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This is what happens when you don't sponsor your job on Indeed. So the next time you need someone to get the job done right, get matched with quality candidates with an Indeed-sponsored job. Visit Indeed.com slash NextHire and sponsor your job today. Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand. Marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time from startups to scale ups online, in person and on the go. Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. In the bustling streets of Elizabethan London, a vibrant community of writers help shape the future of the English language and literature. These words, myths, navigated rivalry, collaboration, public critique and bursts of creative genius. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Emily Briffett is joined by Dr Brett Greatley-Hirsch as they dive into the world that produce Shakespeare, Marlowe and countless other literary voices. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today, Brett. Before we really explore this world, what exactly made Elizabethan London's literary scene so vibrant? Great question. I think it's a combination of different factors. Some of these are cultural, some of them are socioeconomic. The tutors are really pushing for educational reform, their funding grammar schools across the country. So by the time we get around to Elizabeth, you've got much wider participation, much wider access to education. So being able to read is no longer the exclusive purview of the aristocracy or the clergy. Partly, all of these education reforms are being pushed because with the new national, Protestant religion, placing so much emphasis on a direct and personal relationship to God, you want your populace to be able to read the scriptures and to participate actively in church services rather than just passively watching the Catholic priest do everything in Latin while you sit there dumbfounded and in awe. But the corollary to this is that while you're training all these schoolboys to join the bureaucratic machinery or to go on to become members of the clergy, you are training them on the classics, the classical Greek and Roman authors. They're being exposed to poetry, including erotic poetry like Ovid's Metamorphoses, which will become one of Shakespeare's favorites. And you're also getting students to act. Performance is part of the rhetorical training that these students are getting. And so in addition to pumping out potential members of the clergy and of the bureaucratic government machinery, you're also really creating playwrights and poets and critical thinkers and philosophers and widening access to those vocations. One of the other things that's happening is geographical and socio-economic. London is becoming a real hub both of industry and creativity. Under Elizabeth Reign, we see the first purpose-built playhouses put up. London becomes one of, if not the most densely populated capital cities in Europe. So you've got lots of people who are working in London, living in London, but also people who have leisure time, people who are able to read, people who are demanding entertainment. So for the first time, we're creating jobs for professional creative writers, professional poets, professional playwrights. The printing press has been around for about 100 years at this point, but it is really established as an industry now in London. So London is really the place to be if you are in Elizabethan with a creative bent. Is it fair to say that we see the emergence of the professional writer at this time? There are lots of cultural shifts that are taking place at this point. With the aristocracy, you'd always had some members who, of course, are reading classical poetry and are also writing poetry themselves, but they're not publishing their poetry by and large. They are circulating it in manuscript just at court or amongst a coterie of friends. What's happening now with people from other social ranks who are now writing is they are seeking publication and they're trying to claim that same sort of cultural cache as poets. So Ben Johnson, for example, is at great pains to try and rehabilitate some of the snobbish dismissal of playwriting as nonsense, grubby, mercantile, mercenary literary output. He's trying to claim that playwrights are poets for the stage. And so you've got these cultural shifts and attitudes towards literature and some of these newer literary forms like the professional drama. It's like the way that we try to take television more seriously. So what are some of the ways that we do that? We have award ceremonies treating these things as serious cultural outputs. The same thing is happening in Elizabethan London. People are chasing fame. People are chasing readership. People are trying to rehabilitate some of these literary forms that do not have the same longer tradition of being seen as privileged cultural forms like poetry. Where did this snobbery come from? Was it all just about that longevity and tradition? Is it just the fact it's a thing of the elite and it's just a these people are coming in on our turf kind of thing? Or are there other factors? I think you're probably right. And that continues as a vein in literary criticism for quite some time. But that doesn't stop people from lower social ranks from engaging in literary writing. So one character who I think bears mentioning here