For Whom Shakespeare Wrote
by
Charles Dudley Warner
This etext was produced by David Widger
THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM SHAKESPEARE WROTE
By Charles Dudley Warner
Queen Elizabeth being dead about ten o'clock in the morning, March 24,
1603, Sir Robert Cary posted away, unsent, to King James of Scotland to
inform him of the "accident," and got made a baron of the realm for his
ride. On his way down to take possession of his new kingdom the king
distributed the honor of knighthood right and left liberally; at
Theobald's he created eight-and-twenty knights, of whom Sir Richard
Baker, afterwards the author of "A Chronicle of the Kings of England,"
was one. "God knows how many hundreds he made the first year," says the
chronicler, "but it was indeed fit to give vent to the passage of Honour,
which during Queen Elizabeth's reign had been so stopped that scarce any
county of England had knights enow to make a jury."
Sir Richard Baker was born in 1568, and died in 1645; his "Chronicle"
appeared in 1641. It was brought down to the death of James in 1625,
when, he having written the introduction to the life of Charles I, the
storm of the season caused him to "break off in amazement," for he had
thought the race of "Stewards" likely to continue to the "world's end";
and he never resumed his pen. In the reign of James two things lost
their lustre--the exercise of tilting, which Elizabeth made a special
solemnity, and the band of Yeomen of the Guard, choicest persons both for
stature and other good parts, who graced the court of Elizabeth; James
"was so intentive to Realities that he little regarded shows," and in his
time these came utterly to be neglected. The virgin queen was the last
ruler who seriously regarded the pomps and splendors of feudalism.
It was characteristic of the age that the death of James, which occurred
in his fifty-ninth year, should have been by rumor attributed to
"poyson"; but "being dead, and his body opened, there was no sign at all
of poyson, his inward parts being all sound, but that his Spleen was a
little faulty, which might be cause enough to cast him into an Ague: the
ordinary high-way, especially in old bo'dies, to a natural death."
The chronicler records among the men of note of James's time Sir Francis
Vere, "who as another Hannibal, with his one eye, could see more in the
Martial Discipline than common men can do with two"; Sir Edward Coke;
Sir Francis Bacon, "who besides his profounder book, of Novum Organum,
hath written the reign of King Henry the Seventh, in so sweet a style,
that like Manna, it pleaseth the tast of all palats"; William Camden,
whose Description of Britain "seems to keep Queen Elizabeth alive after
death"; "and to speak it in a word, the Trojan Horse was not fuller of
Heroick Grecians, than King James his Reign was full of men excellent in
all kindes of Learning." Among these was an old university acquaintance
of Baker's, "Mr. John Dunne, who leaving Oxford, lived at the Innes of
Court, not dissolute, but very neat; a great Visitor of Ladies, a great
frequenter of Playes, a great writer of conceited Verses; until such
times as King James taking notice of the pregnancy of his Wit, was a
means that he betook him to the study of Divinity, and thereupon
proceeding Doctor, was made Dean of Pauls; and became so rare a Preacher,
that he was not only commended, but even admired by all who heard him."
The times of Elizabeth and James were visited by some awful casualties
and portents. From December, 1602, to the December following, the plague
destroyed 30,518 persons in London; the same disease that in the sixth
year of Elizabeth killed 20,500, and in the thirty-sixth year 17,890,
besides the lord mayor and three aldermen. In January, 1606, a mighty
whale came up the Thames within eight miles of London, whose body, seen
divers times above water, was judged to be longer than the largest ship
on the river; "but when she tasted the fresh water and scented the Land,
she returned into the sea." Not so fortunate was a vast whale cast upon
the Isle of Thanet, in Kent, in 1575, which was "twenty Ells long, and
thirteen foot broad from the belly to the backbone, and eleven foot
between the eyes. One of his eyes being taken out of his head was more
than a cart with six horses could draw; the Oyl being boyled out of his
head was Parmacittee." Nor the monstrous fish cast ashore in
Lincolnshire in 1564, which measured six yards between the eyes and had a
tail fifteen feet broad; "twelve men stood upright in his mouth to get
the Oyl." In 1612 a comet appeared, which in the opinion of
Dr. Bainbridge, the great mathematician of Oxford, was as far above the
moon as the moon is above the earth, and the sequel of it was that
infinite slaughters and devastations followed it both in Germany and
other countries. In 1613, in Standish, in Lancashire, a maiden child was
born having four legs, four arms, and one head with two faces--the one
before, the other behind, like the picture of Janus. (One thinks of the
prodigies that presaged the birth of Glendower.) Also, the same year,
in Hampshire, a carpenter, lying in bed with his wife and a young child,
"was himself and the childe both burned to death with a sudden lightning,
no fire appearing outwardly upon him, and yet lay burning for the space
of almost three days till he was quite consumed to ashes." This year the
Globe playhouse, on the Bankside, was burned, and the year following the
new playhouse, the Fortune, in Golding Lane, "was by negligence of a
candle, clean burned down to the ground." In this year also, 1614, the
town of Stratford-on-Avon was burned. One of the strangest events,
however, happened in the first year of Elizabeth (1558), when "dyed Sir
Thomas Cheney, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, of whom it is reported
for a certain, that his pulse did beat more than three quarters of an
hour after he was dead, as strongly as if he had been still alive." In
1580 a strange apparition happened in Somersetshire--three score
personages all clothed in black, a furlong in distance from those that
beheld them; "and after their appearing, and a little while tarrying,
they vanished away, but immediately another strange company, in like
manner, color, and number appeared in the same place, and they
encountered one another and so vanished away. And the third time
appeared that number again, all in bright armour, and encountered one
another, and so vanished away. This was examined before Sir George
Norton, and sworn by four honest men that saw it, to be true." Equally
well substantiated, probably, was what happened in Herefordshire in 1571:
"A field of three acres, in Blackmore, with the Trees and Fences, moved
from its place and passed over another field, traveling in the highway
that goeth to Herne, and there stayed." Herefordshire was a favorite
place for this sort of exercise of nature. In 1575 the little town of
Kinnaston was visited by an earthquake: "On the seventeenth of February
at six o'clock of the evening, the earth began to open and a Hill with a
Rock under it (making at first a great bellowing noise, which was heard a
great way off) lifted itself up a great height, and began to travel,
bearing along with it the Trees that grew upon it, the Sheep-folds, and
Flocks of Sheep abiding there at the same time. In the place from whence
it was first moved, it left a gaping distance forty foot broad, and
forescore Ells long; the whole Field was about twenty Acres. Passing
along, it overthrew a Chappell standing in the way, removed an Ewe-Tree
planted in the Churchyard, from the West into the East; with the like
force it thrust before it High-wayes, Sheep-folds, Hedges, and Trees,
made Tilled ground Pasture, and again turned Pasture into Tillage.
Having walked in this sort from Saturday in the evening, till Monday
noon, it then stood still." It seems not improbable that Birnam wood
should come to Dunsinane.
It was for an age of faith, for a people whose credulity was fed on such
prodigies and whose imagination glowed at such wonderful portents, that
Shakespeare wrote, weaving into the realities of sense those awful
mysteries of the supernatural which hovered not far away from every
Englishman of his time.
Shakespeare was born in 1564, when Elizabeth had been six years on the
throne, and he died in 1616, nine years before James I., of the faulty
spleen, was carried to the royal chapel in Westminster, "with great
solemnity, but with greater lamentation." Old Baker, who says of himself
that he was the unworthiest of the knights made at Theobald's,
condescends to mention William Shakespeare at the tail end of the men of
note of Elizabeth's time. The ocean is not more boundless, he affirms,
than the number of men of note of her time; and after he has finished
with the statesmen ("an exquisite statesman for his own ends was Robert
Earl of Leicester, and for his Countries good, Sir William Cecill, Lord
Burleigh"), the seamen, the great commanders, the learned gentlemen and
writers (among them Roger Askam, who had sometime been schoolmaster to
Queen Elizabeth, but, taking too great delight in gaming and cock-
fighting, lived and died in mean estate), the learned divines and
preachers, he concludes: "After such men, it might be thought ridiculous
to speak of Stage-players; but seeing excellency in the meanest things
deserve remembring, and Roscius the Comedian is recorded in History with
such commendation, it may be allowed us to do the like with some of our
Nation. Richard Bourbidge and Edward Allen, two such actors as no age
must ever look to see the like; and to make their Comedies compleat,
Richard Tarleton, who for the Part called the Clowns Part, never had his
match, never will have. For Writers of Playes, and such as have been
players themselves, William Shakespeare and Benjamin Johnson have
especially left their Names recommended to posterity."
Richard Bourbidge (or Burbadge) was the first of the great English tragic
actors, and was the original of the greater number of Shakespeare's
heroes--Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Shylock, Macbeth, Richard III., Romeo,
Brutus, etc. Dick Tarleton, one of the privileged scapegraces of social
life, was regarded by his contemporaries as the most witty of clowns and
comedians. The clown was a permitted character in the old theatres,
and intruded not only between the acts, but even into the play itself,
with his quips and antics. It is probable that he played the part of
clown, grave-digger, etc., in Shakespeare's comedies, and no doubt took
liberties with his parts. It is thought that part of Hamlet's advice to
the players--"and let those that play your clowns speak no more than is
set down for them," etc.--was leveled at Tarleton.
The question is often asked, but I consider it an idle one, whether
Shakespeare was appreciated in his own day as he is now. That the age,
was unable to separate him from itself, and see his great stature, is
probable; that it enjoyed him with a sympathy to which we are strangers
there is no doubt. To us he is inexhaustible. The more we study him,
the more are we astonished at his multiform genius. In our complex
civilization, there is no development of passion, or character, or trait
of human nature, no social evolution, that does not find expression
somewhere in those marvelous plays; and yet it is impossible for us to
enter into a full, sympathetic enjoyment of those plays unless we can in
some measure recreate for ourselves the atmosphere in which they were
written. To superficial observation great geniuses come into the world
at rare intervals in history, in a manner independent of what we call the
progress of the race. It may be so; but the form the genius shall take
is always determined by the age in which it appears, and its expression
is shaped by the environments. Acquaintance with the Bedouin desert life
of today, which has changed little for three thousand years, illumines
the book of Job like an electric light. Modern research into Hellenic
and Asiatic life has given a new meaning to the Iliad and the Odyssey,
and greatly enhanced our enjoyment of them. A fair comprehension of the
Divina Commedia is impossible without some knowledge of the factions that
rent Florence; of the wars of Guelf and Ghibelline; of the spirit that
banished Dante, and gave him an humble tomb in Ravenna instead of a
sepulchre in the pantheon of Santa Croce. Shakespeare was a child of his
age; it had long been preparing for him; its expression culminated in
him. It was essentially a dramatic age. He used the accumulated
materials of centuries. He was playwright as well as poet. His variety
and multiform genius cannot otherwise be accounted for. He called in the
coinage of many generations, and reissued it purified and unalloyed,
stamped in his own mint. There was a Hamlet probably, there were
certainly Romeos and Juliets, on the stage before Shakespeare. In him
were received the imaginations, the inventions, the aspirations, the
superstitions, the humors, the supernatural intimations; in him met the
converging rays of the genius of his age, as in a lens, to be sent onward
thenceforth in an ever-broadening stream of light.
It was his fortune to live not only in a dramatic age, but in a
transition age, when feudalism was passing away, but while its shows and
splendors could still be seriously comprehended. The dignity that doth
hedge a king was so far abated that royalty could be put upon the stage
as a player's spectacle; but the reality of kings and queens and court
pageantry was not so far past that it did not appeal powerfully to the
imaginations of the frequenters of the Globe, the Rose, and the Fortune.
They had no such feeling as we have in regard to the pasteboard kings and
queens who strut their brief hour before us in anachronic absurdity.
But, besides that he wrote in the spirit of his age, Shakespeare wrote in
the language and the literary methods of his time. This is not more
evident in the contemporary poets than in the chroniclers of that day.
They all delighted in ingenuities of phrase, in neat turns and conceits;
it was a compliment then to be called a "conceited" writer.
Of all the guides to Shakespeare's time, there is none more profitable or
entertaining than William Harrison, who wrote for Holinshed's chronicle
"The Description of England," as it fell under his eyes from 1577 to
1587. Harrison's England is an unfailing mine of information for all the
historians of the sixteenth century; and in the edition published by the
New Shakespeare Society, and edited, with a wealth of notes and
contemporary references, by Mr. Frederick J. Furnivall, it is a new
revelation of Shakespeare's England to the general reader.
