London: The Biography полностью

On the arrival of foreign monarchs, or upon the birth of princes, or after news of success in wars, the city decked itself out in colourful pageants. When Catherine of Aragon entered London in 1501 she was greeted by painted wooden castles built upon stone foundations, columns and statues, fountains and artificial mountains, mechanical zodiacs and battlements. It is impossible to overestimate the thirst for spectacle among Londoners through many centuries. When Henry V returned from Agincourt in 1415 he saw two gigantic figures placed upon the entrance to London Bridge; on the bridge itself “were innumerable boys representing the angelic host, arrayed in white, with glittering wings, and their hair set with sprigs of laurel”; the conduit on Cornhill was covered by a pavilion of crimson cloth and, on the king’s approach, “a great quantity of sparrows and other small birds” were set free. At the conduit in Cheapside there were virgins, dressed entirely in white, “who from cups in their hands blew forth golden leaves on the king.” An image of the sun, “which glittered above all things,” was placed upon a throne and “round it were angels singing and playing all kinds of musical instruments.” In succeeding reigns the conduits of Cornhill and Cheapside were arrayed with trees and caves, artificial hills and elaborate streams of wine or milk; the streets themselves were draped with tapestries and cloth of gold. As Agnes Strickland, an early biographer of Elizabeth I, remarked upon these manifestations, “The city of London might, at that time, have been termed a stage.” A German traveller similarly observed that, at the coronation of George IV, the king “was obliged to present himself, as chief actor in a pantomime” while the royal costume “reminded me strikingly of one of those historical plays which are here got up so well.”

There is another kind of drama which seems close to the life of the city. The streets provided a permanent arena, for example, in which any “patterer” or chanting trader could attract an inquisitive audience. The stages of sixteenth-century theatres were built to face the south, so that more light might fall upon the players, but we may imagine the actions and deportment of less professional actors to be similarly lit upon the crowded thoroughfares of London. Historical scenes were dramatised by street performers. There are extant photographs of actors in nineteenth-century street theatre; they seem poor, and perhaps grimy, but they wear spangling tights and elaborate costumes against garishly painted backdrops. In the early twentieth century, too, scenes from the novels of Dickens were played out on open carts on the very sites where those scenes were set.

Dickens may have appreciated such a gesture, since he turned London itself into a vast symbolic theatre; much of his dramatic imagination was formed by visiting the playhouses which abounded in his youth, particularly the penny gaffs and the small theatrical “houses” around the Drury Lane Theatre. In one of them he saw a pantomime and “noticed that the people who kept the shops, and who represented the passengers in the thoroughfares, and so forth, had no conventionality in them, but were unusually like the real thing.” He is adverting to the fact that ordinary Londoners, mainly of the younger generation, paid to be allowed to act in that season’s latest urban drama or pantomime. In Vanity Fair his contemporary, Thackeray, noted two London boys as having “a taste for painting theatrical characters.” In a similar spirit almost every street of London was once the object of dramatic curiosity, from A Chaste Maid of Cheapside to The Cripple of Fenchurch Street, from the Boss of Billingsgate to The Lovers of Ludgate, from The Devil of Dowgate to The Black Boy of Newgate. The audience found in them what they also found in Bartholomew Fair, a theatre which reflected the nature of their lives as well as the nature of the city itself. These plays were generally violent and melodramatic in theme, but that is precisely why they offered a true image of teeming city life.

London life itself could in turn become street theatre, even if it were sometimes of a tragic and inadvertent kind. The poor, and the outcast in particular, can claim no privacy and, as Gissing noted in his novel The Nether World (1889), “their scenes alike of tenderness and of anger must for the more part be enacted on peopled ways” where their shouts and muttered words could plainly be heard.