is John Taylor, the so-called water poet. He was a scholar. These are the people who ferried people across the Thames. So he's basically the equivalent of say a London hackney cab. But he rises to sort of literary fame writing basically dogaral and macaronic verse. But he's very good at engaging in topical references. He has a really good sense of what's on everybody's mind. He's also really good at stirring controversy and making a fool out of himself in the process mostly. But becomes really popular. And I can't help but think of people on TikTok or people who read sort of YouTube stardom being part of that longer tradition that more established poets might turn around and say, okay, this is garbage, but actually phenomenally popular and successful in their own right. There are a few names that really come to mind when we think of the literary scene in this age. So Shakespeare being one of them. You can't talk about this without talking about Shakespeare. But how large a community of writers are we actually talking about here? And what counts as a writer? Is it just poets and playwrights? Or do other people count as part of this vibrant scene as well? Again, that's a really good question. We know the names of about 300 playwrights from this period. That number is much larger when we consider other forms of writing. And of course, what makes this period also so exciting is that we've got new forms of literature, new forms of writing that are emerging. So for example, travel writing becomes established as a genre in this period. Crime writing, true crime, really can find its origins in this period, partly in the sort of cunny catching pamphlets that describe in great detail the practices of the cheats and tricksters of the London Underground, including dictionaries and vocabularies of their slang terms. Because of course, any underground community to evade the authorities adopts its own sort of language. But people are clearly interested in this stuff. And you can think about the ways that modern crime dramas incorporate the language of the street to give it sort of moral authenticity. But the same thing was happening in Elizabethan London. So yes, you've got an explosion of the types of writing, really challenging notions of what counts as a writer for the first time you're able to make a living on the back of your literary output. Whereas before that was really limited to sort of the privileged few who could get hold of patronage or who had sufficient means on their own and were really just engaging in literature as a form of recreation. Can I just ask for some clarity on how these writers made their living? Yes. So as I said, London now is the home to many industries, including the publishing industry. So what would happen is as a writer, you would approach a publisher. This is somebody who would look at the writing and say, I think we can sell this. They would then pony up the money to take the book to a printer. They would put up all of the funding required for the labor, the paper, the ink, etc. Interestingly enough, the paper is the most expensive part of this equation at this point, because we don't start producing our own paper for writing and printing in England until the 18th century. So everything has to be imported. And because it's imported and subject to lots of tax. I mean, this also has interesting consequences for literary scholarship too, because papers so dear, you don't throw away any of the misprinted pages. They just join the pile anyway. But that's the process. Writer takes their work or takes the work of someone else to a publisher. A publisher says, okay, I'm going to pony up the money required to produce this, takes it to a printer, the printer produces it, and the publisher then sells the work. And most of the publishers in London are outside of St Paul's Cathedral. That's kind of the hub, the literary hub of London. What were the main social or professional networks for those wanting to be involved in their writing communities? Well, ever since the Middle Ages, any kind of profession or artisanal group or specialist starts sort of grouping together into livery companies or trade guilds so that they can kind of police their members and sometimes engage in sort of early forms of enterprise bargaining, I guess. But if you wanted to become a printer or a publisher, you would join the stationers company in London. And they were really the ones who were enforcing very early forms of copyright, because we don't actually have copyright in the sense that we do today until much later. But you didn't want, say, as a publisher, if you've just outlaid all this money to go and publish something, you didn't want one of your other fellow publishers running off with the same work and trying to pass it off. So they had their own systems, they had their own sort of tribunals and courts to try and maintain order and promote professional standards in the community and provide some regulation. If you wanted to get involved in the system as a printer or a publisher, you would usually start as an apprentice to one of those and sort of move your way up or as what seems to happen with increasing regularity, if you are the wife of one of these figures and you work with your husband, when he passes away, you can inherit his business and continue in your own stead. So that's an increasingly important and often neglected aspect of printing and publishing