Dan Snow's History Hit - Tudor True Crime

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

The true-crime genre - stories of actual murders and other crimes that are then fictionalised - is not a new phenomenon. More than four centuries ago, a series of plays based on real life cases appeared on the London stage. It was a short-lived craze generated by the insatiable early modern appetite for the "three Ms" - melodrama, moralizing and misogyny. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to author Charles Nicholl about the little known phenomenon of Elizabethan true crime, which even influenced the works of William Shakespeare.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It's that time of the week when we celebrate a sibling podcast today.

We've got Professor Susanna Lipscomb's Not Just the Tudors, a podcast all about the 16th century. Not just the Tudors though, all sorts of other bits, like Montezuma or what's going on with the Mughals or Ming China it's all happening it's a great pod

it's rampaging up the charts I'm going to have a take mine one of these days and then she'll be airing my episodes on her feed it's going to happen folks this episode of Not Just the Tudors is all about true crime on the Elizabethan stage with Charles Nicol

true crime folks it's not just modern podcast listeners that are obsessed with true crime on the Elizabethan stage with Charles Nicol. True crime, folks, it's not just modern podcast listeners that are obsessed with true crime. It is Tudor playgoers, theatre goers. They loved it. They couldn't get enough of it. True crime genre, stories of actual murders and other crimes, let alone fictionalised, appeared on the London stage plenty, aplenty. It was quite a short-lived craze. And as Susanna Lipscomb points out, it was generated by the insatiable early modern appetite for the three Ms, melodrama, moralising and misogyny. How different the world was.

Anyway, please subscribe to Not To The Jews wherever you get your pods. Also subscribe to History At TV. There is a link in the description of this podcast. You just click on that link and you go towards the world's best history channel. You subscribe for a very, a pittance, a tiny amount of money every month. And you can subscribe to the world's best history channel. You subscribe for a very, a pittance, a tiny amount of money every month, and you can subscribe

to the world's best history channel. Lots going on, folks. We're digging things up. We're explaining things. We're exploring things. It's all happening. It's going to be a very big 2022, and I'm going to be in the Antarctic for a good chunk of it. So wish me luck. If you subscribe, I'm able to afford a pair of socks to keep my little tootsies warm. So thank you for that. In the meantime, folks, enjoy this wonderful episode on true crime and the Elizabethan stage. How did you discover that this true crime genre was around in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period? I mean, I wondered if it had come out of your research into Marlowe's death. Well, it didn't come out of my research, Tomorrow's Death, because in fact,

that connection occurred to me while I was doing this research on the true crime. One of the plays, Arden of Faversham, is a well-known play, although anonymous, but it's partly well-known because it has been claimed quite vociferously to be partly written by Shakespeare, or an up-and-coming Shakespeare, as the date would be quite early on in his career. What I hadn't been aware of, and found out increasingly as I started to look into it, was the extent of this genre of what we would now call true crime, following on from Arden. Arden's the first one we actually know about. It went on stage probably about 1589, 1590, and was published in 1592. But it's a kind of template for some of the ones that follow,

but it seems to have kicked off a fashion in this very novel idea that you could represent real fairly recent events on stage. This seemed to attract various writers, many of whom we don't know, that most of the true crime plays are of uncertain authorship. But for about 15 or so years, 16 years after Arden, there were true crime plays being put on, often competitively between theatres. And it was a bit of a craze as we're going through one now, 400 and something years later. Yes, that's right. So this is an actual murder case. Perhaps you could tell us about the story behind Arden of Faversham. And also to pick up on that point that you raised

about this play setting the template. How did it set the template for a true crime play? Well, the template that I'd be referring to there is the idea that you're using real people's names, real locations. You're basing it on some kind of contemporary account that had been published, different kinds of account produced different kinds of plays. And the pattern that's kind of established by Arden also is this idea that it's a sort of moral lesson for the audience and the rest of us. It's a fairly simple message. This is what happens if dreadful things like murders occur and the culprits will be discovered, they will be punished, they will swing for it, as it were.

