Purle of Siluer and of Golde,
to satisfye your minde.
With Hoods, Bungraces, Hats or Caps,
such store are in that streete:
As if on t’one side you should misse
the t’other serues you feete.
For Nets of every kynd of sort,
I leave within the pawne:
French Ruffes, high Purles, Gorgets and Sleeves
of any kind of Lawne.
For Purse or Kniues, for Combe or Glasse,
or any needeful knacke
I by the Stoks have left a Boy,
wil aske you what you lack.
I Hose doo leave in Birchin Lane,
of any kynd of syse:
For Women stitchte, for men both Trunks
and those of Gascoyne gise.
Bootes, Shoes or Pantables good store,
Saint Martins hath for you:
… And for the men, few Streetes or Lanes,
but Bodymakers bee:
And such as make the sweeping Cloakes,
with Gardes beneth the Knee.
Artyllery at Temple Bar,
and Dagges at Tower hyll:
Swords and Bucklers of the best,
are nye the Fleete vntyll.
Now when thy Folke are fed and clad
with such as I have namde:
For daynty mouthes, and stomacks weake
some Iunckets must be framde.
Wherfore I Poticaries leave,
with Banquets in their Shop:
Phisicians also for the sicke,
Diseases for to stop.
Some Roysters styll, must bide in thee,
and such as cut it out:
That with the guiltlesse quarel wyl,
to let their blood about.
For them I cunning Surgions leave,
some Playsters to apply.
That Ruffians may not styll be hangde,
nor quiet persons dye.
For Salt, Otemeale, Candles, Sope,
or what you els doo want:
In many places, Shops are full,
I left you nothing scant …
Here, in all its plenty, is the sprawling mercantile metropolis of modern times beginning to slide into view; here is a first version of the ‘embarrassment of riches’ described by Simon Schama in relation to the slightly later civilisation of the Dutch Republic. It is clear, however, that Isabella Whitney’s London is also a harsh, challenging place where change is almost too fast-moving. As it still is.
Earlier, we saw how during Tudor times the world of the court began to intersect more closely with the ordinary urban imagination; like a dangerous magnet, the court attracted attention from everywhere. That’s partly about the politics, increasingly aggressive, of religious reform. But nowhere is it clearer than in the development of the period’s most brilliant and long-lasting cultural innovation – the English theatre. It can often seem as if William Shakespeare and a select few contemporaries exploded upon the world from nothing. But as the man said, nothing comes from nothing. The truth is that the urban world of the sixteenth century across England was brimming with spectacle and theatre long before Shakespeare.
In trying to tell the story of the British through poetry there is a particular problem which begins around now, and which I ought to own up to. Just as in high medieval culture, so in early modern culture, Britain was still a Latin-soaked society. If you wanted to get on, if you wanted to be taken seriously, you had to be able to read and speak Latin. In towns across Britain, grammar schools had been established to birch and bully Latin conjugations into young boys – and very occasionally girls too, though almost all the education for them would have been accomplished in the home. Once you had your Latin, the chance of a university education at Oxford, Cambridge or St Andrews might be open to you. (The Scots were well served: from 1451 Glasgow was an option, and from 1495 Aberdeen as well.) Without Latin, and preferably Greek, there was no chance of a career in the Church, the law, or any literate profession connected to the court.
This double literacy had huge advantages for the educated British. It meant that scholars from these islands could talk fluently with their counterparts across the European Continent; and it meant that they had access, directly, to the greatest of the classical writers now becoming more and more freely available in Renaissance Europe. But for poetry, it bred a problem. The educated poets were doused, pickled and marinated in Latin and Greek authors. They had been brought up to parse and translate Plautus, Livy, Ovid and Cicero. Their poetic models came from Imperial Rome and ancient Greece. Their minds were stocked, and over-stuffed, with stories from classical mythology. So when they turned to write in English, they naturally showed their proficiency by imitating the Greek and Roman classics. Sometimes they did this so well you barely notice: the early Shakespeare play The Comedy of Errors comes directly from Plautus. But often anthologies of British poetry from this time seem an endless procession of Roman nymphs and swains, busy copies of Ovid’s Metamorphoses or, as we saw earlier, versions of Horace’s odes. This is fine. It produces some highly enjoyable poetry. There is a lot of very, very clever writing, with bold and daring games, going on. But mostly it doesn’t tell us much about the Britain of the period. For that we have to go to less clever, less fashionable verse by people further down the social scale, or who have turned their backs on the enticements of ancient Rome. Thus, in what follows there will be rather less than in most verse collections of Edmund Spenser’s droll mimicries of medieval poets and Virgil – fewer Phoebes and Chloes, fewer Strephons – and more of the earthier, homespun verse of the ballads and the morality plays.
British theatrical traditions followed directly from medieval religious pageantry. Some, at least, of the great cycles of mystery plays, from York, Coventry, Wakefield and Chester, were still being performed in the first half of the 1500s, telling the stories of Noah, Cain and Abel, the New Testament and the saints in churches and marketplaces. Here was direct, simple, often funny drama which had to catch the attention of an illiterate peasant, or lose its audience. So long as the Catholic Church and the medieval guilds held on to their authority, these immensely popular and protracted (the York Cycle was composed of no fewer than forty-eight different tableaux) entertainments were an essential part of the religious education of millions of Britons, particularly in
