Shakespeare and Co by Stanley Wells

Author:Stanley Wells [Wells, Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary, History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Literary Criticism, Shakespeare
ISBN: 9780307497826
Google: m1uQKUv5tXAC
Amazon: 0141017139
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2007-09-25T07:00:00+00:00

Heartlessly, the ballad was sung repeatedly under Anne Elsdon's window.

At the time of the trial the play dramatizing the terrible happenings for which Audley and Tindall were prosecuted had already been set forth on the stage of the Red Bull in Clerkenwell, which had a particular reputation as a playhouse that catered for the lower end of the market. Dekker was one of the play's four authors - the others were John Webster, author already of two great tragedies, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, the young John Ford, who would go on to write some of the finest tragedies of the reign of King Charles I, and William Rowley, best remembered for his collaboration with Thomas Middleton on The Changeling. Dekker refers to the play in a legal statement as The Late Murder in Whitechapel; or, Keep the Widow Waking. The play entwined Anne Elsdon's story with that of the unhappy young Nathaniel Tindall's murder of his mother by stabbing her with a knife in the throat and the left breast, which provoked two ballads, one entitled 'The Penitent Son's Tears for his Murdered Mother', the other? Most Bloody Unnatural and Unmatchable Murder Committed in Whitechapel by Nathaniel Tindall upon his own Mother'. Tindall confessed to the crime, and was sentenced to be 'hanged near the house where he committed the murder'.

Astonishingly, it was alleged in the court of Star Chamber that Audley and his confederates had compounded their offences by inciting Dekker, Rowley and others to 'make, devise, and contrive one scandalous interlude or play most tauntingly naming the same interlude or play Keep the Widow Waking, thereby setting forth and intimating how long… Anne Elsdon was kept waking and the manner of … Anne Elsdon's distemperature with wine and hot waters and the loss of her estate … to the great infamy and scandal of … Anne Elsdon'. Dekker gave written evidence testifying that he 'did often see the … play or part thereof acted but how often he cannot depose'. Presumably he felt a professional duty to be present in the playhouse where the play he had helped to write was being performed. We do not know exactly how work on this play was divided among its collaborators, but Dekker reveals that he wrote 'two sheets [eight pages] of paper containing the first act' - which was completed within a month - 'and a speech in the last scene of the last act of the boy who had killed his mother' - probably this was Nathaniel's death speech at the point of execution. Dekker's composition of the first act suggests that he laid down the lines of the plot that his collaborators would develop. Shakespeare, in his collaborations with Middleton and Fletcher, seems to have worked in the same way.

Dekker was also able to continue his lifelong celebration of the City of London in pageants and in the annual entertainments offered to the incoming Lord Mayor. Fees for this kind of work could be

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