So there is a sense in which Elizabethan audiences did enjoy quite a lot of schadenfreude. Comeuppances seems to be a sort of general theme in these plays, and indeed watching an execution. Yes, well, it's been said of Elizabethan executions themselves that they were a kind of theatre. They were a spectacle put on, and people were supposed to draw the obvious lesson from them as people went to very grisly deaths as a result of the crimes they'd supposedly committed. There's a sort of crossover, let's say, between the theatre of cruelty, as it's been called, of actual executions and the theatre that goes on stage with these true

crime plays. But this idea of the documentary, I think, is very interesting. And also the idea that recurs very much in our own true crime output, which is this idea of the very recognisable sort of landscape in which murders occur. And they are mostly murder stories, as are most of our true crime docudrummers, as we call them. It's not really a thrill of suspense as you watch them, because we docudramas, as we call them, it's not really a thrill of suspense as you watch them, because we know where it's going, we know what's going to happen, all the broad outlines in advance. The frisson is one of recognition, that this happens in a landscape we all recognise, a landscape we inhabit ourselves. So that idea, I think,

is very pressed forward in the true crime plays of the 1590s and 1600s, that the audience is recognising this as an event that happens in their sort of world. And that would also include a sociological idea that these plays tend to be about middle class, in inverted commas, ordinary people and households, and about the disruptions that occur within them, obviously, nothing more disruptive than someone getting murdered in the house. And one of the ideas that comes out in Arden, as I remember it, is that we've got a disloyal and a wanton wife who is committing a murder of her husband.

And this is a sort of 16th century trope. You know, men at the time seemed to have been terrified of women rising up against them. It's been referred to as kind of intensely patriarchal, but also sort of anxiously patriarchal age. Is this misogyny a theme? It certainly is. And anxious patriarchy would certainly be a good example of many of the people that might be watching it. The wicked wife trope, as it were, and indeed, in these cases, the murderous wife. Arden is by no means the only wicked wife story that

is encompassed within this genre. And one thing to say about it is that it actually goes against the realities of domestic homicide. There are some sort of fairly patchy records, but statistical analysis of them suggests that in about two-thirds of the case, the perpetrator was actually the husband in cases of domestic homicide. So the authors are playing a little fast and loose with what might be the actuality in society around them, but they're playing into that idea of patriarchy, that idea of the domestic household as a sort of microcosm of society in which, yep, dare I say it, the husband is king, the wife is one of his sort of satellite courtiers, as it were. And interestingly, in the law courts,

a wife that's convicted of killing her husband was deemed guilty of petty treason. Petty treason is a bit of a catch-all sort of judgment, not quite so heinous, obviously, as high treason, but within the same ambit. And indeed, it's a grisly fact of, again, the reality of late Elizabethan homicides and judicial judgments that some of the murderous wives, if convicted as such, were burned at the stake. So you get that trespassing across, as it were, into another misogynistic trope, which is that of the witch who traditionally was burned. And in the case of Alice Arden, in fact, she was burned at the stake, having been found guilty of her husband's murder. So that wasn't represented on stage, being rather difficult in terms of stagecraft, but the death is reported as something that's happened off stage, as it were. But in later true crime plays, the actual executions are performed on stage as the finale of the story. The culprits are shown hanging on stage.

Yeah, I think it's really interesting, isn't it, that you're saying this is absolutely going against what's happening in reality. But I suppose that heightened tension around seeing something that many men might have feared at the time being played out is what makes it sort of so thrilling to watch on stage, I suppose. Yes. So in one sense, they are presenting what they're showing as almost what we would call documentary, with that sense that you've got real people being impersonated as they put it on stage, and real events being played out. But there's also the tweaking that we would also find in our true crime stories, that sort of sense in which they're shaped and moulded to put across a certain message or just to be more entertaining. Of course, there's another sort of trope, as it were, about our own enjoyment of the true crime genre. There's a twinge of guilt as we settle down comfortably to watch these horrific stories. That sort of sense we're confronting ghastly events within our own society and our own sort of recent social history. Yet, we cannot deny that the reason we're sitting down and watching them is because we find

them entertaining. I always think often of the great essay by George Orwell called The Decline of English Murder, where he talks about sort of settling down after a hearty Sunday lunch and putting his feet up and getting out the news of the world. And, you know, what are we going to read about in these wonderful situations? Well, of course, it's going to be about a murder. So our fascination with the lurid events of murder, and with, as I say, the idea that murder occurs in landscapes we all recognise, is one of the great attractions of true crime. Arguably, it's one of the great attractions of the Tudor period for us now as well,

