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prepared for an invasion the previous year, not with flotillas of galleons but by vessels towing barges full of soldiers over from the Low Countries; and it might well have succeeded had it not been for the English raid on Cadiz which destroyed some of the fleet. The real Spanish Armada was a far more hazardous venture for the Spaniards than the first would have been and was soundly defeated by a combination of superior English seamanship in more manoeuvrable ships and the appalling weather. Her leadership of the country during that time and the vanquishing of the Armada was Elizabeth’s finest hour, her speech at Tilbury worthy of Shakespeare. But Spain’s determination to invade did not end there; there were at least two other abortive attempts afterwards, with Ireland being used as a base. No one can pretend that what England did in Ireland during the last half of the sixteenth century was anything of which to be proud, but it should also be remembered that the government considered their western neighbour to be their Achilles’ heel.
    The great flowering of the dramatists in the 1590s was therefore accompanied by increasing paranoia on the part of the government, the implementation of draconian laws against Catholic ‘Mass priests’, along with other repressive legislation to deal with civil unrest. In 1593 the latter would catch in its net both Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, at the scene of whose murder we come across once again that very same Robert Poley who played such a vital role in the bringing to justice of the Babington plotters. From then until the Queen’s death in 1603, there was war in Ireland, continuing uncertainty as to the succession since Elizabeth refused to name King James of Scotland as her heir, and the abortive final plot, that of the Queen’s last great favourite, the inept Earl of Essex, whose arrogance finally brought him to the block. Nor did the death of the Queen and the subsequent coronation of James VI of Scotland as James I of England make the profession of dramatist any less hazardous. Anti-Catholic feeling became even more ferocious, factionalism even more intense at Court where the King was swayed by a succession of favourites. It was an age in which almost anything could be bought.
    Throughout it all, mostly unaware, or uncaring, of the affairs of state (with the exception of the threat from the Armada), the people of London packed the playhouses. The times might be dangerous but the people were well able to live with that. Death was ever present and, in Marlowe’s words, they lived ‘on the slicing edge’ of it: death from disease, particularly from the regular epidemics of plague, death at the hands of a robber in the street, or following a quarrel at a time when insults led easily to fights and men routinely wore swords and daggers, while for women there was always the very real fear of death in childbirth or the dreaded puerperal fever associated with it.
    Their idea of entertainment, however, was a broad one. The very same audiences which crowded into the Rose and the Globe to laugh at
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
or enjoy the poetry of
Twelfth Night
were equally happy to visit the Bear Pit the following day or stand at the front of the crowd at Tyburn to watch the public hangings. But theatre opened up for them whole new worlds: those of kingship and its power and responsibilities in the great historical epics, of hubris followed by nemesis as portrayed in the characters of Marlowe’s great over-reachers, of betrayal and murder set alongside the foibles of humanity in the great tragedies and comedies of Shakespeare – not to mention the nature of love.

ONE
The New Professionals
    A play’s a true transparent crystal mirror,
To show good minds their mirth, the bad their terror.
    Thomas Heywood,
Apology for Actors
(1612)
    B y the time Heywood wrote these words a visitor to London could have joined audiences at eight or nine playhouses and even if, as was likely, not