Playgoers, Players and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern London: The Bridewell Evidence

Abstract

The rise of the professional theatre from the 1570s, the most spectacular achievement of the English Renaissance, appeared in a much less positive light to London's magistrates, preachers and pamphleteers. They viewed plays as a threat to public order and morals, and the playhouses themselves, attracting a huge and raucous assembly of men and women of every degree, as an affront to social hierarchy and decorum. Some regarded acting as intrinsically evil, perpetrating a public 'lie' through the deliberate distortion of true identities, a lie exacerbated by the use of boy-actors to play all female roles. While aristocratic patronage afforded the companies a measure of protection and security, the London authorities were still inclined to regard actors as little better than the vagabonds with whom they had been bracketed in a statute of 1572.1 This article throws new light on contemporary concerns by examining a stream of references to playgoers and players in the minutebooks of the London Bridewell. The same records also furnish information on the social practice of cross-dressing, and thus help us to understand the context in which cross-dressing on the stage was judged.Andrew Gurr has suggested that by 1620 London's six theatres were attracting as many as 25,000 visitors each week. Contemporaries agreed on their immense popularity, while moralists raged that citizens preferred plays to sermons. It has proved notoriously difficult, however, to identify individual playgoers. While most of the two hundred or so painstakingly identified by Gurr were members of London's social elite, he agrees with contemporary observers that most playgoers were drawn from the ranks of tradesmen, artisans, and their families.2 Writers complained that playhouses also attracted the poor and disreputable, of both sexes. But both poor and 'middling sort' playgoers have remained frustratingly elusive, except as an anonymous mass.We will never be able to establish the precise social composition of playhouse audiences. But there is no doubt that several sources remain largely untapped, including the court minute-books of the Bridewell Hospital, on which this article is based. Founded in the mid-sixteenth century, the London Bridewell exercised a wide if ill-defined jurisdiction over beggars, rogues, harlots, bawds and vagrants in and around the capital.3 Its records yield a steady trickle of plebeian playgoers, of both sexes, from Elizabeth's reign to the closure of the theatres in 1642, and though inevitably weighted towards the disorderly young, poor and marginal, they throw incidental light too on some better-off playgoers. The information they provide on specific offenders and circumstances enables us to see how closely these paralleled the dire warnings of moralists about the playhouse world as a whole.Playhouses were most commonly associated with illicit sex, especially prostitution. Moralists warned how easily men could be tempted or hardened in sin by harlots touting for custom there, and the Bridewell governors heard evidence to substantiate such claims. On 21 March 1579 they examined Stephen Coke, cobbler, and Joane Bassett, harlot, 'taken at a barneside nere the Theatar suspiciously'. Joane confessed they had been intending to have sex, and they were both whipped.4 On 7 November 1600 the governors sat in judgement on Alice Pinder, gentlewoman, and Robert Welch, gentleman, who 'taking acquaintance of her coming from a playe did send for her . . . to come to him in Smythfeild where he had a cooche redy and tooke her into the cooche with him and carried her to Stratford the Bowe where he had thuse and carnall knowledge of her bodye'. Alice also admitted several other sexual liaisons, including one with the landlord of the lodgings where she lay for the cure of a 'sore leg'. Her story was a worrying reminder that the women corrupted or corrupting at playhouses might come from highly respectable backgrounds. Alice appears to be a high-class prostitute, separated from her husband, underlining the threat that playgoing posed to domestic order. …