Book(s) For an Upcoming Paper

[willowisp]

Since I may have only mentioned this on Facebook and Twitter, quick update: I'm taking a summer course prior to attending SUNY Oswego full-time in the fall. The course is called Western Theatre: Edification or Entertainment?

For an upcoming paper I need to write a first-person account of a Londoner in late 16th or early 17th century attending one of Shakespeare's plays at the Globe. The professor doesn't want a synopsis of the play, but he does want information on the staging thereof. He also wants detail on where I live, how I get to the theatre, what it's like, concessions, and so on. Last but not least, we need three sources, not including the textbooks.

Even though the paper is a ways in the future, I'd like to get started in research. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to recommend media, especially books, which give a good historical perspective of life in that time period. The professor pointed us to a site which is a virtual tour of the Globe theatre, so I'm more interested in the other aspects of life at that time. Any and all recommendations are welcome and will be greatly appreciated.

Now if only I could use studentbane's well-researched Cthulu meets Victorian England RPG as a source...

Comments

[esmerel.livejournal.com]

I have no sources anymore, my high school teachers were all hugely fond of Shakespeare and the Globe though. :)

Your perspective varied mightily depending on if you were a commoner or a noble. Nobles (and the wealthy) could afford to buy seats! Commoners? Stood in the ground area. And bathrooms? Not so much. You just kinda went... where you were. Ew. But, theater was a hugely popular pasttime.:)

I admite a giant fondness for the Globe - I was part of a fundraiser to help build the new one:)

[druidsfire.livejournal.com]

The only 'sources' I could offer would be a series of UK TV shows and movies set during that time, in particular an episode of the 3rd series of the new Doctor Who entitled 'The Shakespeare Code' which was actually filmed in the recreated Globe Theatre...

But I have a feeling fiction doesn't count. ;)

[studentbane.livejournal.com]

Ooohhh... We might be able to help with this. We have been trying to set aside time to go see a play at the (recreated) Globe anyway. When is your paper due? Are there any photos of the site that would be helpful? We can keep an eye out for lit and so on, though often they're thin on that kind of thing...

Now if only I could use [info]studentbane's well-researched Cthulu meets Victorian England RPG as a source...

"And as Macbeth slithers onto stage, his slimy and squamous tentacles held high..."

[willowisp.livejournal.com]

What, no stygian references?

[studentbane.livejournal.com]

What, no stygian references?

That would Act 1, Scene 1: Enter 3 Witches...

[jklgoduke.livejournal.com]

There was a book I read ... I think it was "Shakespeare of London" by Chute that would be an excellent source. While searching for it online, I mistyped it as "Shakespeare's London" on both google and ebay and found a wealth of useful stuff ... "Shakespeare's Londond on 5 groats a day" and so forth. It looks like there's a lot of information out there. Have fun!

[studentbane.livejournal.com]

late 16th or early 17th century

Ok, so you're before the Great Fire (1666), then? You might look at Samuel Pepys's diary. He was writing 1650-1670-ish. Not terribly long on detail, but does have a lot of day-to-day account of life in London for the upper middle class. Also accounts of the plague (1665-1666, IIRC), which is also a bit late for you, but is cool. ;-)

Do you know what class of Londoner you're going to be? That will affect a lot about where you live and, therefore, how you get to the play. E.g., if you're wealthy, you probably live in Westminster, so you're across the river from the Globe. Which means that it's very likely that you travel by water to get there, and so on. Water travel is big in this era. The Thames is tidal as far up as London, so parts of your journey could conceivably be influenced by the state of the tides (though not badly so -- I don't see much reference in Pepys to the state of the tides when he travels by water).

Remember also that the Thames itself is considerably wider and slower than it is today, because the Victorians narrowed it during their great plumbing projects of the second half of the 19th. The Strand, which today is about 100m inland, was the street along the beach back then.

A big factor to be kept in mind is that in the day, the town was a lot more stinky than it is now. Less than by the early 19th, of course, b/c the population of London area is much lower. (Looks like the population of London was roughly half-a-million people in the era you're targeting.) But still got some nasty going on, by our standards. One statistic I saw at the London Science Museum was that by the mid-19th century, there was something like 100,000 tons of horse-dung dumped on the streets of London per day. If you're lower class and have the misfortune to live near butchering areas of town, then you have to deal with offal piled deeper-than-head-deep. And left there for days or weeks. Yum...

Since you're before the Great Fire, the predominant building material is wood. A lot of half-timbered buildings with wattle and daub construction and slate or possibly thatch roofs. (Daub, of course, often using dung as one of its ingredients.)

You're not yet up to the London Fogs, b/c we're not burning coal yet IIRC. Most of the tributary rivers to the Thames in the vicinity of London haven't yet been paved over or otherwise buried, so you might have to cross one or more of those as well. (Gaiman references a book called something like the Lost Rivers of London.)

The skyline of London will be very different than today, of course. Not only do you not have the skyscrapers (obviously), but you don't yet have a lot of the monuments that we associate with London -- St. Paul's Cathedral, the Tower Bridge, Houses of Parliament, etc. all came in after the Great Fire, or as late as the Victorians. (More precisely, there was an old St. Paul's before the Fire, but it looked nothing like the modern St. Paul's. It was wood, with a peaked spire, rather than the famous Wren dome.) The Tower of London is a notable exception, as it dates back to William the Conqueror. (Heh heh.) In this era, it's still a royal and military feature and would be quite prominent over the skyline of mostly lower buildings. It also controls slightly more territory than it does today because the outer-most defensive walls were taken down in the 19th and early 20th, while the moat was filled in in the 19th. (Good thing too, because by all accounts it was an open cesspit, due to a design flaw.)

Ran out of space here. Bah! More in the next comment...

[studentbane.livejournal.com]

The Old London Bridge was still standing then -- certainly fertile ground for description. (Closed and gated for curfew after dark.)

Other important social bits to keep in mind: neither police forces nor fire brigades have been invented yet. Some localities pay their own thugs to keep off the other thugs, but unless you're royalty and can afford your own personal army, that's as close as you get to official law and order. I can't find the citation offhand, but I have read that the murder rates in big cities through the medieval period, anyway, exceeded that in some war zones today. Still, it's not so rampant and chaotic that society completely breaks down and people flee the city. (That takes a plague. Or lots of raw sewage in the summer sun.) There were, however, courts and trials and a justice process and so on. And the heads of traitors and criminals were hung on pikes at the south gate of London Bridge.

I wish that I had better physical references to recommend. Most of what I know came off the 'net or from wandering around being a tourist here.

[missazrael.livejournal.com]

Bill Bryson wrote a really good book called "Shakespeare" that has lots of interesting information about life during Shakespeare's time. It's a pretty easy, fast read too.

[studentbane.livejournal.com]

Here's a book I just found on Google Books:

The History of St. Pauls Cathedral in London 1658. (So just before the Great Fire.)

(Hope that URL comes through...)