The tradition continues, principally because it is an aspect of Cockney humour once known as “chaff.” We hear in the eighteenth century of Londoners being sent into “convulsions” of laughter by prints of a couple yawning after sexual intercourse. The humour could also be of a more personal kind. Steele, in the Spectator of 11 August 1712, tells the story of an eighteenth-century gentleman who was approached by a beggar and politely asked for sixpence so that he might visit a tavern. “He urged, with a melancholy Face, that all his Family had died of Thirst. All the Mob have Humour, and two or three began to take the Jest.” The “Humour” of “the Mob” here consists in the beggar implicitly mocking the gentleman, a form of burlesque which is the most common form of Cockney humour. Chimney-sweeps were dressed up as clergymen; shoe-blacks, “with their footstools on their heads,” were driven around the “ring” of Hyde Park at the precise moment when the fashionable were about to parade. They were levelling distinctions, and parodying wealth or rank. William Hazlitt divined in The Plain Speaker of 1826 that “Your true Cockney is your only true leveller.” He concluded that “Everything is vulgarised in his mind. Nothing dwells long enough on it to produce an interest; nothing is contemplated sufficiently at a distance to excite curiosity or wonder … He has no respect for himself, and still less (if possible) for you. He cares little about his own advantage, if he can only make a jest out of yours. Every feeling comes to him through a medium of levity and impertinence.” This may represent too jaundiced an attitude, however, since the levelling humour is also related to the spirit of “fair play” which was said to be prevalent among the London crowd; one of the great Cockney expressions was “Fair play’s a jewel.” In this spirit the street urchins of the nineteenth century might innocently ask a gentleman, “Is the missus quite well?” Swift remembered a child declaring, “Go and teach your grandmother to suck eggs.”
When street scavengers were confronted by the new “street-sweeping machines,” “a brisk interchange of street wit took place, the populace often enough encouraging both sides.” In similar fashion street fights, however spontaneous, took place according to rules well known to the London crowd. The same equalising spirit of London burlesque may also lie behind the permanent affection for cross-dressing among Cockneys. Theatrical transvestism has been prominent in London entertainments for centuries-from Mrs. Noah of the medieval pageants to the latest act in a London “drag” club. When in 1782 the actor Bannister played the character of Polly Peachum in The Beggar’s Opera-itself a great emblem of London-one member of the audience “was thrown into hysterics which continued without intermission until Friday morning when she expired.”
<p>CHAPTER 15. Theatrical City</p>Evidence for a Roman theatre, south-west of St. Paul’s, is now very clear; it was located little more than 150 feet east of the Mermaid Theatre, which is situated by Puddle Dock. Further evidence can be found for a theatre at Whitechapel in 1567; it was just beyond Aldgate, with a stage some five feet high and a series of galleries.
This was in turn followed by the erection of the Theatre in the fields of Shoreditch. It was constructed of wood and thatch, well enough designed to merit the description of this “gorgeous playing-place erected in the Fields.” Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare’s Hamlet were performed here. Certainly it must have proved popular because, a year later, another theatre was built two hundred yards away; it was known as “The Curtain” or, latterly, “The Green Curtain” in deference to the colourful sign painted on its exterior. Theatres, like taverns and shops, were well illustrated to catch the attention of the citizens.