that actually there are these gruesome things that happened, but they're a safe distance away from us. They are safely contained in history, exactly. We can observe them without being threatened by them. But to the audience of the plays, the audience which these true crime plays were aimed at, they were going to feel, in some cases, quite uncomfortably close, or that was the idea, to the circumstances and events and the topography. Some of them are deliberately close to the actual playhouses. There's one murder that occurred on Thames Street, which is just across the river from the Rose Theatre, where the enactment of it was performed. And the prologue of the play sort of twists the knife a little bit

to say most here present will know about this story. And it's happened just around the corner. I think one thing to say about the author's intentions, just going back to that question of the wicked wives and so on, they do actually, to some extent, partly because they're giving these events a much bigger treatment and a more nuanced treatment by virtue of both the writing and the performing than the sources would have done. So you get a rather bare account of these events in either the Chronicles or the news pamphlets. And there's a bit of a shift there as it evolves

between the more official kind of accounts of these events, like the Arden murder. The source is to be found in Hollinghead's Chronicles of England and almost what one might call an official account of recent history, much used by Shakespeare in terms of more distant history, where some of the later plays go to the much cheaper and more immediate and more sensational media of the news pamphlet, the chapbook, and the ballad. But the plays give something more 3D,

as it were. And I think, in a way, that sort of retributive, punitive moralization is something that is maybe imposed on the writers more than the message that they're particularly interested in. And even in the case of Arden, there's a sort of contextualisation of the event of murder, both in the sense that Thomas Arden is presented as a rather avaricious and not a terribly attractive kind of character. So he's not the sort of blameless victim that might appear from the synoptic version of the event. And Alice herself, Alice Arden, the murderer, and her affair with the tailor Mosby, which is the ostensible reason of the murder, is just given more sort of human dimension.

So the plays, in a way, work against that heavy punitive morality that they have to frame it with, but in a way they're working against it as well. I suppose they're trying to pass the censorship of the late Elizabethan world of plays. And so that moralising tone means that they can get past that obstacle, whilst nevertheless introducing all sorts of things that might otherwise seem a little problematic. I think that's exactly right, Susanna.

They were playing the game. They were playing within the rules or bending the rules slightly. Of course, many greater plays may have tried to do that as well, not least Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, which ends with the very orthodox chub-thumping view that anyone that practices these dangerous occult experiments is practicing more than heavenly power permits and are bound to be sent off down to hell. But within the play, we get all sorts of different moods which suggest that Marlowe, as one might think, didn't necessarily think that Faustus was doomed to hellfire, but he had to put it in. Or if he didn't put it in, someone else did by the time

the play came into print. Yes, I always think about that one. That's after you've seen basically magic performed on stage. You've conjured devils in front of the audience and then said it was all a play. So that always seems quite problematic. Exactly. It's more about liberation while you're watching it. And then the damnation message is rather sort of hastily tacked on at the end. Another play I'd like you to describe is Beach's Tragedy. Tell us about that one. Well, Beach's Tragedy was written in 1599 and performed in the early 1600s. It's the only one of these murder plays or true crime plays that survives from the Rose Theatre's repertoire. We have a few from the Lord Chamberlain's Men, which is Shakespeare's

company, but the Rose's repertoire looked directly in competition with the Lord Chamberlain's Men, newly installed at the Globe in 1599, and probably including one of their successful true crime plays, A Warning for Fair Women, in the repertoire of their successful true crime plays, A Warning for Fair Women, in the repertoire of their first season. And over at the Rose, we find no less than three true crime plays being rather hurriedly tacked together. Two of those are lost in terms of actual text, although we have an account by a member of the audience of one of them. And there's an interesting fact about another one, which is Page of Plymouth,

which is that Ben Johnson was one of the authors. But that unfortunately is completely lost, although we do know about the murder that it's covering. We also know that Johnson and his co-author Thomas Decker were paid £4 each for writing the play, but that then Philip Henslow, the owner of the Rose, then spent £12 on the costumes. Rather puts the playwright, as they were at that time, in a rather more ordinary sort of rank, costing rather less than the actual costumes that the play featured. But Beecher's Tragedy is the third of those plays that was hurriedly put on at the Rose to try and compete with the Globe's warning for fair women. And I find it interesting because it only survives in a rather mangled form, because it survives in a sort of composite play script where it's interleaved with another story, which isn't in fact a true crime

