hylas wept;
And for Patroclus stern Achilles drooped:
And not kings only, but the wisest men:
The Roman Tully loved Octavius;
Great Socrates wild Alcibiades.
Once the teenage King Edward's love is thwarted by the murder of the
lovely, vain and passionate Piers, (off the road near Warwick), he turns
tyranically savage. Dethroned, and in solitary confinement in Berkeley
Castle, he is buggered to death by a red-hot poker. When I played
Edward in 1969, I was told that the
family moves out of Berkeley on the anniversary, so as not to hear the
ghostly screams from the wine-cellar.
Onstage too, the parody of male-love in the death-scene is properly
upsetting. An early twentieth-century production actually hid the offending
act, behind a curtain. In 1969, men in our audiences crossed their legs in
sympathy for the tortured king, while the women all leaned forward. Other
Edwards in the 1960s, including Richard Kaye in Leicester and Derek Jacobi
for the newly-formed National Youth Theatre, helped bring the play out of
the closet. It would be good to see a modern, young, passionate actor make
his name in the best part Marlowe ever wrote.
When Marlowe met his own violent death in a Deptford pub — fatally
stabbed in the eye — his glittering reputation was overtaken by the
law-abiding Shakespeare. Did Bill like Kit Marlowe so much, that he
recreated him, as the roistering, iconoclastic Mercutio who so resents
Romeo's love affairs with women?
But for the next few weeks, we can touch the very bricks and mortar
which once heard Marlowe's mighty lines, and echoed with the treble voices
of boy-actors and with Edward II's dying cry. Eventually on Imry Merchant's
new office-block, there should be a pink plaque to the lovely Rose and to
the gay playwright whom I hope she loved most.
THE ROSE THEATRE - AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERY by Julian Bowsher.
Foreword by Sir Ian McKellen. A straightforward but excellent account of the
discoveries made during the excavation, written by the Site Director.
Clearly written, beautifully illustrated and jargon-free. |
Ian McKellen and Gorden Kaye at the excavation of the Rose Theatre
London, 1989
|