Harrison himself is an interesting character, and trustworthy above the
general race of chroniclers. He was born in 1534, or, to use his
exactness of statement, "upon the 18th of April, hora ii, minut 4,
Secunde 56, at London, in Cordwainer streete, otherwise called bowe-
lane." This year was also remarkable as that in which "King Henry 8
polleth his head; after whom his household and nobility, with the rest of
his subjects do the like." It was the year before Anne Boleyn, haled
away to the Tower, accused, condemned, and executed in the space of
fourteen days, "with sigheing teares" said to the rough Duke of Norfolk,
"Hither I came once my lord, to fetch a crown imperial; but now to
receive, I hope, a crown immortal." In 1544, the boy was at St. Paul's
school; the litany in the English tongue, by the king's command, was that
year sung openly in St. Paul's, and we have a glimpse of Harrison with
the other children, enforced to buy those books, walking in general
procession, as was appointed, before the king went to Boulogne. Harrison
was a student at both Oxford and Cambridge, taking the degree of bachelor
of divinity at the latter in 1569, when he had been an Oxford M.A. of
seven years' standing. Before this he was household chaplain to Sir
William Brooke, Lord Cobham, who gave him, in 1588-89, the rectory of
Radwinter, in Essex, which he held till his death, in 1593. In 1586 he
was installed canon of Windsor. Between 1559 and 1571 he married Marion
Isebrande,--of whom he said in his will, referring to the sometime
supposed unlawfulness of priests' marriages, "by the laws of God I take
and repute in all respects for my true and lawful wife." At Radwinter,
the old parson, working in his garden, collected Roman coins, wrote his
chronicles, and expressed his mind about the rascally lawyers of Essex,
to whom flowed all the wealth of the land. The lawyers in those days
stirred up contentions, and then reaped the profits. "Of all that ever I
knew in Essex," says Harrison, "Denis and Mainford excelled, till John of
Ludlow, alias Mason, came in place, unto whom in comparison these two
were but children." This last did so harry a client for four years that
the latter, still called upon for new fees, "went to bed, and within four
days made an end of his woeful life, even with care and pensiveness."
And after his death the lawyer so handled his son "that there was never
sheep shorn in May, so near clipped of his fleece present, as he was of
many to come." The Welsh were the most litigious people. A Welshman
would walk up to London bare-legged, carrying his hose on his neck, to
save wear and because he had no change, importune his countrymen till he
got half a dozen writs, with which he would return to molest his
neighbors, though no one of his quarrels was worth the money he paid for
a single writ.
The humblest mechanic of England today has comforts and conveniences
which the richest nobles lacked in Harrison's day, but it was
nevertheless an age of great luxury and extravagance; of brave apparel,
costly and showy beyond that of any Continental people, though wanting in
refined taste; and of mighty banquets, with service of massive plate,
troops of attendants, and a surfeit of rich food and strong drink.
In this luxury the clergy of Harrison's rank did not share. Harrison was
poor on forty pounds a year. He complains that the clergy were taxed
more than ever, the church having become "an ass whereon every man is to
ride to market and cast his wallet." They paid tenths and first-fruits
and subsidies, so that out of twenty pounds of a benefice the incumbent
did not reserve more than L 13 6s. 8d. for himself and his family. They
had to pay for both prince and laity, and both grumbled at and slandered
them. Harrison gives a good account of the higher clergy; he says the
bishops were loved for their painful diligence in their calling, and that
the clergy of England were reputed on the Continent as learned divines,
skillful in Greek and Hebrew and in the Latin tongue.
There was, however, a scarcity of preachers and ministers in Elizabeth's
time, and their character was not generally high. What could be expected
when covetous patrons canceled their debts to their servants by bestowing
advowsons of benefices upon their bakers, butlers, cooks, grooms, pages,
and lackeys--when even in the universities there was cheating at
elections for scholarships and fellowships, and gifts were for sale!
The morals of the clergy were, however, improved by frequent conferences,
at which the good were praised and the bad reproved; and these
conferences were "a notable spur unto all the ministers, whereby to apply
their books, which otherwise (as in times past) would give themselves to
hawking, hunting, tables, cards, dice, tipling at the ale house,
shooting, and other like vanities." The clergy held a social rank with
tradespeople; their sons learned trades, and their daughters might go out
to service. Jewell says many of them were the "basest sort of people"
unlearned, fiddlers, pipers, and what not. "Not a few," says Harrison,
"find fault with our threadbare gowns, as if not our patrons but our
wives were the causes of our woe." He thinks the ministers will be
better when the patrons are better, and he defends the right of the
clergy to marry and to leave their goods, if they have any, to their
widows and children instead of to the church, or to some school or
almshouse. What if their wives are fond, after the decease of their
husbands, to bestow themselves not so advisedly as their calling
requireth; do not duchesses, countesses, and knights' wives offend in the
like fully so often as they? And Eve, remarks the old philosopher of
Radwinter--"Eve will be Eve, though Adam would say nay."
The apparel of the clergy, at any rate, was more comely and decent than
it ever was in the popish church, when the priests "went either in divers
colors like players, or in garments of light hue, as yellow, red, green,
etc.; with their shoes piked, their hair crisped, their girdles armed
with silver; their shoes, spurs, bridles, etc., buckled with like metal;
their apparel (for the most part) of silk, and richly furred; their caps
laced and buttoned with gold; so that to meet a priest, in those days,
was to behold a peacock that spreadeth his tail when he danceth before
the hen."
Hospitality among the clergy was never better used, and it was increased
by their marriage; for the meat and drink were prepared more orderly and
frugally, the household was better looked to, and the poor oftener fed.
There was perhaps less feasting of the rich in bishops' houses, and "it
is thought much peradventure, that some bishops in our time do come short
of the ancient gluttony and prodigality of their predecessors;" but this
is owing to the curtailing of their livings, and the excessive prices
whereunto things are grown.
Harrison spoke his mind about dignitaries. He makes a passing reference
to Thomas a Becket as "the old Cocke of Canturburie," who did crow in
behalf of the see of Rome, and the "young cockerels of other sees did
imitate his demeanour." He is glad that images, shrines, and tabernacles
are removed out of churches. The stories in glass windows remain only
because of the cost of replacing them with white panes. He would like to
stop the wakes, guilds, paternities, church-ales, and brides-ales, with
all their rioting, and he thinks they could get on very well without the
feasts of apostles, evangelists, martyrs, the holy-days after Christmas,
Easter, and Whitsuntide, and those of the Virgin Mary, with the rest.
"It is a world to see," he wrote of 1552, "how ready the Catholicks are
to cast the communion tables out of their churches, which in derision
they call Oysterboards, and to set up altars whereon to say mass." And
he tells with sinful gravity this tale of a sacrilegious sow: "Upon the
23rd of August, the high altar of Christ Church in Oxford was trimly
decked up after the popish manner and about the middest of evensong,
a sow cometh into the quire, and pulled all to the ground; for which
heinous fact, it is said she was afterwards beheaded; but to that I am
not privy." Think of the condition of Oxford when pigs went to mass!
Four years after this there was a sickness in England, of which a third
part of the people did taste, and many clergymen, who had prayed not to
live after the death of Queen Mary, had their desire, the Lord hearing
their prayer, says Harrison, "and intending thereby to give his church a
breathing time."
There were four classes in England--gentlemen, citizens, yeomen, and
artificers or laborers. Besides the nobles, any one can call himself a
gentleman who can live without work and buy a coat of arms--though some
of them "bear a bigger sail than his boat is able to sustain." The
complaint of sending abroad youth to be educated is an old one; Harrison
says the sons of gentlemen went into Italy, and brought nothing home but
mere atheism, infidelity, vicious conversation, and ambitious, proud
behavior, and retained neither religion nor patriotism. Among citizens
were the merchants, of whom Harrison thought there were too many; for,
like the lawyers, they were no furtherance to the commonwealth, but
raised the price of all commodities. In former, free-trade times, sugar
was sixpence a pound, now it is two shillings sixpence; raisins were one
penny, and now sixpence. Not content with the old European trade, they
have sought out the East and West Indies, and likewise Cathay and
Tartary, whence they pretend, from their now and then suspicious voyages,
they bring home great commodities. But Harrison cannot see that prices
are one whit abated by this enormity, and certainly they carry out of
England the best of its wares.
The yeomen are the stable, free men, who for the most part stay in one
place, working the farms of gentlemen, are diligent, sometimes buy the
land of unthrifty gentlemen, educate their sons to the schools and the
law courts, and leave them money to live without labor. These are the
men that made France afraid. Below these are the laborers and men who
work at trades, who have no voice in the commonwealth, and crowds of
young serving-men who become old beggars, highway-robbers, idle fellows,
and spreaders of all vices. There was a complaint then, as now, that in
many trades men scamped their work, but, on the whole, husbandmen and
artificers had never been so good; only there were too many of them, too
many handicrafts of which the country had no need. It appears to be a
fault all along in history that there are too many of almost every sort
of people.
In Harrison's time the greater part of the building in cities and towns
was of timber, only a few of the houses of the commonalty being of stone.
In an old plate giving a view of the north side of Cheapside, London, in
1638, we see little but quaint gable ends and rows of small windows set
close together. The houses are of wood and plaster, each story
overhanging the other, terminating in sharp pediments; the roofs
projecting on cantilevers, and the windows occupying the whole front of
each of the lower stories. They presented a lively and gay appearance on
holidays, when the pentices of the shop fronts were hung with colored
draperies, and the balconies were crowded with spectators, and every pane
of glass showed a face. In the open country, where timber was scarce,
the houses were, between studs, impaneled with clay-red, white, or blue.
One of the Spaniards who came over in the suite of Philip remarked the
large diet in these homely cottages: "These English," quoth he, "have
their houses made of sticks and dirt, but they fare commonly so well as
the king." "Whereby it appeareth," comments Harrison, "that he liked
better of our good fare in such coarse cabins, than of their own thin
diet in their prince-like habitations and palaces." The timber houses
were covered with tiles; the other sort with straw or reeds. The fairest
houses were ceiled within with mortar and covered with plaster, the
whiteness and evenness of which excited Harrison's admiration. The walls
were hung with tapestry, arras-work, or painted cloth, whereon were
divers histories, or herbs, or birds, or else ceiled with oak. Stoves
had just begun to be used, and only in some houses of the gentry, "who
build them not to work and feed in, as in Germany and elsewhere, but now
and then to sweat in, as occasion and need shall require." Glass in
windows, which was then good and cheap, and made even in England, had
generally taken the place of the lattices and of the horn, and of the
beryl which noblemen formerly used in windows. Gentlemen were beginning
to build their houses of brick and stone, in stately and magnificent
fashion. The furniture of the houses had also grown in a manner "passing
delicacy," and not of the nobility and gentry only, but of the lowest
sort. In noblemen's houses there was abundance of arras, rich hangings
of tapestry, and silver vessels, plate often to the value of one thousand
and two thousand pounds. The knights, gentlemen, and merchants had great
provision of tapestry, Turkie work, pewter, brass, fine linen, and
cupboards of plate worth perhaps a thousand pounds. Even the inferior
artificers and many farmers had learned also to garnish their cupboards
with plate, their joined beds with silk hangings, and their tables with
fine linen--evidences of wealth for which Harrison thanks God and
reproaches no man, though he cannot see how it is brought about, when all
things are grown to such excessive prices.
Old men of Radwinter noted three things marvelously altered in England
within their remembrance. The first was the multitude of chimneys lately
erected; whereas in their young days there were not, always except those
in the religious and manor houses, above two or three chimneys in most
upland towns of the realm; each one made his fire against a reredos in
the hall, where he dined and dressed his meat. The second was the
amendment in lodging. In their youth they lay upon hard straw pallets
covered only with a sheet, and mayhap a dogswain coverlet over them, and
a good round log for pillow. If in seven years after marriage a man
could buy a mattress and a sack of chaff to rest his head on, he thought
himself as well lodged as a lord. Pillows were thought meet only for
sick women. As for servants, they were lucky if they had a sheet over
them, for there was nothing under them to keep the straw from pricking
their hardened hides. The third notable thing was the exchange of treene
(wooden) platters into pewter, and wooden spoons into silver or tin.
