Francis Langley

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Francis Langley (* 1548 ; † 1602 ) was a theater owner in the Elizabethan era . After James Burbage and Philip Henslowe , Langley was the third major theater entrepreneur in a time when Elizabethan theater was nearing its peak.

background

Originally from the village of Althorpe in North Lincolnshire , Uncle John Langley , a London goldsmith who also served as mayor in 1577, raised Francis. His training was short-lived, as Francis succumbed to the temptations his position offered and he eventually had to leave the company due to various indiscretions. However, he initially overcame his tendency to youthful escapades and later held the office of "Alnager and Searcher of Cloth" in London (for example: "Cloth knife, or Ellenstempler and examiner of fabrics"); so he was an officially appointed quality inspector for clothing fabrics. He received his post as cloth examiner through a recommendation from Sir Francis Walsingham . Langley, however, was soon involved in legal proceedings in which he was accused of fraud and extortion. In the demi-world of old, winding houses, brothels and theaters, Langley felt most at home and ran a loan business. He became aware of the royal saddler Thomas Cure, the owner of Paris Gardens , whose area also included an amusement park with bearbaiting businesses on the south bank of the Thames. He was in jail because of his indebtedness and Langley offered him £ 850 for his Paris Gardens. All but 95 pounds went into the debt settlement cure. However, the financially tight Langley had to take out a loan himself "on interest from the London Orphan Court". Ingram described the bad business of loan guarantees (English "cosigning") Langley, who immediately called in the entered collateral in the event of default in repayment. Contemporaries said he didn't have a friend who would donate a large sum for the benefit of said Francis Langley. Langley later took out a mortgage on all of his Cheapside property to build rental homes on his newly acquired Paris Gardens property for £ 1,650. Langley had previously built 13 homes, nine of which were rented.

The Swan Theater

Swan Exterior.
The Swan Theater 1616

Langley's main contribution to the Elizabethan theater was the construction of the Swan Theater in Southwark , on the south bank of the Thames , directly across from the City of London, between 1595 and 1596 . The Swan was the fourth largest theater in London, after Burbage's The Theater from 1576, Lanman's Curtain from 1577 and Henslowe's The Rose from 1587 - but the Swan was the best-appointed and most visually striking of the four. The surviving - and deep due to its location is constantly threatened by floods - mansion on the site belonged to one day to the Knights Templar Monastery in Bermondsey , which, like all such houses came in royal or private hands after Henry VIII. , The dissolution of the monasteries had caused. In November 1594 the Lord Mayor of London complained to the Lord High Treasurer and Secretary of State Lord Burghley about Langley's plans to build a theater in the neighborhood. The Rose and the Beargarden already existed there . However, the Lord Mayor's complaint had no noticeable result and so the Swan Theater was securely completed in February 1597 when Langley signed a contract with the Pembroke's Men , a company that was to play the new house. The contract included the interesting note that the theater was already being used at the time it was signed. But who played there - in 1596 - is not recorded; however, since Shakespeare had an association with Langley, it seems possible that it was the Lord Chamberlain's Men .

Langley used the same entrepreneurial way of working his colleague Henslowe by taking various actors and ensembles under exclusive contracts and in return for reliable financial security. Unfortunately, Langley did not leave posterity the relatively extensive documentation that Henslowe produced. Langley's work is therefore in the dark and is difficult to grasp today.

Langley's and Shakespeare's dispute with Gardiner

Langley had an undisclosed relationship with William Shakespeare . In November 1596 two lawsuits were served on the sheriff of Surrey, the Shire in which Southwark is located. In the first, Langley sued William Gardiner and William Wayte. Wayte then sued Shakespeare, Langley and two women named Anne Lee and Dorothy Soer .

William Gardiner was a corrupt Justice of the Peace in Surrey. The Canadian literary historian Leslie Hotson describes Gardiner's life as a mixture of "greed, usury, deceit, cruelty and perjury". Shortly before these events, Gardiner had first brought charges of defamation against Langley because Langley had accused him of precisely this, namely perjury . Langley stubbornly defended himself, insisting that this allegation was true and that he could prove it in court. Gardiner then withdrew his complaint. William Wayte was Gardiner's stepson, in a document other than "a certain loose person of no reckoning or value being wholly under the rule and commandment of said Gardiner" ("a certain loose person of no discretion or value who is completely under control and command." of the said Gardiner stands ").

Write down a motion for a peace pledge from William Wayte against William Shakespeare , Francis Langley, and others

Shakespeare's role in this dispute is unclear. Anne Lee and Dorothy Soer, the two women named with Shakespeare in the second complaint, cannot be identified. Hotson suspects that they worked as an assistant in the theater. Shakespeare may have been linked to Langley through the Pembroke's Men, with whom he may have worked in the early 1590s, as they performed at least two of his early plays ( Titus Andronicus and Henry VI Part 3 ). His later ensemble, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, may have played at the Swan in the summer of 1596. In addition, Shakespeare was living in the area at the time. Hotson points out that the argument between Langley and Gardiner likely escalated after Gardiner's bluff of defamation charges was exposed. He believes that Gardiner took revenge by now threatening Langley's theatrical interests and pursuing "Langley and Shakespeare and his fellow actors at the Swan" with the help of the already existing Puritan opposition to theater. This could also have posed the threat of the Swan's demolition, as Gardiner was ordered to demolish Langley's theater a few months after the deeds were issued. However, this order was soon lifted. Wayte, as Gardiner's spy on site, would probably have felt the sometimes violent anger of the friends of the Swan Theater. The feud ended with Gardiner's death in November 1597.

