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The Bard at the Tabard MARTHA CARLIN

We hope you enjoy this free piece from Did Shakespeare, Jonson and their the TLS, which is available every ‘roystering associates’ drink at the inn Thursday in print and via the TLS app. where Chaucer’s pilgrims gathered? An This week’s issue also features Tessa intriguing discovery suggests they did Hadley on adventures in reading, Nadia Atia on Baghdad and Rachel Polonsky Published: 24 September 2014 on Malevich at Tate Modern. We also look at trust in politics, Thomas Nashe’s dog days, the rise of Afrikaner

nationalism – and much more.

WELCOME TO THE TLS A new glimpse of Shakespeare and his circle appears in a description of the borough We hope you enjoy our free selection of reviews and of , written around 1643 by an articles from this week's Times Literary Supplement. anonymous antiquary, and now part of a The TLS is available in print and as an app, with full portfolio of twenty-seven loose sheets of paper access to our online archives. in Edinburgh University Library (MS La. II 422/211). The recto sides of these pages contain Patrick Stewart and Richard McCabe as Shakespeare and Jonson, from Edward Bond’s play manuscript notes, in fair copy, described as In the latest in the TLS's occasional series of readings, Bingo Photograph: [email protected] “Some notes for my Perambulation in and Ronald Blythe and Michael Caines celebrate Laurie Lee, the round ye Citye of London for six miles and author of Cider with Rosie, who was born 100 years ago. Remnants of divers worthie things and men”.

The notes chiefly concern Southwark and Hackney, and derive partly from Anthony Munday’s The TLS edition (1633) of John Stow’s Survey of London. There is also much material that appears to be Laurie Lee with Rona… otherwise unrecorded, however, and the author announces that his survey is intended

“only to notice those places and things that have been passed by or littled [sic] mentiond [sic] by those greate Antiquaries that have written of this noble Citye and ye which places are fast ruining as 14:08 the Tabard Inne and ye many houses of Priesthood old Monuments Halls Palaces and Houses of its : Cookie policy greate Citizens and Lords and may be useful to searchers of Antiquitye in time to come.” Follow @TheTLS

In Southwark, he notes, there are “many ancient places yet to be seen and fast falling in ruine and not noticed by others”: not only the priory of St Mary Overy and the Bishop of Winchester’s palace, Follow but “ye old House of ye Poet Gower”, London Bridge and “those Stews so long a source of profitt to ye Maiers of London and Bishopps of Winchester ye Bear Gardens and Playes”. Each September the Mayor, Sheriffs and Aldermen of London paid an official visit to Southwark Fair, and the antiquary describes how they used the Tabard inn in the high street as their headquarters, concluding with the This week's contents page (PDF) following remarkable passage:

“Ye Tabard I find to have been ye resort Mastere Will Shakspear Sir Sander Duncombe Lawrence Fletcher Richard Burbage Ben Jonson and ye rest of their roystering associates in King Jameses time as in ye lange room they have cut their names on ye Pannels.” 100 good godly reads Germany: Memories of a nation Shakespeare (1564–1616) and Burbage (1568–1619) had been associates since the 1580s, and Author, Author members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men since the 1590s; Jonson (1572–1637) began to write for A (fake?) stake through the heart the company in 1598. The following year, the company transferred its operations from to Books unbound – and Prufrock in his the new Globe on Bankside in Southwark. In 1603, King James became the company’s patron, and cabinet Lawrence Fletcher (d. 1608), an actor who had come to London in the royal entourage, became a If buildings could talk member of the company now renamed the King’s Men.

Shakespeare is thought by some scholars to have lived near the Globe at the end of the 1590s. (This In praise of the bus pass -- for oldies

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1462934.ece[2014/10/11 17:18:14] The Bard at the Tabard | TLS

is suggested by annotations to tax records from his previous residence in the City, but there is no Cheltenham Literary Festival - for Latin corresponding evidence in the extant records for Southwark.) By 1604, however, he was certainly lovers living in the City, and is not known to have lived in Southwark thereafter. Fletcher settled on Marriage à la mode My "birthday" Bankside, where he lived from at least 1604 until his death in September 1608. Burbage, the company’s leading actor, lived in Shoreditch, and Jonson in the City, but – if the alleged graffiti were genuinely theirs – they all seemingly enjoyed the hospitality of the Tabard, and commemorated it by carving their names on the panelling of one of the public rooms.