story. It's a murder story, but not true crime. So we get a truncated version of it. But even so, I reckon that the quality of it, which I particularly like, is intrinsic to the original script. And that's a sort of very terse, downbeat, sort of hard-boiled, as we might call it in talking about other kinds of detective fiction, language and atmosphere. It's a very bleak sort of play. There's not even the motivation of sort of adultery and sort of marital breakdown. It's just a murder committed for the purposes of robbery of one neighbour by another, an envious neighbour, an alehouse keeper called George Merry,

who murders a rather richer neighbour, Chandler, who lives down the road. He says, you know, he's going to have 20 pounds in his purse, I really need it. But when, of course, he's committed the murder, he opens the purse. Oh, there's only four groats here. There's something for my pains, he says. So it's a kind of sardonic and, to my ears, a rather modern sort of play. Although, as I say, it also survives only in a rather rough version. It's a very violent play as well. I think this is eight or nine years after Arden. Fashion's changing, audiences need something new, and one of the things they need is more and more blood and guts. It's a very gory play. There's two murders committed in it. The stage directions for one of them is after the boy enters the shop, Mary goes in and strikes him six times on the head with a hammer and with the

seventh blow leaves the hammer sticking out of his skull. And the boy then comes on rather later in the play, rather improbably, still alive, still hanging in there with the hammer still embedded in his skull. And I reckon that's got to be a sort of Joe Orton moment of sort of black humour. So it's the Roses sort of downmarket pulp melodrama version of the murder plays. And another interesting twist about this play is that one of the authors, John Day, it's co-authored by John Day and William Horton, both sort of rising young stars in the Admiral's stable of hacks, let's say. The interesting thing is that John Day had himself been on a murder rap just a few months earlier. let's say. The interesting thing is that John Day had himself been on a murder rap just a few months earlier. He'd killed another author of the Roses stable, Henry Porter, in what turns out to be a sort of duel, but he was actually arrested on a charge of murder that he did feloniously and

with malice aforethought commit this murder. So he was later acquitted on a plea of self-defense. He thrust his sword through the chest of his fellow author. For what reason, we don't know. But, you know, material conditions in the Rose's scriptwriting stable might have been a bit rough. So we don't quite know when the Southwark Assizes acquitted him of murder, but he could have possibly been writing Beach's tragedy while out on bail under the threat of being charged as a murderer himself. So that's quite a good credential, as it were, for a true crime writer, I think. Yes, and gives it yet another frisson, doesn't it? One wonders, however, they staged such a thing.

I mean, the hammer sticking out of the boy's head raises questions about what it would have looked like. It does indeed. I mean, of course, the audience's imagination is being appealed to quite a lot in these plays because we know from the generality of staging at that time that it was fairly stylized. So our wonderful period detail and fine camera work that presents these murders to us on our true crime television series, there's none of that. It's all very stylized. You've got a street, there's an upstairs area

where people count as an interior. This play, Beech's Tragedy, is also interesting because it is very local to the audience. The murder occurs on Thames Street, just on the north bank of the Thames, directly across from the Rose, where it's playing on the south bank. And at one point, another grisly aspect of the production is that one of the corpses is dismembered on stage,

having been killed with the hammer. It's then cut up on stage. I don't know what kind of properties are being used from false legs sort of flying up. And then, by narration rather than what you actually see, I suppose, it's ferried across the river to the south bank, to the Paris Gardens, and dumped in a ditch there. So, on that sort of errand, the murderer would have landed at the Falcon Stairs, just a couple of hundred yards from the Rose Theatre, and many of the audience would have landed on the same water stairs in order to come to the play. So you've got a real tightening in there of this

idea that this is murder happening right on your doorstep. You're right in it as you're watching the play. It's a very noir-ish play, full of sort of bleak, unnecessary violence. That's the sort of mood of the plays that the rose were putting on what we know of the other two was pretty similar as well so there's a bit of a divergence of styles there you could choose which you went to they're in almost literally spitting distance of each other the globe and the rose just down maiden lane in southwark between the two and you could decide are you going for a slightly more poetic and sort of nuanced presentation of murder or good old sort of pulp melodrama i love the fact also that you've said

that sort of borrowing the imagination of the audience and therefore the play would have kept kind of resounding in their minds as they traveled home i mean they would have been traveling home down the steps to be ferried across the river, perhaps up Thames Street. And each of these places, this has happened. You can see that they would keep talking about it. It's the sort of thing they would report to their neighbours. It's a brilliant marketing strategy. It's absolutely brilliant.