Wooden stuff was plenty, but a good farmer would not have above four
pieces of pewter in his house; with all his frugality, he was unable to
pay his rent of four pounds without selling a cow or horse. It was a
time of idleness, and if a farmer at an alehouse, in a bravery to show
what he had, slapped down his purse with six shillings in it, all the
rest together could not match it. But now, says Harrison, though the
rent of four pounds has improved to forty, the farmer has six or seven
years' rent, lying by him, to purchase a new term, garnish his cupboard
with pewter, buy three or four feather-beds, coverlets, carpets of
tapestry, a silver salt, a nest of bowls for wine, and a dozen spoons.
All these things speak of the growing wealth and luxury of the age. Only
a little before this date, in 1568, Lord Buckhurst, who had been ordered
to entertain the Cardinal de Chatillon in Queen Elizabeth's palace at
Sheen, complains of the meanness of the furniture of his rooms.
He showed the officers who preceded the cardinal such furniture and stuff
as he had, but it did not please them. They wanted plate, he had none;
such glass vessels as he had they thought too base. They wanted damask
for long tables, and he had only linen for a square table, and they
refused his square table. He gave the cardinal his only unoccupied
tester and bedstead, and assigned to the bishop the bedstead upon which
his wife's waiting-women did lie, and laid them on the ground. He lent
the cardinal his own basin and ewer, candlesticks from his own table,
drinking-glasses, small cushions, and pots for the kitchen. My Lord of
Leicester sent down two pair of fine sheets for the cardinal and one pair
for the bishop.
Harrison laments three things in his day: the enhancing of rents, the
daily oppression of poor tenants by the lords of manors, and the practice
of usury--a trade brought in by the Jews, but now practiced by almost
every Christian, so that he is accounted a fool that doth lend his money
for nothing. He prays the reader to help him, in a lawful manner, to
hang up all those that take cent. per cent. for money. Another
grievance, and most sorrowful of all, is that many gentlemen, men of good
port and countenance, to the injury of the farmers and commonalty,
actually turn Braziers, butchers, tanners, sheep-masters, and woodmen.
Harrison also notes the absorption of lands by the rich; the decay of
houses in the country, which comes of the eating up of the poor by the
rich; the increase of poverty; the difficulty a poor man had to live on
an acre of ground; his forced contentment with bread made of oats and
barley, and the divers places that formerly had good tenants and now were
vacant, hop-yards and gardens.
Harrison says it is not for him to describe the palaces of Queen
Elizabeth; he dare hardly peep in at her gates. Her houses are of brick
and stone, neat and well situated, but in good masonry not to be compared
to those of Henry VIII's building; they are rather curious to the eye,
like paper-works, than substantial for continuance. Her court is more
magnificent than any other in Europe, whether you regard the rich and
infinite furniture of the household, the number of officers, or the
sumptuous entertainments. And the honest chronicler is so struck with
admiration of the virtuous beauty of the maids of honor that he cannot
tell whether to award preeminence to their amiable countenances or to
their costliness of attire, between which there is daily conflict and
contention. The courtiers of both sexes have the use of sundry languages
and an excellent vein of writing. Would to God the rest of their lives
and conversation corresponded with these gifts! But the courtiers,
the most learned, are the worst men when they come abroad that any man
shall hear or read of. Many of the gentlewomen have sound knowledge of
Greek and Latin, and are skillful in Spanish, Italian, and French; and
the noblemen even surpass them. The old ladies of the court avoid
idleness by needlework, spinning of silk, or continual reading of the
Holy Scriptures or of histories, and writing diverse volumes of their
own, or translating foreign works into English or Latin; and the young
ladies, when they are not waiting on her majesty, "in the mean time apply
their lutes, citherns, pricksong, and all kinds of music." The elders
are skillful in surgery and the distillation of waters, and sundry other
artificial practices pertaining to the ornature and commendation of their
bodies; and when they are at home they go into the kitchen and supply a
number of delicate dishes of their own devising, mostly after Portuguese
receipts; and they prepare bills of fare (a trick lately taken up) to
give a brief rehearsal of all the dishes of every course. I do not know
whether this was called the "higher education of women" at the time.
In every office of the palaces is a Bible, or book of acts of the church,
or chronicle, for the use of whoever comes in, so that the court looks
more like a university than a palace. Would to God the houses of the
nobles were ruled like the queen's! The nobility are followed by great
troops of serving-men in showy liveries; and it is a goodly sight to see
them muster at court, which, being filled with them, "is made like to the
show of a peacock's tail in the full beauty, or of some meadow garnished
with infinite kinds and diversity of pleasant flowers." Such was the
discipline of Elizabeth's court that any man who struck another within it
had his right hand chopped off by the executioner in a most horrible
manner.
The English have always had a passion for gardens and orchards.
In the Roman time grapes abounded and wine was plenty, but the culture
disappeared after the Conquest. From the time of Henry IV. to Henry
VIII. vegetables were little used, but in Harrison's day the use of
melons, pompions, radishes, cucumbers, cabbages, turnips, and the like
was revived. They had beautiful flower-gardens annexed to the houses,
wherein were grown also rare and medicinal herbs; it was a wonder to see
how many strange herbs, plants, and fruits were daily brought from the
Indies, America and the Canaries. Every rich man had great store of
flowers, and in one garden might be seen from three hundred to four
hundred medicinal herbs. Men extol the foreign herbs to the neglect of
the native, and especially tobacco, "which is not found of so great
efficacy as they write." In the orchards were plums, apples, pears,
walnuts, filberts; and in noblemen's orchards store of strange fruit-
apricots, almonds, peaches, figs, and even in some oranges, lemons, and
capers. Grafters also were at work with their artificial mixtures,
"dallying, as it were, with nature and her course, as if her whole trade
were perfectly known unto them: of hard fruits they will make soft, of
sour sweet, of sweet yet more delicate; bereaving also some of their
kernels, others of their cores, and finally endowing them with the flavor
of musk, amber, or sweet spices at their pleasure." Gardeners turn
annual into perpetual herbs, and such pains are they at that they even
used dish-water for plants. The Gardens of Hesperides are surely not
equal to these. Pliny tells of a rose that had sixty leaves on one bud,
but in 1585 there was a rose in Antwerp that had one hundred and eighty
leaves; and Harrison might have had a slip of it for ten pounds, but he
thought it a "tickle hazard." In his own little garden, of not above
three hundred square feet, he had near three hundred samples, and not one
of them of the common, or usually to be had.
Our kin beyond sea have always been stout eaters of solid food, and in
Elizabeth's time their tables were more plentifully laden than those of
any other nation. Harrison scientifically accounts for their inordinate
appetite. "The situation of our region," he says, "lying near unto the
north, does cause the heat of our stomachs to be of somewhat greater
force; therefore our bodies do crave a little more ample nourishment than
the inhabitants of the hotter regions are accustomed withal, whose
digestive force is not altogether so vehement, because their internal
heat is not so strong as ours, which is kept in by the coldness of the
air, that from time to time (specially in winter) doth environ our
bodies." The north Britons in old times were accustomed often to great
abstinence, and lived when in the woods on roots and herbs. They used
sometimes a confection, "whereof so much as a bean would qualify their
hunger above common expectation"; but when they had nothing to qualify it
with, they crept into the marsh water up to their chins, and there
remained a long time, "only to qualify the heat of their stomachs by
violence."
In Harrison's day the abstemious Welsh had learned to eat like the
English, and the Scotch exceeded the latter in "over much and
distemperate gormandize." The English eat all they can buy, there being
no restraint of any meat for religion's sake or for public order. The
white meats--milk, butter, and cheese--though very dear, are reputed as
good for inferior people, but the more wealthy feed upon the flesh of all
sorts of cattle and all kinds of fish. The nobility ("whose cooks are
for the most part musical-headed Frenchmen and strangers ") exceed in
number of dishes and change of meat. Every day at dinner there is beef,
mutton, veal, lamb, kid, pork, conie, capon, pig, or as many of these as
the season yielded, besides deer and wildfowl, and fish, and sundry
delicacies "wherein the sweet hand of the seafaring Portingale is not
wanting." The food was brought in commonly in silver vessels at tables
of the degree of barons, bishops, and upwards, and referred first to the
principal personage, from whom it passed to the lower end of the table,
the guests not eating of all, but choosing what each liked; and nobody
stuffed himself. The dishes were then sent to the servants, and the
remains of the feast went to the poor, who lay waiting at the gates in
great numbers.
Drink was served in pots, goblets, jugs, and bowls of silver in
noblemen's houses, and also in Venice glasses. It was not set upon the
table, but the cup was brought to each one who thirsted; he called for
such a cup of drink as he wished, and delivered it again to one of the
by-standers, who made it clean by pouring out what remained, and restored
it to the sideboard. This device was to prevent great drinking, which
might ensue if the full pot stood always at the elbow. But this order
was not used in noblemen's halls, nor in any order under the degree of
knight or squire of great revenue. It was a world to see how the nobles
preferred to gold and silver, which abounded, the new Venice glass,
whence a great trade sprang up with Murano that made many rich. The
poorest even would have glass, but home-made--a foolish expense, for the
glass soon went to bits, and the pieces turned to no profit. Harrison
wanted the philosopher's stone to mix with this molten glass and toughen
it.
There were multitudes of dependents fed at the great houses, and
everywhere, according to means, a wide-open hospitality was maintained.
Froude gives a notion of the style of living in earlier times by citing
the details of a feast given when George Neville, brother of Warwick the
king-maker, was made archbishop of York. There were present, including
servants, thirty-five hundred persons. These are a few of the things
used at the banquet: three hundred quarters of wheat, three hundred tuns
of ale, one hundred and four tuns of wine, eighty oxen, three thousand
geese, two thousand pigs,--four thousand conies, four thousand
heronshaws, four thousand venison pasties cold and five hundred hot, four
thousand cold tarts, four thousand cold custards, eight seals, four
porpoises, and so on.
The merchants and gentlemen kept much the same tables as the nobles,
especially at feasts, but when alone were content with a few dishes.
They also desired the dearest food, and would have no meat from the
butcher's but the most delicate, while their list of fruits, cakes,
Gates, and outlandish confections is as long as that at any modern
banquet. Wine ran in excess. There were used fifty-six kinds of light
wines, like the French, and thirty of the strong sorts, like the Italian
and Eastern. The stronger the wine, the better it was liked. The
strongest and best was in old times called theologicum, because it was
had from the clergy and religious men, to whose houses the laity sent
their bottles to be filled, sure that the religious would neither drink
nor be served with the worst; for the merchant would have thought his
soul should have gone straightway to the devil if he had sent them any
but the best. The beer served at noblemen's tables was commonly a year
old, and sometimes two, but this age was not usual. In households
generally it was not under a month old, for beer was liked stale if it
were not sour, while bread was desired as new as possible so that it was
not hot.
The husbandman and artificer ate such meat as they could easiest come by
and have most quickly ready; yet the banquets of the trades in London
were not inferior to those of the nobility. The husbandmen, however,
exceed in profusion, and it is incredible to tell what meat is consumed
at bridals, purifications, and such like odd meetings; but each guest
brought his own provision, so that the master of the house had only to
provide bread, drink, houseroom, and fire. These lower classes Harrison
found very friendly at their tables--merry without malice, plain without
Italian or French subtlety--so that it would do a man good to be in
company among them; but if they happen to stumble upon a piece of venison
or a cup of wine or very strong beer, they do not stick to compare
themselves with the lord-mayor--and there is no public man in any city of
Europe that may compare with him in port and countenance during the term
of his office.
Harrison commends the great silence used at the tables of the wiser sort,
and generally throughout the realm, and likewise the moderate eating and
drinking. But the poorer countrymen do babble somewhat at table, and
mistake ribaldry and loquacity for wit and wisdom, and occasionally are
cup-shotten; and what wonder, when they who have hard diet and small
drink at home come to such opportunities at a banquet! The wealthier
sort in the country entertain their visitors from afar, however long they
stay, with as hearty a welcome the last day as the first; and the
countrymen contrast this hospitality with that of their London cousins,
who joyfully receive them the first day, tolerate them the second, weary
of them the third, and wish 'em at the devil after four days.
The gentry usually ate wheat bread, of which there were four kinds, and
the poor generally bread made of rye, barley, and even oats and acorns.
Corn was getting so dear, owing to the forestallers and middlemen, that,
says the historian, "if the world last a while after this rate, wheat and
rye will be no grain for poor men to feed on; and some catterpillers
[two-legged speculators] there are that can say so much already."