in this period are the roles of women. Do we see women involved elsewhere in the process at all? Women are involved as producers of literary works. There does seem to be some limitation on the kinds of work that creative women can engage in. So for example, women don't appear to have been able to write for the professional stage. Instead, they engaged in producing what we call closet drama. So these are plays that are designed to be read rather than performed. Although there's nothing to stop you and your friends, if you've got enough of them, just performing it for your own benefit at home. Women are also engaging in translation, usually of biblical or classical sources. In fact, the first play by a woman author, which is not a direct translation of one of these sources, is produced in the 1610s. This is Elizabeth Carey's The Tragedy of Mariam, but it's a closet drama. But we do also get women who are writing a devotional literature, talking about their experiences. And we've got several prominent female poets who are writing in this period as well. But they tend to come from the upper ranks of society. So they have the benefit of an education, which is still unavailable to most women, because girls don't get to go to grammar school at this point. Women also couldn't act on the English stage, which was unusual, because elsewhere in Europe, you don't have any prohibition against female actors. In fact, it becomes so naturalized that when we get travelers who go over to the continent and they see female performers, they come back and they say, wow, these women on stage are not as good as the boys that we have here in London. Because sometimes when people find out that all of the female parts in sort of Shakespearean drama would have been played by boys or young men, they often think, oh, well, they couldn't have been taken seriously. But these sorts of travelers' accounts really, really put the lie to that. They did take them seriously. Do we know if there's a reason why boys played women's parts? Or is that just something that's just generally accepted? That's how it is. I think when you read the sort of history of this period, often there's an assumption that there was a law in place prohibiting women's involvement in the stage. There is no such law. Nothing's been codified. But I suspect that this is an attitude towards women's involvement in public performance that we inherited from the Middle Ages. So, performance in the Middle Ages tended to be limited also to men. Performers, when they become more professionalized under the tutors, also seek the protection of a patron rather than having access to a livery company. And again, I think the same attitudes prescribing women from engaging in that kind of public performance is really what's driving that attitude. I mean, women do participate in some other kinds of entertainment and other kinds of performance, particularly at court. So, women do participate as dancers and performers in the court masks, which are these sort of lavish combinations of music and dance and also drama. But as far as we can tell, they didn't get speaking parts in those masks. So, yeah, it's a quaintly English tradition to deny women the spotlight until the restoration in the 1660s. Because what's French is what is popular at that point. And there's no reason to not do what the French are doing on stage. So, the rise of the actress. Did this continental influence go across the written works as well as the sort of acting styles and, I guess, the performance? Absolutely. It probably goes the other way as well, because you had English acting troops touring the continent, putting on performances of play. So, we've got records of that. But yes, scholars have pointed to the influence of, say, the Comedian de la Té and that kind of acting in England. There's even been a suggestion that, say, Shylock in the Merchant of Venice might have been performed with a sort of pants-a-lon type nose, or at least as modeled on that kind of Comedian de la Té character. Playwrights are definitely reading works by continental authors. So, John Fletcher, for example, reads Miguel Cervantes. And so, you've got his dramatization of Cervantes' work in his drama. So, there's a very strong stream of literary and dramatic influence coming over from the continent. Playwrights and poets and other writers are also reading in Italian and German and French and Spanish. And there's also a market for translations into English. So, some of those writers who are writing their own works are also getting work translating, works into English for those readers who don't have foreign languages. Did this sort of influence between writers, between playwrights, between those performers happen within London as well? Was there a sense of camaraderie and community? That's a really interesting question. Poets probably see themselves or at least aspire to be part of a larger poetic tradition, which includes figures from classical Greek and Roman literature, but then through to sort of prominent figures like Dante Petrarch in particular. So, in the early stages, you've got poets like Sir Thomas Wyatt, who's really modeling his poetry on the Italian forms, and he brings the sonnet over to England. And the sonnet, of course, gets really popularized for us by Shakespeare and his adaptation of the sonnet form. So, they probably do think of themselves as being part of a longer literary