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Follow Honesty and Alice through Elizabethan London – Day 4: Southwark & London Bridge

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This month author Eloise Williams takes us on a tour around the Elizabethan London featured in Honesty and Lies.

We’ll be visiting the key places where Honesty and Alice spend their time and Eloise will give you an inside sneak peek into the places as well as what it takes to bring this world to life!

 

Southwark and London Bridge

The story is set over Christmastide and Twelfth Night. It’s cold. Very cold. Not so many years before the Thames had frozen over and King Henry VIII had ridden his sleigh from London to Greenwich across its surface. I’m a big fan of creating wintry settings and London Bridge and Southwark were so much fun to write about.

The bridge would have been astonishing to a newcomer. All manner of people and animals would have been using it to cross the river and there would have been timbered houses and shops galore. There is nothing more pleasing to my writer’s eye than to imagine an apothecarist, filled with remedies and beaked masks. A mercer draping rippling silk over his arm as if it is trickling water juxtaposed with soldiers and sailors and rats the size of cats. And a candlemaker’s sign blowing in an icy wind sounds romantic for some reason. Or is that just me?

Once over it, having walked beneath a huge gate with the heads of traitors on spikes, you’d reach Southwark.

Southwark was the place of entertainment so when Honesty and Alice are sent on an errand it’s little wonder that they get caught up in the excitement of celebrations. A falconer with a trained bird, carollers, a merry group of boys with a bowl of spiced ale distract them from their duties. Then there are the men on stilts, the jugglers and flamethrowers, and people blowing crumhorn pipes and making a racket with… well… racketts. And, of course, the magic of the Globe theatre! Happy days.

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Follow Honesty and Alice through Elizabethan London – Day 3: The Globe

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This month author Eloise Williams takes us on a tour around the Elizabethan London featured in Honesty and Lies.

We’ll be visiting the key places where Honesty and Alice spend their time and Eloise will give you an inside sneak peek into the places as well as what it takes to bring this world to life!

 

The Globe

I love to write about the theatre and the Globe is surely one of the most evocative when it comes to historical stages. Don’t get me wrong, I love Victorian theatres with their decorative auditoriums, glittering chandeliers and plush velvet curtains. I’m also a sucker for other great outdoor venues, the Minack in Cornwall springs to mind as being exceptional, as does Regent’s Park. I also love a bit of street theatre, and the work of Brecht in breaking down barriers, or Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed which relies on audience participation. I feel as if I’m needlessly showing off my knowledge of theatres and practitioners now, but the point is, I adore it.

Before I became a writer, I was an actor and from the first professional performance I can remember, I was spellbound. Yul Brynner at the London Palladium is a pretty good place to start and though he meant nothing to me at the time – philistine that I was, I became completely enraptured by the costumes, lights, magic and story of the play. I’ve since been in lots of wonderful theatres, but the Globe is surely one of the most spectacular recreations of our time.

The audience in modern theatres – by which I mean British Victorian and onwards – tend to sit quietly until the end of an act and then applaud politely unless invited to take part in the action. Not so with an audience in Honesty and Alice’s day! There would have been shouting and heckling, ale being consumed in large quantities, cavorting and pickpocketing. The groundlings would have shoved and pushed for their view of the stage, and with their hard lives, poverty, and disease rife, the play had better be good to make it worth their while.

It’s that, which makes it so remarkable that a story could spellbind an audience. Of course, there was swordplay and gunpowder, beating drums and merry jigs, but ‘the play’s the thing’ and beyond these tricks of the trade and smells of the audience, the story soared capturing the hearts of the people and lifting them above the hardship for a while. At least, I like to imagine it did.

As Honesty says, ‘This is everything I ever knew that stories could be. The words curl and romp, frolic and gambol, trip from the actor’s tongues and enchant us all.’
If Honesty says it, it must be true, right?

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Follow Honesty and Alice through Elizabethan London – Day 2: Greenwich Palace

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This month author Eloise Williams takes us on a tour around the Elizabethan London featured in Honesty and Lies.