The great drink of the realm was, of course, beer (and it is to be noted
that a great access of drunkenness came into England with the importation
much later of Holland gin) made from barley, hops, and water, and upon
the brewing of it Harrison dwells lovingly, and devotes many pages to a
description of the process, especially as "once in a month practiced by
my wife and her maid servants." They ground eight bushels of malt, added
half a bushel of wheat meal, half a bushel of oat meal, poured in eighty
gallons of water, then eighty gallons more, and a third eighty gallons,
and boiled with a couple of pounds of hops. This, with a few spices
thrown in, made three hogsheads of good beer, meet for a poor man who had
only forty pounds a year. This two hundred gallons of beer cost
altogether twenty shillings; but although he says his wife brewed it
"once in a month," whether it lasted a whole month the parson does not
say. He was particular about the water used: the Thames is best, the
marsh worst, and clear spring water next worst; "the fattest standing
water is always the best." Cider and perry were made in some parts of
England, and a delicate sort of drink in Wales, called metheglin; but
there was a kind of "swish-swash" made in Essex from honey-combs and
water, called mead, which differed from the metheglin as chalk from
cheese.
In Shakespeare's day much less time was spent in eating and drinking than
formerly, when, besides breakfast in the forenoon and dinners, there were
"beverages" or "nuntion" after dinner, and supper before going to bed--
"a toie brought in by hardie Canutus," who was a gross feeder. Generally
there were, except for the young who could not fast till dinnertime, only
two meals daily, dinner and supper. Yet the Normans had brought in the
habit of sitting long at the table--a custom not yet altogether abated,
since the great people, especially at banquets, sit till two or three
o'clock in the afternoon; so that it is a hard matter to rise and go to
evening prayers and return in time for supper.
Harrison does not make much account of the early meal called "breakfast";
but Froude says that in Elizabeth's time the common hour of rising, in
the country, was four o'clock, summer and winter, and that breakfast was
at five, after which the laborers went to work and the gentlemen to
business. The Earl and Countess of Northumberland breakfasted together
and alone at seven. The meal consisted of a quart of ale, a quart of
wine, and a chine of beef; a loaf of bread is not mentioned, but we hope
(says Froude) it may be presumed. The gentry dined at eleven and supped
at five. The merchants took dinner at noon, and, in London, supped at
six. The university scholars out of term ate dinner at ten. The
husbandmen dined at high noon, and took supper at seven or eight. As for
the poorer sort, it is needless to talk of their order of repast, for
they dined and supped when they could. The English usually began meals
with the grossest food and ended with the most delicate, taking first the
mild wines and ending with the hottest; but the prudent Scot did
otherwise, making his entrance with the best, so that he might leave the
worse to the menials.
I will close this portion of our sketch of English manners with an
extract from the travels of Hentzner, who visited England in 1598, and
saw the great queen go in state to chapel at Greenwich, and afterwards
witnessed the laying of the table for her dinner. It was on Sunday.
The queen was then in her sixty-fifth year, and "very majestic," as she
walked in the splendid procession of barons, earls, and knights of the
garter: "her face, oblong, fair, but wrinkled; her eyes small, yet black
and pleasant; her nose a little hooked; her lips narrow, and her teeth
black (a defect the English seem subject to from their great use of
sugar). She had in her ears two pearls with very rich drops; she wore
false hair, and that red; upon her head she had a small crown, reported
to be made of some of the gold of the celebrated Lunebourg table. Her
bosom was uncovered, as all the English ladies have it till they marry;
and she had on a necklace of exceeding fine jewels; her hands were small,
her fingers long, and her stature neither small nor low; her air was
stately, her manner of speaking mild and obliging. That day she was
dressed in white silk, bordered with pearls of the size of beans, and
over it a mantle of black silk, shot with silver threads; her train was
very long, and the end of it borne by a marchioness; instead of a chain
she had an oblong collar of gold and jewels." As she swept on in this
magnificence, she spoke graciously first to one, then to another, and
always in the language of any foreigner she addressed; whoever spoke to
her kneeled, and wherever she turned her face, as she was going along,
everybody fell down on his knees. When she pulled off her glove to give
her hand to be kissed, it was seen to be sparkling with rings and jewels.
The ladies of the court, handsome and well shaped, followed, dressed for
the most part in white; and on either side she was guarded by fifty
gentlemen pensioners with gilt battle-axes. In the ante-chapel, where
she graciously received petitions, there was an acclaim of "Long live
Queen Elizabeth!" to which she answered, "I thank you, my good people."
The music in the chapel was excellent, and the whole service was over in
half an hour. This is Hentzner's description of the setting out of her
table:
"A gentleman entered the room bearing a rod, and along with him another
who had a table-cloth, which, after they had both kneeled three times,
he spread upon the table; and after kneeling again they both retired.
Then came two others, one with the rod again, the other with a salt-
cellar, a plate, and bread; and when they had kneeled as the others had
done, and placed what was brought upon the table, they two retired with
the same ceremonies performed by the first. At last came an unmarried
lady (we were told she was a countess) and along with her a married one,
bearing a tasting-knife; the former was dressed in white silk, who, when
she had prostrated herself three times, in the most graceful manner
approached the table, and rubbed the plates with bread and salt, with as
much awe as if the Queen had been present. When they had waited there a
little while the Yeomen of the Guard entered, bare-headed, clothed in
scarlet, with a golden rose upon their backs, bringing in at each turn a
course of twenty-four dishes, served in plate, most of it gilt; these
dishes were received by a gentleman in the same order they were brought,
and placed upon the table, while the Lady Taster gave to each of the
guard a mouthful to eat, of the particular dish he had brought, for fear
of, any poison. During the time that this guard, which consists of the
tallest and stoutest men that can be found in all England, being
carefully selected for this service, were bringing dinner, twelve
trumpets and two kettle-drums made the hall ring for half an hour
together. At the end of all this ceremonial, a number of unmarried
ladies appeared, who with particular solemnity lifted the meat off the
table and conveyed it into the Queen's inner and more private chamber,
where, after she had chosen for herself, the rest goes to the Ladies of
the court."
The queen dined and supped alone, with very few attendants.
II
We now approach perhaps the most important matter in this world, namely,
dress. In nothing were the increasing wealth and extravagance of the
period more shown than in apparel. And in it we are able to study the
origin of the present English taste for the juxtaposition of striking and
uncomplementary colors. In Coryat's "Crudities," 1611, we have an
Englishman's contrast of the dress of the Venetians and the English.
The Venetians adhered, without change, to their decent fashion,
a thousand years old, wearing usually black: the slender doublet made
close to the body, without much quilting; the long hose plain, the jerkin
also black--but all of the most costly stuffs Christendom can furnish,
satin and taffetas, garnished with the best lace. Gravity and good taste
characterized their apparel. "In both these things," says Coryat, "they
differ much from us Englishmen. For whereas they have but one color,
we use many more than are in the rainbow, all the most light, garish,
and unseemly colors that are in the world. Also for fashion we are much
inferior to them. For we wear more fantastical fashions than any nation
under the sun doth, the French only excepted." On festival days, in
processions, the senators wore crimson damask gowns, with flaps of
crimson velvet cast over their left shoulders; and the Venetian knights
differed from the other gentlemen, for under their black damask gowns,
with long sleeves, they wore red apparel, red silk stockings, and red
pantofles.
Andrew Boord, in 1547, attempting to describe the fashions of his
countrymen, gave up the effort in sheer despair over the variety and
fickleness of costume, and drew a naked man with a pair of shears in one
hand and a piece of cloth in the other, to the end that he should shape
his apparel as he himself liked; and this he called an Englishman. Even
the gentle Harrison, who gives Boord the too harsh character of a lewd
popish hypocrite and ungracious priest, admits that he was not void of
judgment in this; and he finds it easier to inveigh against the enormity,
the fickleness, and the fantasticality of the English attire than to
describe it. So unstable is the fashion, he says, that today the Spanish
guise is in favor; tomorrow the French toys are most fine and delectable;
then the high German apparel is the go; next the Turkish manner is best
liked, the Morisco gowns, the Barbary sleeves, and the short French
breeches; in a word, "except it were a dog in a doublet, you shall not
see any so disguised as are my countrymen in England."
This fantastical folly was in all degrees, from the courtier down to the
tarter. "It is a world to see the costliness and the curiosity, the
excess and the vanity, the pomp and the bravery, the change and the
variety, and finally the fickleness and the folly that is in all degrees;
insomuch that nothing is more constant in England than inconstancy of
attire. So much cost upon the body, so little upon souls; how many suits
of apparel hath the one, or how little furniture hath the other!"
"And how men and women worry the poor tailors, with endless fittings and
sending back of garments, and trying on!" "Then must the long seams of
our hose be set with a plumb line, then we puff, then we blow, and
finally sweat till we drop, that our clothes may stand well upon us."
The barbers were as cunning in variety as the tailors. Sometimes the
head was polled; sometimes the hair was curled, and then suffered to grow
long like a woman's locks, and many times cut off, above or under the
ears, round as by a wooden dish. And so with the beards: some shaved
from the chin, like the Turks; some cut short, like the beard of the
Marquis Otto; some made round, like a rubbing-brush; some peaked, others
grown long. If a man have a lean face, the Marquis Otto's cut makes it
broad; if it be platterlike, the long, slender beard makes it seem
narrow; "if he be weasel-beaked, then much hair left on the cheeks will
make the owner look big like a bowdled hen, and so grim as a goose."
Some courageous gentlemen wore in their ears rings of gold and stones,
to improve God's work, which was otherwise set off by monstrous quilted
and stuffed doublets, that puffed out the figure like a barrel.
There is some consolation, though I don't know why, in the knowledge that
writers have always found fault with women's fashions, as they do today.
Harrison says that the women do far exceed the lightness of the men;
"such staring attire as in time past was supposed meet for light
housewives only is now become an habit for chaste and sober matrons."
And he knows not what to say of their doublets, with pendant pieces on
the breast full of jags and cuts; their "galligascons," to make their
dresses stand out plumb round; their farthingales and divers colored
stockings. "I have met," he says, "with some of these trulls in London
so disguised that it hath passed my skill to determine whether they were
men or women." Of all classes the merchants were most to be commended
for rich but sober attire; "but the younger sort of their wives, both in
attire and costly housekeeping, cannot tell when and how to make an end,
as being women indeed in whom all kind of curiosity is to be found and
seen." Elizabeth's time, like our own, was distinguished by new
fashionable colors, among which are mentioned a queer greenish-yellow,
a pease-porridge-tawny, a popinjay of blue, a lusty gallant, and the
"devil in the hedge." These may be favorites still, for aught I know.
Mr. Furnivall quotes a description of a costume of the period, from the
manuscript of Orazio Busino's "Anglipotrida." Busino was the chaplain of
Piero Contarina, the Venetian ambassador to James I, in 1617. The
chaplain was one day stunned with grief over the death of the butler of
the embassy; and as the Italians sleep away grief, the French sing, the
Germans drink, and the English go to plays to be rid of it,
the Venetians, by advice, sought consolation at the Fortune Theatre;
and there a trick was played upon old Busino, by placing him among a bevy
of young women, while the concealed ambassador and the secretary enjoyed
the joke. "These theatres," says Busino, "are frequented by a number of
respectable and handsome ladies, who come freely and seat themselves
among the men without the slightest hesitation . . . . Scarcely was I
seated ere a very elegant dame, but in a mask, came and placed herself
beside me . . . . She asked me for my address both in French and
English; and, on my turning a deaf ear, she determined to honor me by
showing me some fine diamonds on her fingers, repeatedly taking off no
fewer than three gloves, which were worn one over the other . . . .
This lady's bodice was of yellow satin, richly embroidered,
her petticoat--[It is a trifle in human progress, perhaps scarcely worth
noting, that the "round gown," that is, an entire skirt, not open in
front and parting to show the under petticoat, did not come into fashion
till near the close of the eighteenth century.]--of gold tissue with
stripes, her robe of red velvet with a raised pile, lined with yellow
muslin with broad stripes of pure gold. She wore an apron of point lace
of various patterns; her headtire was highly perfumed, and the collar of
white satin beneath the delicately wrought ruff struck me as exceedingly
pretty." It was quite in keeping with the manners of the day for a lady
of rank to have lent herself to this hoax of the chaplain.
Van Meteren, a Netherlander, 1575, speaks also of the astonishing change
or changeableness in English fashions, but says the women are well
dressed and modest, and they go about the streets without any covering of
mantle, hood, or veil; only the married women wear a hat in the street
and in the house; the unmarried go without a hat; but ladies of
distinction have lately learned to cover their faces with silken masks
or vizards, and to wear feathers. The English, he notes, change their
fashions every year, and when they go abroad riding or traveling they don
their best clothes, contrary to the practice of other nations. Another
foreigner, Jacob Rathgeb, 1592, says the English go dressed in exceeding
fine clothes, and some will even wear velvet in the street, when they
have not at home perhaps a piece of dry bread. "The lords and pages of
the royal court have a stately, noble air, but dress more after the
French fashion, only they wear short cloaks and sometimes Spanish caps."