tradition, but whether that's a form of sort of camaraderie, I'm not sure I can answer. What about sort of the more simple influences? If you see one writer doing this, that it might influence your style and your work? Are there things like that? Absolutely. So, one of the ways that you're taught to read and write in grammar school, in Tudor England, is through a process of imitation and through a process of creative translation. So, you would be instructed to read, say, a poem by Ovid to translate that into English and then translate it back into Latin or to translate something that's written in verse into prose and vice versa. So, there is more value placed on that sort of creative adaptation of work rather than on direct originality. What about rivalries then? Were there big rivalries between those in the writing community? Oh, absolutely. And of course, the same way that we love the fights that can sometimes make their way onto the stage or the page, this is happening in Elizabethan and Jacobi in London. That poet who I mentioned before, John Taylor, the water poet, he has a sort of decades-long sort of flame war of exchanging the polemic with a writer who becomes, say, the first travel writer in English, Thomas Corryot, who actually we mentioned before, he is one of those travelers who goes to Venice, sees women in the theatre and comes back and says, they're not as good as the boys here in London. So, they have a really strong rivalry. But we see it in the drama too, because what we often see is rivalry between the different theatre companies. So, if a particular kind of play or a particular genre seems to be doing really well for them, we need to mount our own production of this. So, one example might be when one of the theatre companies puts on a production of Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare's company thinks, oh, okay, we need to play with a Jew, because that seems to be really topical, people are really enjoying this, I know the merchant of Venice, here we go. So, rivalry can be really creatively enabling and productive, but you don't get that sense of the rivalry unless you zoom out and see these plays from the perspective of the playing companies rather than perhaps through the lens of the author, which is how we usually approach players today. One of the most famous, most notorious examples of rivalry insults is this upstart crow accusation thrown at Shakespeare. Could you tell us more about what this was? I think it's something that is in the popular sphere through things like upstart crow with David Mitchell, but could you give us the actual historical context? Sure. Okay, so the upstart crow reference shows up in a letter or an epistle which is appended to a pamphlet called Green's Grotesworth of Witt, which is published in 1592. It ostensibly purports to be sort of the deathbed repentance of Robert Green, who is one of these playwrights and poets and professional writers who passes away. And in fact, three of these pamphlets purporting to be his sort of last will and testament and recantation of his scurrilous life are published very shortly after his death. And so there are question marks over the authenticity of these pamphlets. So, Green is an interesting figure. He is one of the educated playwrights, so he did take a degree. He writes very learned plays. He makes his living writing prose romances based on sort of the Greek romance model, but he also engages in sort of writing pamphlets. I think before I mentioned Cunny Catching, that kind of interest in the criminal underworld of Elizabethan England. So Green writes these very popular Cunny Catching pamphlets. A Cunny is a hare or a rabbit. It comes from the Latin word caniculus, which is the whole burrowing animal. It's also where we get that horrible slang term. It's all from the same Latin root. So a Cunny Catcher is somebody who's taking advantage of usually a country bumpkin who's come to London and is just duped or cheated. But there's also that suggestion that there's a sexual dimension to it. Of course, Cunny Catcher, this is somebody who's being taken advantage of, someone who's being dominated. And of course, the same sort of London underground scene of thieves and pickpockets is also very, very strongly related to prostitution and all of that kind of sexual deviance. Sorry to be going down a Cunny Catching rabbit hole, but Robert Green is quite famous and notorious because he is himself blasphemous. He's a drunkard. He's a lech, you know, who's abandoned his wife and his child. And according to hostile sources, dies after a surfeit of pickled herring and relish wine, but he dies a pauper. Anyway, so that's Robert Green. He's part of what we call the University Whits. These are the educated dramatists that include among their number people like George Peale, Christopher Marlowe. These are all of the playwrights who also went to Oxford or Cambridge and took a degree. People unlike Shakespeare, who we have no evidence of any education after grammar school. So in Green's Grotesworth of Whits, this pamphlet purporting to be Green's sort of repentance, it's full of these sort of, oh, woe is me, I'm a horrible person. Why did I blaspheme? Why am I lecherous? There's this letter that's included and it's addressed to his fellow University Whits playwrights. And part of what the letter is doing is saying, well, you guys are really smart, but maybe your time would