And it does bring in this idea that I noticed also, which is that they're borrowing this from the pamphlets, which is news of the world would again come into one's mind. And then the ballads as well as another source. So this is sort of cheap, popular print. And the playhouses, in a way, sort of moving into that terrain, commercializing their own plays by appealing to the increasing literacy meant there was more readership for those sort of productions, those cheap pamphlets full of news, including murders. And the playhouses are saying, yes, we want a chunk of that. You've read the book, here's the movie, as it were. The playhouses of London were, in a way, the popular medium like television is to us today. It's that sort of commercialized medium, which can nevertheless produce some really great stuff as well. So the playhouses are saying,

we're giving you news here. Not only are we giving it to you like you might have read it, but you can see it in 3D and you can see how it happened, formed on stage. And as you say, you'll be talking about it on your way home. You'll be looking over your shoulder a bit nervously as you walk up the darkness of Thames Street. It's a new kind of theatre. It's the first time that this idea of documentary, that this is about ordinary people like you and me. This is about not bygone kings and princes and famous battles. This is life as it's lived in London in the 1590s. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I'm talking about true crime on the Elizabethan stage. Who knew? More coming up. Who knew? More coming up. look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes.

Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. If the Rose Theatre has the sort of pulp end of the spectrum and the globe is doing something slightly more highbrow how did the true crime plays that we know of from the globe compare to say the poetic language of shakespeare so at the globe in contrast to the rose theater's rather down market output there are plays that are more serious and better written in some conventional understandings of that judgment. And one in particular has a very interesting connection with the more serious plays of the repertoire of the Globe. And that's A Warning for Fair Women,

which contains an anecdote told by one of the characters on a general theme of murder will out, how a woman who'd murdered her husband actually was moved to confess her crime when she was sitting at a play which contained a similar story. So the play that she was watching resonated so much with her that she was forced to confess that she had herself murdered her husband. Whether or not this is a true story is beside the point, I think, because the interesting point is that 1599, when this play was on at the Globe, Shakespeare was at work on Hamlet. And of course, Hamlet almost hinges on putting on a play,

which, as he said, will show something like the murder of my father. And this is a play in which he hopes to catch the conscience of the king, i.e. his murderous uncle Claudius. And he actually says some lines about this that almost echo, or anyway, pre-see this story that's being told in the Warning for Fair Women. This idea that people sitting at a play might be moved to admit their malefactions because murder, though it hath no tongue, will speak. So Hamlet has this idea, I'll put on a play, and I'll see what Claudius's reaction to this is. And indeed, that's what happens. And Claudius reacts rather tellingly to this performance. Hamlet calls the play that he

puts on the mousetrap, because it's intended to catch the rat Claudius. But he also tells us, in discussing with the players about how they're going to perform it, he calls the play The Murder of Gonzago. And he says, this is the story of a murder done in Vienna. It's the exact account of it. The story is extant. In other words, he's basing this idea on a true crime play, a fictional true crime play. Hamlet dramatizes a story that's being told in a true crime play and uses this idea of the true crime play as a way of drawing out a member of the audience to confess his crimes. I mean, I just think that's wonderful because you're giving us a sense of context that Shakespeare's familiar with these works, must change how we read his plays.