Harrison's arraignment of the English fashions of his day may be
considered as almost commendative beside the diatribes of the old Puritan
Philip Stubbes, in "The Anatomie of Abuses," 1583. The English language
is strained for words hot and rude enough to express his indignation,
contempt, and fearful expectation of speedy judgments. The men escape
his hands with scarcely less damage than the women. First he wreaks his
indignation upon the divers kinds of hats, stuck full of feathers,
of various colors, "ensigns of vanity," "fluttering sails and feathered
flags of defiance to virtue"; then upon the monstrous ruffs that stand
out a quarter of a yard from the neck. As the devil, in the fullness of
his malice, first invented these ruffs, so has he found out two stays to
bear up this his great kingdom of ruffs--one is a kind of liquid matter
they call starch; the other is a device made of wires, for an under-
propper. Then there are shirts of cambric, holland, and lawn, wrought
with fine needle-work of silk and curiously stitched, costing sometimes
as much as five pounds. Worse still are the monstrous doublets, reaching
down to the middle of the thighs, so hard quilted, stuffed, bombasted,
and sewed that the wearer can hardly stoop down in them. Below these are
the gally-hose of silk, velvet, satin, and damask, reaching below the
knees. So costly are these that "now it is a small matter to bestow
twenty nobles, ten pound, twenty pound, fortie pound, yea a hundred pound
of one pair of Breeches. (God be merciful unto us!) "To these gay hose
they add nether-socks, curiously knit with open seams down the leg, with
quirks and clocks about the ankles, and sometimes interlaced with gold
and silver thread as is wonderful to behold. Time has been when a man
could clothe his whole body for the price of these nether-socks." Satan
was further let loose in the land by reason of cork shoes and fine
slippers, of all colors, carved, cut, and stitched with silk, and laced
on with gold and silver, which went flipping and flapping up and down in
the dirt. The jerkins and cloaks are of all colors and fashions; some
short, reaching to the knee; others dragging on the ground; red, white,
black, violet, yellow, guarded, laced, and faced; hanged with points and
tassels of gold, silver, and silk. The hilts of daggers, rapiers, and
swords are gilt thrice over, and have scabbards of velvet. And all this
while the poor lie in London streets upon pallets of straw, or else in
the mire and dirt, and die like dogs!"
Stubbes was a stout old Puritan, bent upon hewing his way to heaven
through all the allurements of this world, and suspecting a devil in
every fair show. I fear that he looked upon woman as only a vain and
trifling image, a delusive toy, away from whom a man must set his face.
Shakespeare, who was country-bred when he came up to London, and lived
probably on the roystering South Side, near the theatres and bear-
gardens, seems to have been impressed with the painted faces of the
women. It is probable that only town-bred women painted. Stubbes
declares that the women of England color their faces with oils, liquors,
unguents, and waters made to that end, thinking to make themselves fairer
than God made them--a presumptuous audacity to make God untrue in his
word; and he heaps vehement curses upon the immodest practice. To this
follows the trimming and tricking of their heads, the laying out their
hair to show, which is curled, crisped, and laid out on wreaths and
borders from ear to ear. Lest it should fall down it is under-propped
with forks, wires, and what not. On the edges of their bolstered hair
(for it standeth crested round about their frontiers, and hanging over
their faces like pendices with glass windows on every side) is laid great
wreaths of gold and silver curiously wrought. But this is not the worst
nor the tenth part, for no pen is able to describe the wickedness.
"The women use great ruffs and neckerchers of holland, lawn, camerick,
and such cloth, as the greatest thread shall not be so big as the least
hair that is: then, lest they should fall down, they are smeared and
starched in the Devil's liquor, I mean Starch; after that dried with
great diligence, streaked, patted and rubbed very nicely, and so applied
to their goodly necks, and, withall, under-propped with supportasses,
the stately arches of pride; beyond all this they have a further fetch,
nothing inferior to the rest; as, namely, three or four degrees of minor
ruffs, placed gradatim, step by step, one beneath another, and all under
the Master devil ruff. The skirts, then, of these great ruffs are long
and side every way, pleted and crested full curiously, God wot."
Time will not serve us to follow old Stubbes into his particular
inquisition of every article of woman's attire, and his hearty damnation
of them all and several. He cannot even abide their carrying of nosegays
and posies of flowers to smell at, since the palpable odors and fumes of
these do enter the brain to degenerate the spirit and allure to vice.
They must needs carry looking-glasses with them; "and good reason," says
Stubbes, savagely, "for else how could they see the devil in them? for no
doubt they are the devil's spectacles [these women] to allure us to pride
and consequently to destruction forever." And, as if it were not enough
to be women, and the devil's aids, they do also have doublets and
jerkins, buttoned up the breast, and made with wings, welts, and pinions
on the shoulder points, as man's apparel is, for all the world. We take
reluctant leave of this entertaining woman-hater, and only stay to quote
from him a "fearful judgment of God, shewed upon a gentlewoman of Antwerp
of late, even the 27th of May, 1582," which may be as profitable to read
now as it was then: "This gentlewoman being a very rich Merchant man's
daughter: upon a time was invited to a bridal, or wedding, which was
solemnized in that Toune, against which day she made great preparation,
for the pluming herself in gorgeous array, that as her body was most
beautiful, fair, and proper, so her attire in every respect might be
correspondent to the same. For the accomplishment whereof she curled her
hair, she dyed her locks, and laid them out after the best manner, she
colored her face with waters and Ointments: But in no case could she get
any (so curious and dainty she was) that could starch, and set her Ruffs
and Neckerchers to her mind wherefore she sent for a couple of
Laundresses, who did the best they could to please her humors, but in any
wise they could not. Then fell she to swear and tear, to curse and damn,
casting the Ruffs under feet, and wishing that the Devil might take her
when she wear any of those Neckerchers again. In the meantime (through
the sufference of God) the Devil transforming himself into the form of a
young man, as brave and proper as she in every point of outward
appearance, came in, feigning himself to be a wooer or suitor unto her.
And seeing her thus agonized, and in such a pelting chase, he demanded of
her the cause thereof, who straightway told him (as women can conceal
nothing that lieth upon their stomachs) how she was abused in the setting
of her Ruffs, which thing being heard of him, he promised to please her
mind, and thereto took in hand the setting of her Ruffs, which he
performed to her great contentation and liking, in so much as she looking
herself in a glass (as the Devil bade her) became greatly enamoured of
him. This done, the young man kissed her, in the doing whereof she
writhe her neck in, sunder, so she died miserably, her body being
metamorphosed into black and blue colors, most ugglesome to behold, and
her face (which before was so amorous) became most deformed, and fearful
to look upon. This being known, preparaunce was made for her burial,
a rich coffin was provided, and her fearful body was laid therein, and it
covered very sumptuously. Four men immediately assayed to lift up the
corpse, but could not move it; then six attempted the like, but could not
once stir it from the place where it stood. Whereat the standers-by
marveling, caused the coffin to be opened to see the cause thereof.
Where they found the body to be taken away, and a black Cat very lean and
deformed sitting in the coffin, setting of great Ruffs, and frizzling of
hair, to the great fear and wonder of all beholders."
Better than this pride which forerunneth destruction, in the opinion of
Stubbes, is the habit of the Brazilian women, who "esteem so little of
apparel" that they rather choose to go naked than be thought to be proud.
As I read the times of Elizabeth, there was then greater prosperity and
enjoyment of life among the common people than fifty or a hundred years
later. Into the question of the prices of labor and of food, which Mr.
Froude considers so fully in the first chapter of his history, I shall
not enter any further than to remark that the hardness of the laborer's
lot, who got, mayhap, only twopence a day, is mitigated by the fact that
for a penny he could buy a pound of meat which now costs a shilling.
In two respects England has greatly changed for the traveler, from the
sixteenth to the eighteenth century--in its inns and its roads.
In the beginning of Elizabeth's reign travelers had no choice but to ride
on horseback or to walk. Goods were transported on strings of pack-
horses. When Elizabeth rode into the city from her residence at
Greenwich, she placed herself behind her lord chancellor, on a pillion.
The first improvement made was in the construction of a rude wagon a cart
without springs, the body resting solidly on the axles. In such a
vehicle Elizabeth rode to the opening of her fifth Parliament. In 1583,
on a certain day, Sir Harry Sydney entered Shrewsbury in his wagon, "with
his trompeter blowynge, verey joyfull to behold and see." Even such
conveyances fared hard on the execrable roads of the period. Down to the
end of the seventeenth century most of the country roads were merely
broad ditches, water-worn and strewn with loose stones. In 1640 Queen
Henrietta was four weary days dragging over the road from Dover to
London, the best in England. Not till the close of the sixteenth century
was the wagon used, and then rarely. Fifty years later stage-wagons ran,
with some regularity, between London and Liverpool; and before the close
of the seventeenth century the stagecoach, a wonderful invention, which
had been used in and about London since 1650, was placed on three
principal roads of the kingdom. It averaged two to three miles an hour.
In the reign of Charles II. a Frenchman who landed at Dover was drawn up
to London in a wagon with six horses in a line, one after the other.
Our Venetian, Busino, who went to Oxford in the coach with the ambassador
in 1617, was six days in going one hundred and fifty miles, as the coach
often stuck in the mud, and once broke down. So bad were the main
thoroughfares, even, that markets were sometimes inaccessible for months
together, and the fruits of the earth rotted in one place, while there
was scarcity not many miles distant.
But this difficulty of travel and liability to be detained long on the
road were cheered by good inns, such as did not exist in the world
elsewhere. All the literature of the period reflects lovingly the
homelike delights of these comfortable houses of entertainment. Every
little village boasted an excellent inn, and in the towns on the great
thoroughfares were sumptuous houses that would accommodate from two to
three hundred guests with their horses. The landlords were not tyrants,
as on the Continent, but servants of their guests; and it was, says
Harrison, a world to see how they did contend for the entertainment of
their guests--as about fineness and change of linen, furniture of
bedding, beauty of rooms, service at the table, costliness of plate,
strength of drink, variety of wines, or well-using of horses. The
gorgeous signs at their doors sometimes cost forty pounds. The inns were
cheap too, and the landlord let no one depart dissatisfied with his bill.
The worst inns were in London, and the tradition has been handed down.
But the ostlers, Harrison confesses, did sometimes cheat in the feed, and
they with the tapsters and chamberlains were in league (and the
landlord was not always above suspicion) with highwaymen outside, to
ascertain if the traveler carried any valuables; so that when he left the
hospitable inn he was quite likely to be stopped on the highway and
relieved of his money. The highwayman was a conspicuous character.
One of the most romantic of these gentry at one time was a woman named
Mary Frith, born in 1585, and known as Moll Cut-Purse. She dressed in
male attire, was an adroit fencer, a bold rider, and a staunch royalist;
she once took two hundred gold jacobuses from the Parliamentary General
Fairfax on Hounslow Heath. She is the chief character in Middleton's
play of the "Roaring Girl"; and after a varied life as a thief, cutpurse,
pickpocket, highwayman, trainer of animals, and keeper of a thieves'
fence, she died in peace at the age of seventy. To return to the inns,
Fyner Morrison, a traveler in 1617, sustains all that Harrison says of
the inns as the best and cheapest in the world, where the guest shall
have his own pleasure. No sooner does he arrive than the servants run to
him--one takes his horse, another shows him his chamber and lights his
fire, a third pulls off his boots. Then come the host and hostess to
inquire what meat he will choose, and he may have their company if he
like. He shall be offered music while he eats, and if he be solitary the
musicians will give him good-day with music in the morning. In short,
"a man cannot more freely command at home, in his own house, than he may
do in his inn."