be better spent applying your wits elsewhere because theaters are horrible places. Theaters are a waste of time. The audiences are stupid. The audiences would be better off spending their time in prayer. It's rehearsing or engaging in the sorts of critiques of the theater, which are usually made by the more puritanical folks who also complain about the fact that you've got young boys dressing up as girls and titillating their audiences. And this might lead to sort of carnal desires and unnatural desires, longstanding critiques of the theater. So as part of this letter, there is also a reference sort of warning these University Whits about some young upstart, this upstart crow, beautified with our feathers. This playwright who thinks that he can do what we're doing and is being presumptuous because he doesn't have the same level of education and experiences as us. There are different ways of interpreting the reference, which in full is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers that with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he's as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you. There are different ways of interpreting this. So one way is that it might be an attack on Shakespeare's presumption in challenging the University educated dramatists like Green himself. It might be interpreted as an accusation of plagiarism that he's beautified with our feathers, but it might also be a more specific accusation of Shakespeare's plagiarism of Green's work himself. And critics have spent a lot of ink trying to substantiate those claims. And for the longest time, scholarship has treated this as an authentic work of Robert Greens. New work has been done, however, to challenge this. And there's a suggestion that it may not be the authentic work of Robert Greens, but might in fact be by Thomas Nash, who is referenced in that letter, but also Henry Chetl, who worked in some way as Greens literary executor. Henry Chetl was himself a part of the publishing industry. He worked as a stationer. But soon after this pamphlet is printed, both Thomas Nash and Henry Chetl publish letters in their works to say, hold up, people are saying that this isn't Greens work and that it's me, that I wrote it. And I want to just come clean and say I had no part in this. So both Thomas Nash and Henry Chetl write these disclaimers off their own back. But in so doing, I think they're also putting a target on themselves. So scholars have rightly thought to question just how genuine these claims or these disclaims are. If we're questioning the authorship, how would that difference affect how we understand such a piece of work? I think if you've got generations of scholars who have accepted the idea that Robert Green hates Shakespeare, then that sort of shuts down a lot of critical avenues that you might otherwise have been pursuing about the kind of relationship that these two figures may have had, both personally and professionally. It means that when you've been looking at Shakespeare's earlier plays, which have tended to be collaborations, that Green has been immediately discounted as a potential collaborator because we believe that there's this antipathy between them. It has meant that scholarship of Green and of Shakespeare looking at their relationship between the two have been really coloured by this negativity rather than looking at perhaps lines of influence between the two are really trying to look for sort of barbed attacks. So if we take the Grotesworth away or more properly, if we take the insult to Shakespeare or that letter from the Grotesworth away from Green, I think we're freeing scholarship up to look at their relationship with new eyes. Of course, it then also means that we change the relationship of whoever the author of that letter is. So we need to look at that author's relationship to Shakespeare with new eyes as well. Were such attacks and letters common at this time? Or is this a sort of standout piece of work? I mean, it's a standout piece of work because it's Shakespeare, but these sorts of attacks do take place. And in fact, you were talking before about rivalries and Thomas Nash is no stranger to these kind of rivalries. He likes to pick fights. Robert Green picks these sorts of fights. Gabriel Harvey is sort of the main focus of sort of Green and Nash's ire. And he really goes after Nash. And some of the back and forth is just so funny. Nash does not pull any punches. And neither does Harvey. But if you could imagine, say, a satirist taking aim at a Cambridge Dom and then luring, really compelling, staid, dry, learned figure to engage in the kind of mud raking is just so pleasurable to read and to imagine this taking place. So that's Gabriel Harvey. At one point, Gabriel's brother is involved as well. It's a whole family affair. But yes, to come back to your question, these kind of barbed sort of veiled criticisms of other authors, yes, they show up all over the place. And did public opinion come into this in any way? You mentioned earlier, rivalries are in the public sphere that might have encouraged viewers to watch in the same way that we're very much obsessed today with watching drama, watching spectacle, play out on social media. Did it encourage more of this, knowing that the public are enjoying it? It made money. Publishers were very keen to get hold of this kind of material because it's sold well. The danger, of course, was