The Clink

by Stephen Jeffreys

London at the start of the seventeenth century. Elizabeth is in the throes of death; the alchemist is mixing his powders; the court jester is far too presumptious about his abilities, and everybody else is plotting.

Corrupt councilors, and suspicious bishops skulk through a cyclone of scenes, laced with the intrigues and entanglements of the court, the rumblings from the slums, gratuitous political cabaret and fuddling feminism. So it should come as no surprise that here even a duel fought with words can result in a fatality!

The Story

The year is 1603, at the very end of Queen Elizabeth's reign, the place South London's red light district. Here are the brothels, here are the disreputable inns, and here is the Clink, the infamous prison that quite a few of the play's characters will get to know.

The Bodkin Brothers, Lucius and Thomas, are the youngest generation of a dynasty of fools - professional entertainers who perform a comic double act. Thomas is the traditionalist, Lucius is younger and more ambitious. He experiments with new, more aggressive types of comedy and actually manages to get a booking. Beatrice, the daughter of the important government official Warburton, wants him to perform in front of an audience of Dutchmen - alone, without Thomas, who leaves him in anger.

Lucius' performance ends in the disaster everybody but he himself has foreseen: an adviser to the Queen gets killed, Lucius manages to escape but is recaptured and made the scapegoat for this and another death. From now on he is on his way down and out. Elizabeth has two of his fingers chopped off; then he is sentenced to a year in the Clink for spreading revolutionary propaganda, and even that is not enough. By the end of the play, Elizabeth is dead, succeeded by James I. In the last scene, Lucius is about to learn that the times have changed indeed: he is about to undergo the most sophisticated form of punishment yet.