Sir Sander (or Sanders) Duncombe seems unlikely to have been their fellow “roisterer”. Knighted in 1617, and with a reputation, among other things, as a healer (according to John Evelyn’s Diary, when Evelyn’s mother lay mortally ill in 1635, Duncombe tried to save her life with “his celebrated and famous powder”), Duncombe was presumably younger than Shakespeare, Burbage, Jonson and Fletcher, and is not otherwise recorded as their associate. A Justice of the Peace for Middlesex in the early 1640s, he might have carved his name alongside theirs as an act of homage.

The most likely time for Shakespeare and his “roystering associates” to have congregated at the Tabard was probably the decade after the opening of the Globe in 1599. (In 1609, the new indoor theatre at Blackfriars became the preferred theatre of the King’s Men, although they continued to perform at the Globe.) Lawrence Fletcher’s own graffiti certainly would have dated from this period, between his arrival in London in May 1603 and his death. In the following decade, Jonson became a member of a group of men, composed largely of lawyers and politicians, who met at the Mermaid tavern in the City. Shakespeare, however, was not a member of that group, leading some to doubt the credibility of John Aubrey’s and Thomas Fuller’s later accounts of the many lively “wit combates” between Jonson and Shakespeare. Perhaps these exchanges did indeed take place – at the Tabard in Southwark.

The Tabard, celebrated in Shakespeare’s day and after as the inn where Chaucer’s pilgrims gathered in the General Prologue of The Tales, stood opposite the sessions house (formerly St Margaret’s Church) on the east side of Southwark’s high street. This was well south of London Bridge and quite some distance from the Bankside theatres, and so would seem an inconvenient place for Shakespeare and his theatrical companions to have met – perhaps they chose it specifically for its association with Chaucer. Unfortunately, the Tabard that they knew was burnt down in the great Southwark fire of 1676. Although rebuilt and restored to use, any earlier remains that might have survived were demolished along with the rest of the inn in 1874–5.

The antiquary’s name does not appear in his notes, but it is clear from them, and from a page of personal reflections dated “November 1643”, that he was an unmarried royalist with an interest in Download this week's classified ads (PDF) the capital’s medieval monuments. He was acquainted with “Dr Harvey”, and was a friend of the Download more of this week's classified ads (PDF) Bohemian artist Wenceslaus Hollar (in England from December 28, 1636 until 1644), whose Download the TLS rate card (PDF) magnificent panorama of London, published in 1647, was taken from the tower of St Saviour’s Church (now Southwark Cathedral). These features – and the initials “JE”, which occur on one page – would fit the diarist John Evelyn. The hand of the notes does not appear to match Evelyn’s early or mature hands, however, and Evelyn does not mention the ruinous antiquities of Southwark or Hackney, or a gentlewoman named Mabel Acton, in whom the anonymous antiquary had a romantic JENNIFER HOWARD interest. Evelyn’s references to Dr William Harvey (1578–1657) date from after Harvey’s death and Literature in the digital age do not imply a personal acquaintance, and he does not report visiting Southwark Fair until 1660, ANTHONY PHELAN when he described such sights as dancing monkeys and conjoined twins, not the Mayor’s visit or the The critical life of Walter Benjamin Tabard inn. So for now, the author’s identity remains a tantalizing mystery. GEOFFREY HOSKING Martha Carlin is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a Fellow of Crimea and the Tsars the Royal Historical Society. She is the author of Medieval Southwark, 1996, and, most recently, the ANTHONY O’HEAR co-author, with David Crouch, of Lost Letters of Medieval Life: English society, 1200–1250, which Michael Oakeshott on sex was published last year. She discusses the Tabard inn and its Host in Historians on Chaucer, edited by Stephen Rigby, with the assistance of Alastair Minnis, which is due to appear next month.

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http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1462934.ece[2014/10/11 17:18:14] The Bard at the Tabard | TLS

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