And also, I suppose it tells us something about how the Elizabethan audience is consuming plays in that they seem to them so sufficiently compelling, so sufficiently lifelike, that in theory, they can act as mousetraps, that they can produce this effect, which is really interesting in and of itself. Absolutely, Sarah. And Hamlet is full of reflections on this idea that a play can be more real than the supposedly real world of Elsinore, and the actors can produce tears in themselves and in the audience, but in a fiction, a dream of passion. So this idea of the true crime play as having that impact is imported into the much more serious play that Shakespeare was working

on at that time, and Shakespeare would certainly have been familiar with A Warning for Fair Women because it's in the repertoire. Not impossible, they actually might have taken part in it because we know he performed in Ben Johnson's Every Man in His Humour in 1598 because he's in the cast list. Anyway, he would certainly be very familiar with it. And A Warning for Fair Women also has some echoes of earlier Shakespeare plays. So there's a symbiosis there, or there's a natural sense of the collective communal world of the

play companies and the authors. They know what's going on. The audience knows what's going on. So the audience would not only get this scene in Hamlet, they'd also say, ah, yeah, that was in the one we saw a few months ago about the murder of George Sanders so it's a playhouse world that feeds on its own sort of internal references and puffs let's say within the theatrical jargon Shakespeare's almost taking the trouble to in that key scene of Hamlet to add a little bit of promotional puff for another play in the repertoire so he's a good old company man as well as the magnificent author of Hamlet at that point. Yes, and it makes the audience who have seen the one before feel somewhat superior to those who haven't because

they know what's going on in that moment. Now, not all the plays survive, and I was absolutely delighted to see that actually one of the ways that you've got at them otherwise is that you've used things like the libel suits at the courts of high commission to find evidence of the contents of some of the lost works. What did you learn from this? Well, that's right. I mean, quite a lot of the plays we know about that don't survive as texts, essentially speaking, they didn't make it into print. But we know the titles because they're in lists of, particularly Philip Henslow's

lists at the Rose Theatre of plays that went on. So we have a title. Often we can relate that to a criminal case that we know about from other sources. So Page of Plymouth, which was tacked together by Ben Johnson and Thomas Decker in late 1599, we know about the actual case that they were dealing with, even though we don't have the play. in the Court of High Commission actually refers to a slight offshoot of the true crime genre, because it's a comedy that was written by George Chapman from a plot that was given him by a discontented bookbinder called Mr. Flasket about the shenanigans involved with someone he was trying to marry and the shenanigans of that potential bride's father who was balancing out various different suitors. And so this guy Flaskett says, I'm going to take this story along and give it to George Chapman,

well-known playwright, and he's going to make a play out of it. So this is a true crime comedy, or a comedy based on real people in London and real events, not yet a crime. In fact, the crime turns out to be the play because it's sued for libel. But it's, again, a lost play. It's called The Old Joiner of Aldgate. Joiner being used humorously as the idea of a marriage program. And it features these characters. One of them, the father of the potential bride, goes to the court and instigates a libel. The bookbinder, Flaskett, who had the idea of putting this play on, also says at some point during the trial that he hoped it would persuade Agnes, the young lady he was hoping to marry because she was coming into a nice inheritance, the pressure of being on the stage. He hoped it would sort of make her want to hastily accept his offer of marriage as opposed to the other suitors. It didn't work. She married someone else and the the court found in favour of the libelled father. Mr Flaskett had to pay a fine. George Chapman, the playwright, one noticed, doesn't actually get into trouble for this. He's just the playmaker plying his trade. It wasn't his fault that this was libelous material, which is quite interesting in itself. So that's a little offshoot of what

one would call a city comedy of that sort of period, but it's based on real events. Did any of them fall foul of the centering of the Master of the Rebels? This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.

Well, one of the Lord Chamberlain's Men productions, Shakespeare's Company, by then become the King's Men, so the Royal Play Company. 1604, they put on a play called The Tragedy of Gowrie, another lost play. And the reason why it's lost is almost certainly because it was suppressed. It was found to be a play that the authorities did not want to have on stage. The reason being, it was a dramatization of an attempted assassination of King James. This had happened when he was still King of Scotland, before he moved down to England. King James, according to the official account, as I'd call it, managed through skill and courage to evade the assassination attempt. Someone in the King's Men, Shakespeare's company, must have thought, this has got to be a good idea.