The amusements of the age were often rough, but certainly more moral than
they were later; and although the theatres were denounced by such
reformers as Stubbes as seminaries of vice, and disapproved by Harrison;
they were better than after the Restoration, when the plays of
Shakespeare were out of fashion. The Londoners went for amusement to the
Bankside, or South Side of the Thames, where were the famous Paris
Gardens, much used as a rendezvous by gallants; and there were the places
for bear and bull baiting; and there were the theatres--the Paris
Gardens, the Swan, the Rose, the Hope, and the Globe. The pleasure-
seekers went over usually in boats, of which there were said to be four
thousand plying between banks; for there was only one bridge, and that
was crowded with houses. All distinguished visitors were taken over to
see the gardens and the bears baited by dogs; the queen herself went, and
perhaps on Sunday, for Sunday was the great day, and Elizabeth is said to
have encouraged Sunday sports, she had been (we read) so much hunted on
account of religion! These sports are too brutal to think of; but there
are amusing accounts of lion-baiting both by bears and dogs, in which the
beast who figures so nobly on the escutcheon nearly always proved himself
an arrant coward, and escaped away as soon as he could into his den, with
his tail between his legs. The spectators were once much disgusted when
a lion and lioness, with the dog that pursued them, all ran into the den,
and, like good friends, stood very peaceably together looking out at the
people.
The famous Globe Theatre, which was built in 1599, was burned in 1613,
and in the fire it is supposed were consumed Shakespeare's manuscripts of
his plays. It was of wood (for use in summer only), octagon shaped, with
a thatched roof, open in the centre. The daily performance here, as in
all theatres, was at three o'clock in the afternoon, and boys outside
held the horses of the gentlemen who went in to the play. When theatres
were restrained, in 1600, only two were allowed, the Globe and the
Fortune, which was on the north side, on Golden Lane. The Fortune was
fifty feet square within, and three stories high, with galleries, built
of wood on a brick foundation, and with a roof of tiles. The stage was
forty-three feet wide, and projected into the middle of the yard (as the
pit was called), where the groundlings stood. To one of the galleries
admission was only twopence. The young gallants used to go into the
yards and spy about the galleries and boxes for their acquaintances.
In these theatres there was a drop-curtain, but little or no scenery.
Spectators had boxes looking on the stage behind the curtain, and they
often sat upon the stage with the actors; sometimes the actors all
remained upon the stage during the whole play. There seems to have been
great familiarity between the audience and the actors. Fruits in season,
apples, pears, and nuts, with wine and beer, were carried about to be
sold, and pipes were smoked. There was neither any prudery in the plays
or the players, and the audiences in behavior were no better than the
plays.
The actors were all men. The female parts were taken usually by boys,
but frequently by grown men, and when Juliet or Desdemona was announced,
a giant would stride upon the stage. There is a story that Kynaston, a
handsome fellow, famous in female characters, and petted by ladies of
rank, once kept Charles I. waiting while he was being shaved before
appearing as Evadne in "The Maid's Tragedy." The innovation of women on
the stage was first introduced by a French company in 1629, but the
audiences would not tolerate it, and hissed and pelted the actresses off
the stage. But thirty years later women took the place they have ever
since held; when the populace had once experienced the charm of a female
Juliet and Ophelia, they would have no other, and the rage for actresses
ran to such excess at one time that it was a fashion for women to take
the male parts as well. But that was in the abandoned days of Charles
II. Pepys could not control his delight at the appearance of Nell
Gwynne, especially "when she comes like a young gallant, and hath the
motions and carriage of a spark the most that ever I saw any man have.
It makes me, I confess, admire her." The acting of Shakespeare himself
is only a faint tradition. He played the ghost in "Hamlet," and Adam in
"As You Like It." William Oldys says (Oldys was an antiquarian who was
pottering about in the first part of the eighteenth century, picking up
gossip in coffee-houses, and making memoranda on scraps of paper in book-
shops) Shakespeare's brother Charles, who lived past the middle of the
seventeenth century, was much inquired of by actors about the
circumstances of Shakespeare's playing. But Charles was so old and weak
in mind that he could recall nothing except the faint impression that he
had once seen "Will" act a part in one of his own comedies, wherein,
being to personate a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared
so weak and drooping and unable to walk that he was forced to be
supported and carried by another person to a table, at which he was
seated among some company who were eating, and one of them sang a song.
And that was Shakespeare!
The whole Bankside, with its taverns, play-houses, and worse, its bear
pits and gardens, was the scene of roystering and coarse amusement.
And it is surprising that plays of such sustained moral greatness as
Shakespeare's should have been welcome.
The more private amusements of the great may well be illustrated by an
account given by Busino of a masque (it was Ben Jonson's "Pleasure
Reconciled to Virtue") performed at Whitehall on Twelfthnight, 1617.
During the play, twelve cavaliers in masks, the central figure of whom
was Prince Charles, chose partners, and danced every kind of dance, until
they got tired and began to flag; whereupon King James, "who is naturally
choleric, got impatient, and shouted aloud, 'Why don't they dance? What
did you make me come here for? Devil take you all, dance!' On hearing
this, the Marquis of Buckingham, his majesty's most favored minion,
immediately sprang forward, cutting a score of lofty and very minute
capers, with so much grace and agility that he not only appeased the ire
of his angry sovereign, but moreover rendered himself the admiration and
delight of everybody. The other masquers, being thus encouraged,
continued successively exhibiting their powers with various ladies,
finishing in like manner with capers, and by lifting their goddesses from
the ground . . . . The prince, however, excelled them all in bowing,
being very exact in making his obeisance both to the king and his
partner; nor did we ever see him make one single step out of time--a
compliment which can scarcely be paid to his companions. Owing to his
youth, he has not much wind as yet, but he nevertheless cut a few capers
very gracefully." The prince then went and kissed the hand of his serene
parent, who embraced and kissed him tenderly. When such capers were cut
at Whitehall, we may imagine what the revelry was in the Bankside
taverns.
The punishments of the age were not more tender than the amusements were
refined. Busino saw a lad of fifteen led to execution for stealing a bag
of currants. At the end of every month, besides special executions,
as many as twenty-five people at a time rode through London streets in
Tyburn carts, singing ribald songs, and carrying sprigs of rosemary in
their hands. Everywhere in the streets the machines of justice were
visible-pillories for the neck and hands, stocks for the feet, and chains
to stretch across, in case of need, and stop a mob. In the suburbs were
oak cages for nocturnal offenders. At the church doors might now and
then be seen women enveloped in sheets, doing penance for their evil
deeds. A bridle, something like a bit for a restive horse, was in use
for the curbing of scolds; but this was a later invention than the
cucking-stool, or ducking-stool. There is an old print of one of these
machines standing on the Thames' bank: on a wheeled platform is an
upright post with a swinging beam across the top, on one end of which the
chair is suspended over the river, while the other is worked up and down
by a rope; in it is seated a light sister of the Bankside, being dipped
into the unsavory flood. But this was not so hated by the women as a
similar discipline--being dragged in the river by a rope after a boat.
Hanging was the common punishment for felony, but traitors and many other
offenders were drawn, hanged, boweled, and quartered; nobles who were
traitors usually escaped with having their heads chopped off only.
Torture was not practiced; for, says Harrison, our people despise death,
yet abhor to be tormented, being of frank and open minds. And "this is
one cause why our condemned persons do go so cheerfully to their deaths,
for our nation is free, stout, hearty, and prodigal of life and blood,
and cannot in any wise digest to be used as villains and slaves." Felony
covered a wide range of petty crimes--breach of prison, hunting by night
with painted or masked faces, stealing above forty shillings, stealing
hawks' eggs, conjuring, prophesying upon arms and badges, stealing deer
by night, cutting purses, counterfeiting coin, etc. Death was the
penalty for all these offenses. For poisoning her husband a woman was
burned alive; a man poisoning another was boiled to death in water or
oil; heretics were burned alive; some murderers were hanged in chains;
perjurers were branded on the forehead with the letter P; rogues were
burned through the ears; suicides were buried in a field with a stake
driven through their bodies; witches were burned or hanged; in Halifax
thieves were beheaded by a machine almost exactly like the modern
guillotine; scolds were ducked; pirates were hanged on the seashore at
low-water mark, and left till three tides overwashed them; those who let
the sea-walls decay were staked out in the breach of the banks, and left
there as parcel of the foundation of the new wall. Of rogues-that is,
tramps and petty thieves-the gallows devoured three to four hundred
annually, in one place or another; and Henry VIII. in his time did hang
up as many as seventy-two thousand rogues. Any parish which let a thief
escape was fined. Still the supply held out.
The legislation against vagabonds, tramps, and sturdy beggars, and their
punishment by whipping, branding, etc., are too well known to need
comment. But considerable provision was made for the unfortunate and
deserving poor--poorhouses were built for them, and collections taken up.
Only sixty years before Harrison wrote there were few beggars, but in his
day he numbers them at ten thousand; and most of them were rogues, who
counterfeited sores and wounds, and were mere thieves and caterpillars on
the commonwealth. He names twenty-three different sorts of vagabonds
known by cant names, such as "ruffers," "uprightmen," "priggers,"
"fraters," "palliards," "Abrams," "dummerers "; and of women, "demanders
for glimmer or fire," "mortes," "walking mortes," "doxes," "kinching
coves."
London was esteemed by its inhabitants and by many foreigners as the
richest and most magnificent city in Christendom. The cities of London
and Westminster lay along the north bank in what seemed an endless
stretch; on the south side of the Thames the houses were more scattered.
But the town was mostly of wood, and its rapid growth was a matter of
anxiety. Both Elizabeth and James again and again attempted to restrict
it by forbidding the erection of any new buildings within the town,
or for a mile outside; and to this attempt was doubtless due the crowded
rookeries in the city. They especially forbade the use of wood in house-
fronts and windows, both on account of the danger from fire, and because
all the timber in the kingdom, which was needed for shipping and other
purposes, was being used up in building. They even ordered the pulling
down of new houses in London, Westminster, and for three miles around.
But all efforts to stop the growth of the city were vain.
London, according to the Venetian Busino, was extremely dirty. He did
not admire the wooden architecture; the houses were damp and cold,
the staircases spiral and inconvenient, the apartments "sorry and ill
connected." The wretched windows, without shutters, he could neither
open by day nor close by night. The streets were little better than
gutters, and were never put in order except for some great parade.
Hentzner, however, thought the streets handsome and clean. When it
rained it must have been otherwise. There was no provision for
conducting away the water; it poured off the roofs upon the people below,
who had not as yet heard of the Oriental umbrella; and the countryman,
staring at the sights of the town, knocked about by the carts, and run
over by the horsemen, was often surprised by a douche from a conduit down
his back. And, besides, people had a habit of throwing water and slops
out of the windows, regardless of passers-by.
The shops were small, open in front, when the shutters were down,
much like those in a Cairo bazaar, and all the goods were in sight.
The shopkeepers stood in front and cried their wares, and besought
customers. Until 1568 there were but few silk shops in London, and all
those were kept by women. It was not till about that time that citizens'
wives ceased to wear white knit woolen caps, and three-square Minever
caps with peaks. In the beginning of Elizabeth's reign the apprentices
(a conspicuous class) wore blue cloaks in winter and blue gowns in
summer; unless men were threescore years old, it was not lawful to wear
gowns lower than the calves of the legs, but the length of cloaks was not
limited. The journeymen and apprentices wore long daggers in the daytime
at their backs or sides. When the apprentices attended their masters and
mistresses in the night they carried lanterns and candles, and a great
long club on the neck. These apprentices were apt to lounge with their
clubs about the fronts of shops, ready to take a hand in any excitement--
to run down a witch, or raid an objectionable house, or tear down a
tavern of evil repute, or spoil a playhouse. The high-streets,
especially in winter-time, were annoyed by hourly frays of sword and
buckler-men; but these were suddenly suppressed when the more deadly
fight with rapier and dagger came in. The streets were entirely
unlighted and dangerous at night, and for this reason the plays at the
theatres were given at three in the afternoon.
About Shakespeare's time many new inventions and luxuries came in: masks,
muffs, fans, periwigs, shoe-roses, love-handkerchiefs (tokens given by
maids and gentlewomen to their favorites), heath-brooms for hair-brushes,
scarfs, garters, waistcoats, flat-caps; also hops, turkeys, apricots,
Venice glass, tobacco. In 1524, and for years after, was used this rhyme
"Turkeys, Carpes, Hops: Piccarel, and beers,
Came into England: all in one year."
There were no coffee-houses as yet, for neither tea nor coffee was
introduced till about 1661. Tobacco was first made known in England by
Sir John Hawkins in 1565, though not commonly used by men and women till
some years after. It was urged as a great medicine for many ills.
