III. RIOT AND LIBERTIES

Thieves, whores, and the homeless had always been present in London—ordinances governing the brothels in London date from the early twelfth century, when the Bishop of Winchester grew rich from licensing and supervising them—but conditions in the fifteen-nineties conspired to increase the sense of menace. From 1592 to 1594 London was gripped by a devastating outbreak of plague. Upwards of ten per cent of the population died, and thousands more fled the terrified city. Thomas Nashe's "Litany in Time of Plague," performed for the archbishop of Canterbury in 1592, captures that terror:

Famine followed pestilence; 1594 was the first of four successive bad harvests. The price of food, already high, doubled. Food riots broke out, and while they might seem innocuous to us—in 1596 a Somerset crowd seized a load of cheese, driven by the belief that "rich men had gotten all into their hands and will starve the poor," and in Canterbury rioters consulted an attorney's clerk as to the law before preventing grain from leaving the city, taking care "not to meddle with the corn," and so flout proclamations restricting the movement of corn in time of dearth—they rattled the already uneasy authorities. Hoarding was rampant. In 1598 Shakespeare himself was cited for illegally holding eighty bushels of malt or grain. In the countryside the practice of enclosure—throwing tenant farmers off the land to convert it to the more profitable use of pasturing sheep—forced more of the homeless into the city of London, increasing the overcrowding, the inflation, and the spread of contagion.

The Liberties were on the margins of the city geographically and culturally. Freed from the jurisdiction of the city fathers, the Liberties attracted those marginal pursuits and desires without a place in the regimented and regulated city: the gaming houses, taverns, bear-baiting pits, brothels, and, not incidentally, Shakespeare's theater. Here the city quarantined—but also permitted—those anarchic pursuits of pleasure.

The authorities feared that such masterless men, stirring up rebellion, were a threat to the state and tried to whip them back to the parishes they left. In 1596 the aldermen appointed a marshal to round up "all manner of rogues, beggars, idle and vagrant persons within the borough of Southwark and the liberties thereof." Their fears of a vast criminal enterprise were fanned by writers of the so-called cony-catching pamphlets—"conies" or rabbits were the con man's marks—who described a burgeoning underworld of cutpurses, pickpockets, con men, thieves, and fences who spoke a colorful thieves' cant.

These pamphlets, and these fears, leave their mark on the Boar's Head and Gadshill scenes in I Henry IV, with their band of "Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon" (1.2.23–4) and "Saint Nicholas' clerks" (2.1.59–60). "The thief that commits the robbery, and is chief clerk to Saint Nicholas," Thomas Dekker wrote, "is called the 'High Lawyer.'"

ALEHOUSE AND WHOREHOUSE

Nashe's "six-penny whoredom" and "ten-times-a-day dishonested strumpets" represent one end of the spectrum of prostitution in the Liberties. The other was represented by Holland's Leaguer, the most exclusive and expensive of the stews. Located in an old manor house among the bear-baiting pits in Paris Garden, Holland's Leaguer was designed as a fortress, surrounded by a moat spanned by a drawbridge leading to a studded door with a peep-hole guarded by a halberdier brandishing a battle-ax. In December, 1631, and January 1632, its staff fought off a siege by City authorities trying to summon its mistress, Bess Holland, to the court of High Commission, the highest and most powerful of the "bawdy" courts administered by the Church to punish vice.

The city became surrounded by playhouses. The Liberties south of the Thames became host to the Rose (1587), the Swan (c. 1595), the Globe (fashioned from timbers of the original Theater by Shakespeare's company when their lease on the land expired in 1599), and the Fortune (1600). The City fathers also came to regard the theaters as sinks of iniquity, linking them not just with prostitution but sedition as well. In 1592 the Lord Mayor wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury complaining that "the daily and disorderly exercise of a number of players and playing houses erected within this city" were corrupting the youth "by reason of the wanton and profane devices represented on the stages." "To which places," he added, "also do usually resort great numbers of light and lewd disposed persons, as harlots, cutpurses, cozeners, pilferers, and such like; and there, under the color of resort to those places to hear plays, devise diverse evil and ungodly matches, confederacies, and conspiracies."

The theaters were felt to be a subversive institution, linked by proximity and ideological function to the forbidden pleasures of the Liberties. the players were marginalized by civic authority but served at the royal pleasure, wearing the livery first of the Lord Chamberlain and Lord Admiral and then of the royal family. In the Liberties the theater found itself at liberty to experiment with forms and ideas without precedent in English society.

The nobles they are fled, the commons they are cold
And will, I fear, revolt on Hereford's side. (2.2.88–9)

However, in Richard II,the commons remain off stage, a disembodied force. Besides the emblematic gardeners, the only commoner who speaks is the poor groom of Richard's stable, still loyal to his king. But in the two parts of Henry IV,

That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wav'ring multitude,

The prodigal prince haunts an urban demi-monde of taverns and stews, consorting with cutpurses and whores, assaulting the law itself on the king's highway in defiance of patriarchal order. Allegorically he embodies the figure of Youth from the moralities, misled by the Vice into a dissolute life of sensual excess set within a tavern, a link that Hal himself makes explicit when, impersonating his father the King, he calls Falstaff "that reverend vice, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years" and "that villainous abominable misleader of youth, that old white-bearded Satan" (I Henry IV 2.2.431–2,462). But he represents as well the threat of riot and disorder not only from within Bullingbrook's own blood, but more generally of rebellion from beneath, from the class of masterless men who have neither voice nor authority but threaten to shake off the yoke of rule. While Mistress Quickly's alehouse is nominally located in Eastcheap, the center of London's butchers and cookshops and fit locale for Falstaff, a character whose epithets—"Call in ribs, call in Tallow" (I Henry IV 2.4.106)—link his great girth to his insatiable appetites, the world of the plays is that of the Liberties.

Shakespeare draws as well on the growth of an underworld within the Liberties surrounding the theaters in which these plays were performed. Hotspur explicitly links the prince with that misrule for which the suburbs were notorious: "Never did I hear / Of any prince so wild a liberty" (I Henry IV 5.2.70–1). In the two parts of Henry IV, that underworld of alehouses and whorehouses, bawds and cutpurses that physically surrounded Shakespeare's playhouse enters the world of the plays, where it threatens the very order of the state. It represents the fear that a challenge to the ideology of divine right, represented within the play by the crown's loss of legitimacy, Henry IV's status as usurper and murderer of the lord's anointed, will so weaken the state that it will no longer wield the power to uphold the rule of law. And Shakespeare draws on an association in his own times between the assault on "the rusty curb of old father antic the Law" (I Henry IV 1.2.56) and the authorities' fear of a new lawlessness breaking out in the Liberties where Shakespeare's theater stood.