True crime with a royal twist. And so the Tragedy of Gowrie was the result. It was put on at the Globe in late 1604. We know from a letter written at the time that after two performances, there was talk of it being hauled off stage, courtiers were appalled by the subject matter, the matter not being handled correctly was one possibility, or just the general idea you don't show current kings on stage. One gets the idea here of the limits being tested and overstepped of what a true crime play could show, or what, in more broad terms, a documentary drama could show. One has a feeling, perhaps, that almost from the inception of this idea with Arden of Faversham, that the authorities might be looking a little askance on this idea of the stage being an arena for journalism, for reportage. This might be an overstepping of what the authorities consider to be the proper

limits of what you might show on stage. Who knows where it might lead, they might be thinking. What else will they be showing? And I think by the time we get to the King's Men rather daringly showing the attempted assassination of King James on stage, that is the point at which the players had stepped a little too far with this new journalistic mode of theatre. And that's one of the last. There are a couple of other plays by the King's Men, which are based on real-life murders, based on news pamphlets, but they're already a bit diluted.

They don't fulfil that very documentary function. They're already re-fictionalising the story. And that indeed becomes the more dominant mode of what becomes known as domestic tragedy, which are basically, they've got a realistic feel, but they're fiction. One of the other examples you've considered is a case that we told in a news pamphlet that's treated in two different plays. Tell us about the story of Walter Cavill's child murders and how they became entertainment and what that might have meant for true crime drama. Yes. In 1605, a pamphlet emerges from St Paul's Churchyard, Two Unnatural and Bloody Murders, it's called, a typical pamphlet sort of headline. And one of the murders is the case of Walter Calverley, a gentleman of Yorkshire, who, to cut the story short, spirals into debt, having inherited his estate and dissipation and drunkenness.

a debt, having inherited his estate and dissipation and drunkenness. And in a fit of sort of, I don't know, he's lost it. He's lost the plot, let's say. And as the pamphlet puts it, frantic with hard liquors, actually attacks and kills two of his young children, attacks his wife and wounds her before being arrested and led away to trial. So it's a very unsettling story, obviously, child murder, even worse, one might say, than husband murder, and right, one might feel, for true crime treatment. And indeed, two plays of the King's Men's repertoire do use this material, but neither of them really uses it in that documentary sense, which is the true sort of nature of the genre. in that documentary sense, which is the true sort of nature of the genre. In the first version of the Calvary story, it's turned into a sort of picturesque tragicomedy with a manufactured happy ending. It's written by a man called George Wilkins, who has the sort of fairly unusual job

title of hack author and brothel keeper, but also is the very probable collaborator with Shakespeare in the first couple of acts of Pericles. So, like the true crime plays that cross between drama and journalism, George Wilkins crosses between drama and some of the leisure activities that usually sort of followed after a play, because he has a rather busy tavern-cum-brothel close to some of the northern theatres. So, he turns it into a sort of low-life, picturesque drama, all about Calvary's dissipations and revelries in suitably sort of picturesque, low-life haunts in London. And then, as I say, produces a happy ending. So you think it's leading up to the murders, and it doesn't.

There's a sudden reconciliation, totally improbable piece of plotting. The other play is called The Yorkshire Tragedy. And Shakespeare has been, again, canvassed as one of the authors, not least because his name appears on the title page, but the actual publisher of it is rather carefree with his attributions. So this idea that Shakespeare was the sole author is considered unlikely. It might have been written by Thomas Middleton, who's a pretty distinguished playwright. And like George Wilkins was also a collaborator with Shakespeare around this time. So it's very much part of the Shakespeare company, but whether he had an actual hand in it or not. But this play is again, very different from the documentary true crime treatment. It's turned into a very terse, brief, parable almost. No names are used. The speech headings are just husband, wife, servant, and so on. It's drained of all that specificity and all that detail that the true crime drama likes to put forward as a sort of sign of its

verisimilitude. And so we see with both these plays what one might call classic true crime material being edged away from the documentary into more fictionalised, picturesque, moralising, parable-type treatments. Neither of them really count quite as true crime, even though they're based on an actual criminal case. So in a sense, terrible pun here, but the sort of death of the true crime craze comes when it sort of overreaches itself. It tries to deal with royal murders or child murders, and it becomes too much. Yes, I think that would be one explanation for the faltering of the genre at that point. I think another way one might see it is theatrical fashions changing fast. One of the things that true crime offered, probably for the first time to many of the audience, was a sense of social realism, and sort of quite apart and away from the