We’ll be visiting the key places where Honesty and Alice spend their time and Eloise will give you an inside sneak peek into the places as well as what it takes to bring this world to life!

 

Greenwich Palace

I visit London as often as I can and have favourite haunts. Highgate Cemetery – excuse the haunts pun – the Southbank, Postman’s Park and the West End are all well frequented by us and our tourist’s fascination with pretty much everything. But we wanted to discover somewhere new. ‘What about Greenwich?’ I asked my husband as I peered at a Google map. There’s an observatory in a big park and we can get the boat back. Feet weary of concrete and longing for grass agreed. And so, we set off.

I’d never heard of Greenwich Palace. I don’t know why. I’m not claiming to be a font of all knowledge by any stretch of the imagination but to know nothing of a palace of such stature and magnificence seemed a little bizarre. Oh, it’s not there anymore. That explains it then. But what a gift for a writer to recreate something which has disappeared! Yes! I wanted to do just that.

I had little idea of how people lived in Elizabethan times, save for the series of Blackadder in which Miranda Richardson played QEI which I couldn’t rely on to be wholly accurate, so I thought I’d better educate myself. Nothing helped me more than my visits to Hampton Court Palace, the Globe theatre and the Tudor Merchant’s House in Dinbych-y-Pysgod. The staff at all were so knowledgeable – thanks to them for answering a very annoying number of questions – and to be walking through these historic buildings was just wonderful.

I learned many things which helped me to visualise Alice and Honesty’s lives and how they might have lived at Greenwich. Or course, I am no historian, but I created a palace of my own which, whilst heavily influenced by Hampton Court, has its own identity too.

Seeing it through the eyes of the girls meant that I only had to recreate the places which were relevant to them. It’s a look at the palace through the eyes of the workers. They appreciate the beauty of the dresses and feasts, fine artwork and beautiful fountains, but they also have to work hard in the laundry room, cold underground tunnels where they fear the Thames will break through and drown them, and the stinking washhouse. The contrasts are extreme and the theme of appearance versus reality echoed my theme of honesty and lies so well it was almost as if it was planned that way.

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Follow Honesty and Alice through Elizabethan London – Day 1: The Thames

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This month author Eloise Williams takes us on a tour around the Elizabethan London featured in Honesty and Lies.

We’ll be visiting the key places where Honesty and Alice spend their time and Eloise will give you an inside sneak peek into the places as well as what it takes to bring this world to life!

 

The Thames

I love to write about water. It snakes its way through most of my stories and is, I suppose, the common theme which would draw them together if anyone should care to search for a link in my work. I often find myself absorbed by it. Looking at it, jumping into it, admiring or fearing it. The fluidity of the stuff, everchanging, glittering and gobbling, listening, drinking everything in. There’s such a magical quality to a body of water quite beyond the lifegiving, life-taking one. Think of the stories the Thames carries. The things it has seen and swept away. The voices which have sunk into it and the curious objects it leaves on its banks as clues for mudlarks and historians. It’s the heart of London.

A couple of years ago I took a boat from Greenwich to Southwark and pondered on the perspective it gives the traveller. How grand it would have been during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I to have seen Greenwich Palace – long gone now – on its banks. How frightening to slide past The Bloody Tower. How exhilarating to fight for your place on the water, jostled by other passengers and boats. To dock perhaps at Southwark, place of entertainment and home of the Globe. If you lived at Greenwich Palace, you might make use of a tide clock to make travel swifter. If you were a traitor, you might find your head on a stick for all to see from the barges which passed beneath London Bridge.

The Thames is a very different serpent now to the one it would have been in Elizabethan times. I’ve dipped my toes into its waters without fear of catching the plague and have viewed the Tower of London with a tourist’s eye and no fear of being rowed through Traitor’s Gate. But what fun it is to see London from the water and imagine it as Honesty and Alice would have seen it. The wares transported from foreign climes. Busy with galleons, and wherries and ships crammed with people. The stink of fish guts and scum and human excrement. Oh, what stinky joy for a writer! I hope you enjoy your journey!