The play The Isle of Dogs

A very successful business period between the spring and summer of 1597 was behind it when a scandal shook the English theater world. The play The Isle of Dogs from the pen of Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson was brought to the stage in Swan by the Pembroke's Men and immediately afterwards banned by the authorities. Because on July 28, the Privy Council, angry about the “very seditious and scandalous matter” in the play, ordered all theaters to be closed for the rest of the summer. While this order was lifted for all other theaters in the fall, Langley's Swan Theater had to remain closed. A circumstance that bothered him badly in business.

One reason for the denial of the theater permit could be that Langley was already questioned by the authorities on another matter: In 1592, during the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604) , English sailors under Walter Raleigh had a Spanish carrack , the Madre de Dios (or Madre de Deos ), upset. The captured ship was transferred to Dartmouth with its extremely valuable cargo, but was placed under poor supervision. After all sorts of looters plundered it and Raleigh was able to restore order, only £ 140,000 remained of the half a million pound cargo. There was also a huge diamond under the looted property. After clues, Robert suspected Cecil Langley of the possession or resale of this.

Five of the now unemployed members of the Pembroke's Men moved - in Langley's opinion, contrary to the contract - to the Admiral's Men at the Rose Theater in Henslowe and also seemed to have taken the scripts of their plays with them. Langley then sued her; How it ended is not clear from the surviving documents. It is likely that Langley made an arrangement with Henslowe, as the actors stayed with their new company. Langley's position could not have been particularly strong at that time. The remainder of the Pembroke's Men, certainly replenishing the ranks with some new members, toured outside London between 1598 and 1599. I.a. in Bath , Bristol , Dover and a number of other cities.

Boar's Head

The bad experience he had with the Swan Theater towards the end didn’t annoy Langley when it came to theater. The Boar's Head Inn , outside the north-east walls of London , had been a place of drama for decades before; In 1598 it was turned into a proper theater through a partnership between moneylender and entrepreneur Oliver Woodliffe and Richard Samwell. In November of the same year Langley then took over Woodliffe's shares in this company ("for £ 100 down and three £ 100 bonds")

The originally planned conversion turned out to be inadequate and so a major renovation was initiated in 1599. The inadequate financing of all parties involved, as well as the unclear ownership situation of now three actors (an actor named Richard Brown financed Samwell and later took over his shares in Boar's Head) soon proved to be a major problem. Langley brought a series of lawsuits against the other parties involved; a wave of lawsuits that did not end until January 1602 when Langley died. After Langley's death, his Paris Garden property was sold. The following year, the Holland's Leaguer brothel found its home in the manor house . The Swan still existed, but was only sparsely played. Among other things in the period 1611-1613 by the Lady Elizabeth's Men . Twenty years later, in a pamphlet from 1632, the Swan was explicitly mentioned as a derelict building. But even the financially weak reconstruction of the Boar's Head did not make progress and so this project was buried only two years after Langley's death by the widows of the original owners (Browne and Woodliffe).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ William Ingram, A London Life in the Brazen Age: Francis Langley, 1548-1602 , Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1978.
  2. ^ FE Halliday A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964. Baltimore, Penguin, 1964; P. 273.
  3. ^ Andrew John Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, Third Edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992; Pages 42–45 ff.
  4. ↑ Chambers, Volume 2, pages 411-414.
  5. ^ Halliday, p. 481.
  6. ↑ Chambers, Volume 4, pp. 316-317.
  7. ^ EK Chambers , The Elizabethan Stage, 4 volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923; Volume 1, p. 368 n.3.
  8. ↑ a b c d Leslie Hoson, Shakespeare versus Swallow , 1931, pp. 24-30.
  9. ^ Hugh Bicheno: Elizabeth's Sea Dogs: How England's Mariners Became the Scourge of the Seas , Conway 2012. ISBN 978-1-84486-174-3
  10. ↑ Chambers, Volume 2, pages 131-133.
  11. ^ Joseph Q. Adams, Shakespearean Playhouses: A History of English Theaters from the Beginnings to the Restoration. Cornell University, 1917; Pages 160-180
  12. ↑ a b Theodore B. Canvas: Theater, Finance and Society in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press, 1999, ISBN 978-1-139-42594-0 in the Google book search
  13. ^ Gurr, pp. 139-140.
  14. ↑ "now fall into decay, and, like a dying swan, hang her head and sings her own dirge" in The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist by George Pierce, Macmillan, New York 1907; P. 50 n.2.
personal data
SURNAME Langley, Francis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English theater director
DATE OF BIRTH 1548
DATE OF DEATH January 1602