Harrison says, 1573, "In these days the taking in of the smoke of the
Indian herb called 'Tabaco,' by an instrument formed like a little ladle,
whereby it passeth from the mouth into the head and stomach, is greatly
taken up and used in England, against Rewmes and some other diseases
engendered in the lungs and inward parts, and not without effect." It's
use spread rapidly, to the disgust of James I. and others, who doubted
that it was good for cold, aches, humors, and rheums. In 1614 it was
said that seven thousand houses lived by this trade, and that L 399,375
a year was spent in smoke. Tobacco was even taken on the stage. Every
base groom must have his pipe; it was sold in all inns and ale-houses,
and the shops of apothecaries, grocers, and chandlers were almost never,
from morning till night, without company still taking of tobacco.
There was a saying on the Continent that "England is a paradise for
women, a prison for servants, and a hell or purgatory for horses."
The society was very simple compared with the complex condition of ours,
and yet it had more striking contrasts, and was a singular mixture of
downrightness and artificiality; plainness and rudeness of speech went
with the utmost artificiality of dress and manner. It is curious to note
the insular, not to say provincial, character of the people even three
centuries ago. When the Londoners saw a foreigner very well made or
particularly handsome, they were accustomed to say, "It is a pity he is
not an ENGLISHMAN." It is pleasant, I say, to trace this "certain
condescension" in the good old times. Jacob Rathgeb (1592) says the
English are magnificently dressed, and extremely proud and overbearing;
the merchants, who seldom go unto other countries, scoff at foreigners,
who are liable to be ill-used by street boys and apprentices, who collect
in immense crowds and stop the way. Of course Cassandra Stubbes, whose
mind was set upon a better country, has little good to say of his
countrymen.
"As concerning the nature, propertie, and disposition of the people they
be desirous of new fangles, praising things past, contemning things
present, and coveting after things to come. Ambitious, proud, light, and
unstable, ready to be carried away with every blast of wind." The French
paid back with scorn the traditional hatred of the English for the
French. Perlin (1558) finds the people proud and seditious, with bad
consciences and unfaithful to their word" in war unfortunate, in peace
unfaithful"; and there was a Spanish or Italian proverb: "England, good
land, bad people." But even Perlin likes the appearance of the people:
"The men are handsome, rosy, large, and dexterous, usually fair-skinned;
the women are esteemed the most beautiful in the world, white as
alabaster, and give place neither to Italian, Flemish, nor German; they
are joyous, courteous, and hospitable (de bon recueil)." He thinks their
manners, however, little civilized: for one thing, they have an
unpleasant habit of eructation at the table (car iceux routent a la table
sans honte & ignominie); which recalls Chaucer's description of the
Trumpington miller's wife and daughter:
"Men might her rowtyng hearen a forlong,
The wenche routeth eek par companye."
Another inference as to the table manners of the period is found in
Coryat's "Crudities" (1611). He saw in Italy generally a curious custom
of using a little fork for meat, and whoever should take the meat out of
the dish with his fingers--would give offense. And he accounts for this
peculiarity quite naturally: "The reason of this their curiosity is,
because the Italian cannot by any means indure to have his dish touched
with fingers, seeing all mens fingers are not alike cleane." Coryat
found the use of the fork nowhere else in Christendom, and when he
returned, and, oftentimes in England, imitated the Italian fashion, his
exploit was regarded in a humorous light. Busino says that fruits were
seldom served at dessert, but that the whole population were munching
them in the streets all day long, and in the places of amusement; and it
was an amusement to go out into the orchards and eat fruit on the spot,
in a sort of competition of gormandize between the city belles and their
admirers. And he avers that one young woman devoured twenty pounds of
cherries, beating her opponent by two pounds and a half.
All foreigners were struck with the English love of music and drink,
of banqueting and good cheer. Perlin notes a pleasant custom at table:
during the feast you hear more than a hundred times, "Drink iou" (he
loves to air his English), that is to say, "Je m'en vois boyre a toy."
You respond, in their language, "Iplaigiu"; that is to say, "Je vous
plege." If you thank them, they say in their language, "God tanque
artelay"; that is, "Je vous remercie de bon coeur." And then, says the
artless Frenchman, still improving on his English, you should respond
thus: "Bigod, sol drink iou agoud oin." At the great and princely
banquets, when the pledge went round and the heart's desire of lasting
health, says the chronicler, "the same was straight wayes knowne, by
sound of Drumme and Trumpet, and the cannon's loudest voyce." It was so
in Hamlet's day:
"And as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge."
According to Hentzner (1598), the English are serious, like the Germans,
and love show and to be followed by troops of servants wearing the arms
of their masters; they excel in music and dancing, for they are lively
and active, though thicker of make than the French; they cut their hair
close in the middle of the head, letting it grow on either side; "they
are good sailors, and better pyrates, cunning, treacherous, and
thievish;" and, he adds, with a touch of satisfaction, "above three
hundred are said to be hanged annually in London." They put a good deal
of sugar in their drink; they are vastly fond of great noises, firing of
cannon, beating of drums, and ringing of bells, and when they have a
glass in their heads they go up into some belfry, and ring the bells for
hours together, for the sake of exercise. Perlin's comment is that men
are hung for a trifle in England, and that you will not find many lords
whose parents have not had their heads chopped off.
It is a pleasure to turn to the simple and hearty admiration excited in
the breasts of all susceptible foreigners by the English women of the
time. Van Meteren, as we said, calls the women beautiful, fair, well
dressed, and modest. To be sure, the wives are, their lives only
excepted, entirely in the power of their husbands, yet they have great
liberty; go where they please; are shown the greatest honor at banquets,
where they sit at the upper end of the table and are first served; are
fond of dress and gossip and of taking it easy; and like to sit before
their doors, decked out in fine clothes, in order to see and be seen by
the passers-by. Rathgeb also agrees that the women have much more
liberty than in any other place. When old Busino went to the Masque at
Whitehall, his colleagues kept exclaiming, "Oh, do look at this one--oh,
do see that! Whose wife is this?--and that pretty one near her, whose
daughter is she?" There was some chaff mixed in, he allows, some
shriveled skins and devotees of S. Carlo Borromeo, but the beauties
greatly predominated.
In the great street pageants, it was the beauty and winsomeness of the
London ladies, looking on, that nearly drove the foreigners wild.
In 1606, upon the entry of the king of Denmark, the chronicler celebrates
"the unimaginable number of gallant ladies, beauteous virgins, and other
delicate dames, filling the windows of every house with kind aspect."
And in 1638, when Cheapside was all alive with the pageant of the entry
of the queen mother, "this miserable old queen," as Lilly calls Marie de'
Medicis (Mr. Furnivall reproduces an old cut of the scene), M. de la
Serre does not try to restrain his admiration for the pretty women on
view: only the most fecund imagination can represent the content one has
in admiring the infinite number of beautiful women, each different from
the other, and each distinguished by some sweetness or grace to ravish
the heart and take captive one's liberty. No sooner has he determined to
yield to one than a new object of admiration makes him repent the
precipitation of his judgment.
And all the other foreigners were in the like case of "goneness."
Kiechel, writing in 1585, says, "Item, the women there are charming, and
by nature so mighty pretty as I have scarcely ever beheld, for they do
not falsify, paint, or bedaub themselves as in Italy or other places;"
yet he confesses (and here is another tradition preserved) "they are
somewhat awkward in their style of dress." His second "item" of
gratitude is a Netherland custom that pleased him--whenever a foreigner
or an inhabitant went to a citizen's house on business, or as a guest,
he was received by the master, the lady, or the daughter, and "welcomed"
(as it is termed in their language); "he has a right to take them by the
arm and to kiss them, which is the custom of the country; and if any one
does not do so, it is regarded and imputed as ignorance and ill-breeding
on his part." Even the grave Erasmus, when he visited England, fell
easily into this pretty practice, and wrote with untheological fervor of
the "girls with angel faces," who were "so kind and obliging." "Wherever
you come," he says, "you are received with a kiss by all; when you take
your leave you are dismissed with kisses; you return, kisses are
repeated. They come to visit you, kisses again; they leave you, you kiss
them all round. Should they meet you anywhere, kisses in abundance in
fine, wherever you move there is nothing but kisses"--a custom, says this
reformer, who has not the fear of Stubbes before his eyes, "never to be
sufficiently commended."
We shall find no more convenient opportunity to end this part of the
social study of the age of Shakespeare than with this naive picture of
the sex which most adorned it. Some of the details appear trivial; but
grave history which concerns itself only with the actions of conspicuous
persons, with the manoeuvres of armies, the schemes of politics, the
battles of theologies, fails signally to give us the real life of the
people by which we judge the character of an age.
III
When we turn from France to England in, the latter part of the sixteenth
and the beginning of the seventeenth century, we are in another
atmosphere; we encounter a literature that smacks of the soil, that is as
varied, as racy, often as rude, as human life itself, and which cannot be
adequately appreciated except by a study of the popular mind and the
history of the time which produced it.
"Voltaire," says M. Guizot, "was the first person in France who spoke of
Shakespeare's genius; and although he spoke of him merely as a barbarian
genius, the French public were of the opinion that he had said too much
in his favor. Indeed, they thought it nothing less than profanation to
apply the words genius and glory to dramas which they considered as crude
as they were coarse."
Guizot was one of the first of his nation to approach Shakespeare in the
right spirit--that is, in the spirit in which he could hope for any
enlightenment; and in his admirable essay on "Shakespeare and His Times,"
he pointed out the exact way in which any piece or period of literature
should be studied, that is worth studying at all. He inquired into
English civilization, into the habits, manners, and modes of thought of
the people for whom Shakespeare wrote. This method, this inquiry into
popular sources, has been carried much further since Guizot wrote, and it
is now considered the most remunerative method, whether the object of
study is literature or politics. By it not only is the literature of a
period for the first time understood, but it is given its just place as
an exponent of human life and a monument of human action.
The student who takes up Shakespeare's plays for the purpose of either
amusement or cultivation, I would recommend to throw aside the whole load
of commentary, and speculation, and disquisition, and devote himself to
trying to find out first what was the London and the England of
Shakespeare's day, what were the usages of all classes of society, what
were the manners and the character of the people who crowded to hear his
plays, or who denounced them as the works of the devil and the allies of
sin. I say again to the student that by this means Shakespeare will
become a new thing to him, his mind will be enlarged to the purpose and
scope of the great dramatist, and more illumination will be cast upon the
plays than is received from the whole race of inquisitors into his
phrases and critics of his genius. In the light of contemporary life,
its visions of empire, its spirit of adventure, its piracy, exploration,
and warlike turmoil, its credulity and superstitious wonder at natural
phenomena, its implicit belief in the supernatural, its faith, its
virility of daring, coarseness of speech, bluntness of manner, luxury of
apparel, and ostentation of wealth, the mobility of its shifting society,
these dramas glow with a new meaning, and awaken a profounder admiration
of the poet's knowledge of human life.
The experiences of the poet began with the rude and rural life of
England, and when he passed into the presence of the court and into the
bustle of great London in an age of amazing agitation, he felt still in
his veins the throb of the popular blood. There were classic
affectations in England, there were masks and mummeries and classic
puerilities at court and in noble houses--Elizabeth's court would well
have liked to be classical, remarks Guizot--but Shakespeare was not
fettered by classic conventionalities, nor did he obey the unities,
nor attempt to separate on the stage the tragedy and comedy of life--
"immense and living stage," says the writer I like to quote because he is
French, upon which all things are represented, as it were, in their
solid form, and in the place which they occupied in a stormy and
complicated civilization. In these dramas the comic element is
introduced whenever its character of reality gives it the right of
admission and the advantage of opportune appearance. Falstaff appears in
the train of Henry V., and Doll Tear-Sheet in the train of Falstaff; the
people surround the kings, and the soldiers crowd around their generals;
all conditions of society, all the phases of human destiny appear by
turns in juxtaposition, with the nature which properly belongs to them,
and in the position which they naturally occupy. . . .
"Thus we find the entire world, the whole of human realities, reproduced
by Shakespeare in tragedy, which, in his eyes, was the universal theatre
of life and truth."
It is possible to make a brutal picture of the England of Shakespeare's
day by telling nothing that is not true, and by leaving out much that is
true. M. Taine, who has a theory to sustain, does it by a graphic
catalogue of details and traits that cannot be denied; only there is a
great deal in English society that he does not include, perhaps does not
apprehend. Nature, he thinks, was never so completely acted out. These
robust men give rein to all their passions, delight in the strength of
their limbs like Carmen, indulge in coarse language, undisguised
sensuality, enjoy gross jests, brutal buffooneries. Humanity is as much
lacking as decency. Blood, suffering, does not move them. The court
frequents bull and bear baitings; Elizabeth beats her maids, spits upon a
courtier's fringed coat, boxes Essex's ears; great ladies beat their
children and their servants. "The sixteenth century," he says, "is like
a den of lions. Amid passions so strong as these there is not one
lacking. Nature appears here in all its violence, but also in all its
fullness. If nothing has been softened, nothing has been mutilated.
