William Kip for Harrison’s The Arches of Triumph Erected in Honor of the High and Mighty Prince James the First (1604) we know exactly how they looked. Tall and imposing as Genius Urbis (Spirit of the City), Alleyn was presumably chosen to speak for London as owner of the most famous lungs of his day. (Richard Burbage, two years younger than Alleyn, was chosen six years later in 1610 to star in a water pageant for Prince Henry, and delivered his speeches from the back of an artificial fish in the river Thames.) The introduction to Dekker’s printed text of The Magnificent Entertainment (1604) declares that ‘Master Alleyn’ delivered his ‘gratulatory speech’ with ‘excellent action, and a well- tun’d audible voice’.
striking an attitude in a niche, ‘sawing the air with his hand’ in the very style that Hamlet mocked when telling the group of actors at Elsinore how to act and what to avoid. Tamesis the River, played by a boy actor, whom Genius awakens to tell the triumphant news of the house of Stuart, reclines drowsily at his feet, and there are musicians above him. Before the King’s arrival the Arch was ‘covered with a curtaine of silke, painted like a thicke cloud’; at the King’s approach it was drawn to reveal on the pediment models of the ‘houses, towres and steeples’ within the City, ‘set off in prospective’. The allegorical meaning of the cloud, Jonson explained, was to signify ‘the clouded face of the City’ which was longing to see their new monarch, and by its removal the sun flooding the City. Alleyn appeared in a second scene by Ben Jonson in The Magnificent Entertainment , performing on the seventh Arch of entertainment, the Temple of Janus, set up at Temple Bar, presumably running ahead down back streets in between. Here he confronted a Flamen (Roman priest) standing at an altar: abruptly dismissing him and his superstitious fumes, he presented James with the heart of London, in a perpetual flame never to turn to ashes, which he promises to tend with his prayers, wishes and vows:
A flaming heart is a traditional emblem of charity. In heraldry a crest is a separate addition to a coat of arms and a symbol set above it; Alleyn chose for his crest ‘ from a ring of flames, an arm with a hand holding a heart’, or in correct heraldic terms ‘on an esquire’s helmet, an Arm couped at the elbow and erect, issuing out of flames of fire, and holding a human heart, all proper (in natural colours).’ When Alleyn the childless actor came to found his charity of God’s Gift in 1619, he settled his heraldic crest on the College, and his seal to the Foundation Document clearly shows the arm holding aloft the heart out of flames, impressed above his coat of arms. By this esoteric heraldic symbol Alleyn surely indicated that what he had received from the streets of London in fame and fortune he was returning to the city by his philanthropic scheme: to raise up poor orphan boys from the streets to ‘godliness and good learning’, in the words of the Founder’s prayer. With this emblem he associated for ever his College of God’s Gift with the flaming heart of charity, alluding to the speech to King James that might be said to be the high point of his career. Copies of Jan’s book are available from the Commissariat (or through their website, plus p. & p.) at £12.
The flattering opening address by the Genius of the City, in blank verse by Ben Jonson, was given by Edward Alleyn, wearing a purple mantle and buskins; it declared that, in the course of its long history, London had undergone various regimes, but was all the time waiting for the moment that the Stuarts set foot in the City for its real happiness and prosperity to come about. Alleyn is clearly shown at the centre of the engraving by Kip of ‘The Device called Londinium’. This first Triumphal Arch was set up at Fenchurch, and Alleyn is pictured
My cities heart; which shall for ever burne
Vpon this altar, and no time shall turne
The same to ashes: here I fixe it fast,
Flame bright, flame high, and may it ever last.
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