that if it was held to be libelous, then copies of all of the materials could be burnt and you could be fined. And this is what happens with John Taylor, the water poet, and his sort of scurrilous pamphlet, laugh and be fat, which is really just an out and out attack of Thomas Corriott, that travel writer who had sort of literary pretensions and was a figure at court. And John Taylor just thought, who does this guy think he is? I'm going to take him down a pic. If I had to ask you which figures or perhaps works, do you think best exemplify the vibrant or perhaps sometimes precarious world of Elizabethan literary London? Oh, I think Thomas Nash has to be there. He's exploring the early proto novel with his work, The Unfortunate Traveller. You've got all of those wonderful semi-autobiographical but also very much imaginative works, including the ones that are also written in part to attack Gabriel Harvey. In addition to writing in these different forms, he's also being very playful with the language. And of course, the English language is constantly evolving and it's evolving at a really rapid rate during the Elizabethan and Jacobian period because you've got creative writers who are introducing new words and are playing with form, are playing with syntax, are playing with vocabulary. They're reading foreign influences and they're trying to import and adapt foreign words as well and create some of their own. So, yes, on my list of people who you should read to get a sense of the vibrancy of Elizabethan London, Thomas Nash is there. I think you also should definitely read one or two of Robert Green's Cunninghatching pamphlets. These are those sort of exposés of the criminal underworld because they are fascinating and they give you a voyeuristic pleasure. We feel like we're taking part in a sort of documentary of what the Elizabethan underworld is doing and we're also picking up bits and pieces of their language. So, yes, Robert Green. But then there's no shortage of plays from this period to be reading too and the professional drama is also rapidly evolving. Take a pic. I think the more widely you read in the drama of the period, the less typical Shakespeare becomes. So, Shakespeare is not the norm for drama of this period and that sort of works in two ways. One, he really is special. You know, he is doing incredible things with language. He's doing incredible things with dramaturgy and the way that he puts these plays together. But it would be wrong to assume that all drama from the period follows his dramatic model. Technically, the sort of literary female figures are more Jacobean and Caroline. So, they come later. They also tend to be from the upper classes. People like Lady Mary Roth, who's part of the Sydney family. So, she comes from a family of poets and she writes sonnet sequences that are beautiful and also writes prose. If I had to recommend a single woman writer from the Renaissance period to somebody, I would recommend they go to Margaret Cavendish. She writes in so many genres, including science and early works of science fiction, that she really is a phenomenal figure. Looking back as a final question to you, how do you think the Elizabethan literary scene in London has really affected or shaped the literary scene going forwards coming up to the modern day? The literary scene in Elizabethan England was very much in its infancy. So, it was pushing boundaries. It was testing what could be considered a professional writer or what could be an author or what constituted literature. It explored different forms. It was also encouraging publishers to take risks in experimenting with these new forms. It was also asking readers to take a risk to step outside of their comfort zones and explore different genres and different modes of writing and different forms of literature. I think over time these things sort of settle down. But that's not to say that literary London or that the literary industry has stopped evolving. I think the introduction, say, of digital technologies, I think, has also done similar things to challenge what constitutes literature, what constitutes forms of writing. Things like artificial intelligence are challenging our notions of what constitutes an author, what constitutes a co-author if I've been assisted by this large language model that's been trained on, generations of authors, including those of the Elizabethan period. So, literature of all times, I think, is doing exciting and interesting things. And these are often tied to the technologies and the socioeconomic conditions and the cultures in which authors and readers are living. That was Dr. Brett Greatley-Hirsch speaking to Emily Briffett. Brett is Professor of Renaissance Literature and Textual Studies at the University of Leeds, as well as a coordinating editor of Digital Renaissance Editions, a co-editor of the Ruecklis Journal Shakespeare, and a trustee of the British Shakespeare Association. We love immersing ourselves in history and the BBC Gardeners World Two for One Gardens card and guide is an amazing way to do just that. It gives you discounted access to over 350 gardens across the UK and Ireland, many set within historic estates, ancient landscapes, and landmark grounds shaped by centuries of stories, from four more gardens surrounding stately homes to peaceful walks where history still lingers. Download the Two for One Gardens app and start exploring today.