sensational and lurid aspects of crime and murder there is this portrayal of life inside a middle class household that's very much the arena of the story in most of the true crime and anyway social realism i'd say is something that is achieved by the true crime drama by the early jacobean period which is when one's talking about it starting to decline, social realism is available in all sorts of rather more tasty forms, let's say, with what we call the city comedies. Thomas Middleton, John Marston, Thomas Decker, Ben Johnson. They are, again, taking as their subject matter ordinary lives, middle-class lives, urban settings. But instead of ghastly,

bloody events occurring within the house, you get this more sort of topical satire and sort of society being anatomized with a rather knowing sort of smirk by these authors. They're kind of smutty plays as well, lots of sexual innuendo. So the swift-moving, sort of fashion-conscious world of the playhouses, suddenly the true crime is seeming a little bit old-fashioned, a bit too melodramatic, the blood spurting everywhere, the dismembered bodies. Well, you know, they're preferring these rather more urbane and witty social topical satires for their form of social realism. So I think the atmosphere of the Jacobean theatre changes. And then, of course, we get these tremendous revenge tragedies, which are born out of the true crime plays as

well. But they're a different sort of beast. They're sort of psychopathological. There's really wonderful sinister sort of poetry. So again, it's a sort of re-fictionalising of the murder theme. Murder never goes out of style, let's say that. We are examples of that talking about it now. And so it seems we need a dose of unease and violence administered fairly regularly from the comfort of our armchairs. So the true crime craze, as it were, it's brief, and it has many defects from our eyes, the moralistic, the punitive idea of this being a warning to you all. But nonetheless, it seems to me to strike many chords with what we still enjoy and what we seem to keep coming back to. I think that's absolutely the case. And so one last question,

and this may be something that you need to think on for much longer before it becomes clear. But it seems that to have this 15-year generation of true crime at exactly the time that Shakespeare's appearing, and this extraordinary moment for theatre in England, particularly in London, you know, 1592, the comparison is quite extraordinary. What do you think, in the end, this sort of discovery of yours, really, of the phenomenon of true crime on stage for the Elizabethans and a little bit for the Jacobean's, can tell us more generally about the period? Well, certainly in terms of the playhouses, just before going on to more general, I think it tells us about the tremendous hunger and range and expansion of playwriting at the time. So much is being tested out and experimented with. So this is just one genre within many that they're almost falling over themselves with new ideas and new ways in which to use this medium of the theatre, which has suddenly become the medium with its finger on the pulse, to mix a metaphor rather. In broader terms, I think it shows the idea that the interest is

shifting from the big sort of pageant of history and the idea that tragedy itself deals with princes and kings and heroes in that sense. It's shifting to an idea of culture being a mirror, to use a word that Hamlet used about theatre, a mirror being held up to the audience, this idea that the common run of people, that people like you and me are going to be represented by culture. And it's not just a sort of percolating down of high-minded, expensively procured art, but it's something that can be created by people who are, let's look at the playwrights, Shakespeare the Glover's son, Marlowe the Cobbler's son. This is theatre being written by and for the rising middle classes and the artisans, the craftsmen, the citizens. So Tudor life in a way is the apotheosis of upward mobility of certain classes, consolidation of higher classes as well. But the dissolution of the

monasteries, of course, is one example of the sudden influx of money and property to a more middle-class ownership. I don't know if this is possibly tending towards a sort of Marxist or anyway sociological view, because that's not really my terrain. But I think that's the sort of feeling I'd get, that these plays are showing the vast bulk of people, their image up there on stage. And you get similar movements within poetry and within print. Thomas Nash, the great pamphleteer, writing The Unfortunate Traveller, sometimes canvassed as the first English novel, 1594. The voice of the middle classes, the voice of the aspirant masses of England are being heard on stage and they are seeing their images on stage and that sort of self-awareness and that sort of idea of having

a voice, although to some extent resisted or controlled by the government, is I think probably one of the keynotes of the late 16th century. Well, thank you so much for this extraordinary, concise and brilliant trip through thinking about this true crime craze and therefore introducing us to the Elizabethan playhouses and to this wonderful phenomenon, or wonderful might be the wrong word for it, this interesting phenomenon from the 16th century. Thank you. Great pleasure. Thank you, Susanna. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks for listening, everyone.

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