It is the entire man who is displayed, heart, mind, body, senses, with
his noblest and finest aspirations, as with his most bestial and savage
appetites, without the preponderance of any dominant passion to cast him
altogether in one direction, to exalt or degrade him. He has not become
rigid as he will under Puritanism. He is not uncrowned as in the
Restoration." He has entered like a young man into all the lusty
experiences of life, every allurement is known, the sweetness and novelty
of things are strong with him. He plunges into all sensations. "Such
were the men of this time, Raleigh, Essex, Elizabeth, Henry VIII himself,
excessive and inconstant, ready for devotion and for crime, violent in
good and evil, heroic with strange weaknesses, humble with sudden changes
of mood, never vile with premeditation like the roisterers of the
Restoration, never rigid on principle like the Puritans of the
Revolution, capable of weeping like children, and of dying like men,
often base courtiers, more than once true knights, displaying constantly,
amidst all these contradictions of bearing, only the overflowing of
nature. Thus prepared, they could take in everything, sanguinary
ferocity and refined generosity, the brutality of shameless debauchery,
and the most divine innocence of love, accept all the characters, wantons
and virgins, princes and mountebanks, pass quickly from trivial
buffoonery to lyrical sublimities, listen alternately to the quibbles of
clowns and the songs of lovers. The drama even, in order to satisfy the
prolixity of their nature, must take all tongues, pompous, inflated
verse, loaded with imagery, and side by side with this vulgar prose; more
than this, it must distort its natural style and limits, put songs,
poetical devices in the discourse of courtiers and the speeches of
statesmen; bring on the stage the fairy world of opera, as Middleton
says, gnomes, nymphs of the land and sea, with their groves and meadows;
compel the gods to descend upon the stage, and hell itself to furnish its
world of marvels. No other theatre is so complicated, for nowhere else
do we find men so complete."
M. Taine heightens this picture in generalizations splashed with
innumerable blood-red details of English life and character. The English
is the most warlike race in Europe, most redoubtable in battle, most
impatient of slavery. "English savages" is what Cellini calls them; and
the great shins of beef with which they fill themselves nourish the force
and ferocity of their instincts. To harden them thoroughly, institutions
work in the same groove as nature. The nation is armed. Every man is a
soldier, bound to have arms according to his condition, to exercise
himself on Sundays and holidays. The State resembles an army;
punishments must inspire terror; the idea of war is ever present. Such
instincts, such a history, raises before them with tragic severity the
idea of life; death is at hand, wounds, blood, tortures. The fine purple
cloaks, the holiday garments, elsewhere signs of gayety of mind, are
stained with blood and bordered with black. Throughout a stern
discipline, the axe ready for every suspicion of treason; "great men,
bishops, a chancellor, princes, the king's relations, queens, a protector
kneeling in the straw, sprinkled the Tower with their blood; one after
the other they marched past, stretched out their necks; the Duke of
Buckingham, Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Catherine Howard, the Earl of
Surrey, Admiral Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, Lady Jane Grey and her
husband, the Duke of Northumberland, the Earl of Essex, all on the
throne, or on the steps of the throne, in the highest ranks of honor,
beauty, youth, genius; of the bright procession nothing is left but
senseless trunks, marred by the tender mercies of the executioner."
The gibbet stands by the highways, heads of traitors and criminals grin
on the city gates. Mournful legends multiply, church-yard ghosts,
walking spirits. In the evening, before bedtime, in the vast country
houses, in the poor cottages, people talk of the coach which is seen
drawn by headless horses, with headless postilions and coachmen.
All this, with unbounded luxury, unbridled debauchery, gloom, and revelry
hand in hand. "A threatening and sombre fog veils their mind like their
sky, and joy, like the sun, pierces through it and upon them strongly and
at intervals." All this riot of passion and frenzy of vigorous life,
this madness and sorrow, in which life is a phantom and destiny drives so
remorselessly, Taine finds on the stage and in the literature of the
period.
To do him justice, he finds something else, something that might give him
a hint of the innate soundness of English life in its thousands of sweet
homes, something of that great force of moral stability, in the midst of
all violence and excess of passion and performance, which makes a nation
noble. "Opposed to this band of tragic figures," which M. Taine arrays
from the dramas, "with their contorted features, brazen fronts, combative
attitudes, is a troop (he says) of timid figures, tender before
everything, the most graceful and love-worthy whom it has been given to
man to depict. In Shakespeare you will meet them in Miranda, Juliet,
Desdemona, Virginia, Ophelia, Cordelia, Imogen; but they abound also in
the others; and it is a characteristic of the race to have furnished
them, as it is of the drama to have represented them. By a singular
coincidence the women are more of women, the men more of men, here than
elsewhere. The two natures go to its extreme--in the one to boldness,
the spirit of enterprise and resistance, the warlike, imperious, and
unpolished character; in the other to sweetness, devotion, patience,
inextinguishable affection (hence the happiness and strength of the
marriage tie), a thing unknown in distant lands, and in France especially
a woman here gives herself without drawing back, and places her glory and
duty in obedience, forgiveness, adoration, wishing, and pretending only
to be melted and absorbed daily deeper and deeper in him whom she has
freely and forever chosen." This is an old German instinct. The soul in
this race is at once primitive and serious. Women are disposed to follow
the noble dream called duty. "Thus, supported by innocence and
conscience, they introduce into love a profound and upright sentiment,
abjure coquetry, vanity, and flirtation; they do not lie, they are not
affected. When they love they are not tasting a forbidden fruit, but are
binding themselves for their whole life. Thus understood, love becomes
almost a holy thing; the spectator no longer wishes to be malicious or to
jest; women do not think of their own happiness, but of that of the loved
ones; they aim not at pleasure, but at devotion."
Thus far M. Taine's brilliant antitheses--the most fascinating and most
dangerous model for a young writer. But we are indebted to him for a
most suggestive study of the period. His astonishment, the astonishment
of the Gallic mind, at what he finds, is a measure of the difference in
the literature of the two races as an expression of their life. It was
natural that he should somewhat exaggerate what he regards as the source
of this expression, leaving out of view, as he does, certain great forces
and currents which an outside observer cannot feel as the race itself
feels. We look, indeed, for the local color of this English literature
in the manners and habits of the times, traits of which Taine has so
skillfully made a mosaic from Harrison, Stubbes, Stowe, Holinshed, and
the pages of Reed and Drake; but we look for that which made it something
more than a mirror of contemporary manners, vices, and virtues, made it
representative of universal men, to other causes and forces-such as the
Reformation, the immense stir, energy, and ambition of the age (the
result of invention and discovery), newly awakened to the sense that
there was a world to be won and made tributary; that England, and, above
all places on the globe at that moment, London, was the centre of a
display of energy and adventure such as has been scarcely paralleled in
history. And underneath it all was the play of an uneasy, protesting
democracy, eager to express itself in adventure, by changing its
condition, in the joy of living and overcoming, and in literature, with
small regard for tradition or the unities.
When Shakespeare came up to London with his first poems in his pocket,
the town was so great and full of marvels, and luxury, and entertainment,
as to excite the astonishment of continental visitors. It swarmed with
soldiers, adventurers, sailors who were familiar with all seas and every
port, men with projects, men with marvelous tales. It teemed with
schemes of colonization, plans of amassing wealth by trade, by commerce,
by planting, mining, fishing, and by the quick eye and the strong hand.
Swaggering in the coffee-houses and rufling it in the streets were the
men who had sailed with Frobisher and Drake and Sir Humphrey Gilbert,
Hawkins, and Sir Richard Granville; had perhaps witnessed the heroic
death of Sir Philip Sidney, at Zutphen; had served with Raleigh in Anjou,
Picardy, Languedoc, in the Netherlands, in the Irish civil war; had taken
part in the dispersion of the Spanish Armada, and in the bombardment of
Cadiz; had filled their cups to the union of Scotland with England; had
suffered shipwreck on the Barbary Coast, or had, by the fortune of war,
felt the grip of the Spanish Inquisition; who could tell tales of the
marvels seen in new-found America and the Indies, and, perhaps, like
Captain John Smith, could mingle stories of the naive simplicity of the
natives beyond the Atlantic, with charming narratives of the wars in
Hungary, the beauties of the seraglio of the Grand Turk, and the barbaric
pomp of the Khan of Tartary. There were those in the streets who would
see Raleigh go to the block on the scaffold in Old Palace Yard, who would
fight against King Charles on the fields of Newbury or Naseby, Kineton or
Marston Moor, and perchance see the exit of Charles himself from another
scaffold erected over against the Banqueting House.
Although London at the accession of James I.(1603) had only about one
hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants--the population of England then
numbering about five million--it was so full of life and activity that
Frederick, Duke of Wurtemberg, who saw it a few years before, in 1592,
was impressed with it as a large, excellent, and mighty city of business,
crowded with people buying and selling merchandise, and trading in almost
every corner of the world, a very populous city, so that one can scarcely
pass along the streets on account of the throng; the inhabitants,
he says, are magnificently appareled, extremely proud and overbearing,
who scoff and laugh at foreigners, and no one dare oppose them lest the
street boys and apprentices collect together in immense crowds and strike
to right and left unmercifully without regard to persons.
There prevailed an insatiable curiosity for seeing strange sights and
hearing strange adventures, with an eager desire for visiting foreign
countries, which Shakespeare and all the play-writers satirize.
Conversation turned upon the wonderful discoveries of travelers, whose
voyages to the New World occupied much of the public attention. The
exaggeration which from love of importance inflated the narratives, the
poets also take note of. There was also a universal taste for hazard in
money as well as in travel, for putting it out on risks at exorbitant
interest, and the habit of gaming reached prodigious excess. The passion
for sudden wealth was fired by the success of the sea-rovers, news of
which inflamed the imagination. Samuel Kiechel, a merchant of Ulm, who
was in London in 1585, records that, "news arrived of a Spanish ship
captured by Drake, in which it was said there were two millions of
uncoined gold and silver in ingots, fifty thousand crowns in coined
reals, seven thousand hides, four chests of pearls, each containing two
bushels, and some sacks of cochineal--the whole valued at twenty-five
barrels of gold; it was said to be one year and a half's tribute from
Peru."
The passion for travel was at such a height that those who were unable to
accomplish distant journeys, but had only crossed over into France and
Italy, gave themselves great airs on their return. "Farewell, monsieur
traveler," says Shakespeare; "look, you lisp, and wear strange suits;
disable all the benefits of your own country; be out of love with your
nativity, and almost chide God for making you that countenance you are,
or I will scarce think you have swam in a gondola." The Londoners dearly
loved gossip, and indulged in exaggeration of speech and high-flown
compliment. One gallant says to another: "O, signior, the star that
governs my life is contentment; give me leave to interre myself in your
arms."--"Not so, sir, it is too unworthy an enclosure to contain such
preciousness!"
Dancing was the daily occupation rather than the amusement at court and
elsewhere, and the names of dances exceeded the list of the virtues--such
as the French brawl, the pavon, the measure, the canary, and many under
the general titles of corantees, jigs, galliards, and fancies. At the
dinner and ball given by James I. to Juan Fernandez de Velasco, Constable
of Castile, in 1604, fifty ladies of honor, very elegantly dressed and
extremely beautiful, danced with the noblemen and gentlemen. Prince
Henry danced a galliard with a lady, "with much sprightliness and
modesty, cutting several capers in the course of the dance"; the Earl of
Southampton led out the queen, and with three other couples danced a
brando, and so on, the Spanish visitors looking on. When Elizabeth was
old and had a wrinkled face and black teeth, she was one day discovered
practicing the dance step alone, to the sound of a fiddle, determined to
keep up to the last the limberness and agility necessary to impress
foreign ambassadors with her grace and youth. There was one custom,
however, that may have made dancing a labor of love: it was considered
ill manners for the gentleman not to kiss his partner. Indeed, in all
households and in all ranks of society the guest was expected to salute
thus all the ladies a custom which the grave Erasmus, who was in England
in the reign of Henry VIII., found not disagreeable.
Magnificence of display went hand in hand with a taste for cruel and
barbarous amusements. At this same dinner to the Constable of Castile,
the two buffets of the king and queen in the audience-chamber, where the
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