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The People For Whom Shakespeare Wrote.....................................................................................................1

Charles Dudley Warner ............................................................................................................................1

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 eightandtwenty 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

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

lustrethe 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 fiftyninth 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 highway, 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

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 thirtysixth 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 facesthe 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 StratfordonAvon 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

Somersetshirethree 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

Sheepfolds, 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 EweTree planted in the

Churchyard, from the West into the East; with the like force it thrust before it Highwayes, Sheepfolds,

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

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 Stageplayers; 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 heroesHamlet, 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, gravedigger, 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

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 everbroadening 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

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 158889, 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

barelegged, 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

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 firstfruits 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

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 lackeyswhen

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

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

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, churchales, and bridesales, with all their rioting, and he thinks they

could get on very well without the feasts of apostles, evangelists, martyrs, the holydays 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

There were four classes in Englandgentlemen, 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 armsthough

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, freetrade 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,

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 servingmen who become old beggars, highwayrobbers, 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

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 clayred, 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 princelike 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,

arraswork, 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 linenevidences of wealth for

which Harrison thanks God and reproaches no man, though he cannot see how it is brought about, when all

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 featherbeds, 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 waitingwomen did lie,

and laid them on the ground. He lent the cardinal his own basin and ewer, candlesticks from his own table,

drinkingglasses, small cushions, and pots for the kitchen. My Lord of Leicester sent down two pair of fine

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 usurya 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, sheepmasters, 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

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 paperworks, 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

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 servingmen 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

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 flowergardens 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 dishwater 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,

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

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 meatsmilk, butter, and cheesethough 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 musicalheaded 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 bystanders, 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 homemadea 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

There were multitudes of dependents fed at the great houses, and everywhere, according to means, a

wideopen 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 kingmaker, was made archbishop

of York. There were present, including servants, thirtyfive 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

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 fiftysix 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

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 tablesmerry

without malice, plain without Italian or French subtletyso 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 lordmayorand 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 cupshotten; 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

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 [twolegged 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 "swishswash" made in Essex from honeycombs and

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 tablea 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

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 sixtyfifth 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

battleaxes. In the antechapel, 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

"A gentleman entered the room bearing a rod, and along with him another who had a tablecloth, 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 tastingknife; 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, bareheaded, clothed in scarlet, with a golden rose upon their backs,

bringing in at each turn a course of twentyfour 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

kettledrums 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

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

blackbut 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

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

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 rubbingbrush; 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 weaselbeaked, 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

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 greenishyellow, a peaseporridgetawny, 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

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

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 ruffsone 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 needlework 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

gallyhose 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 nethersocks, 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 nethersocks. 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

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 countrybred 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 townbred

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 thema 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 underpropped 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, underpropped 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,

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 lookingglasses 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 womanhater, 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 standersby 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

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 centuryin 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, waterworn 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 stagewagons 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

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 guestsas 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 wellusing 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 CutPurse. 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 himone 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 goodday 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 theatresthe 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

lionbaiting 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 fortythree 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 dropcurtain, 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

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 coffeehouses, 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

The whole Bankside, with its taverns, playhouses, 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

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 timea 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

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 twentyfive 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

visiblepillories 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 cuckingstool, or

duckingstool. 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 disciplinebeing

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 crimesbreach 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 lowwater mark, and left till three tides overwashed them; those who let the seawalls decay

were staked out in the breach of the banks, and left there as parcel of the foundation of the new wall. Of

roguesthat is, tramps and petty thievesthe gallows devoured three to four hundred annually, in one place or

another; and Henry VIII. in his time did hang up as many as seventytwo thousand rogues. Any parish which

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 poorpoorhouses 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 twentythree 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,"

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

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 passersby.

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 threesquare 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

highstreets, especially in wintertime, were annoyed by hourly frays of sword and bucklermen; 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

About Shakespeare's time many new inventions and luxuries came in: masks, muffs, fans, periwigs,

shoeroses, lovehandkerchiefs (tokens given by maids and gentlewomen to their favorites), heathbrooms

for hairbrushes, scarfs, garters, waistcoats, flatcaps; also hops, turkeys, apricots, Venice glass, tobacco. In

"Turkeys, Carpes, Hops: Piccarel, and beers, Came into England: all in one year."

There were no coffeehouses 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 alehouses, and the shops of apothecaries, grocers, and chandlers were almost never, from morning

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 illused 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

"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 fairskinned; 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

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 fingerswould 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

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 kettledrum and trumpet thus bray out The triumph of

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 passersby. 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 oneoh, 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

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 himwhenever 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 illbreeding 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

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

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

"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

Guizot was one of the first of his nation to approach Shakespeare in the right spiritthat 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

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

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 housesElizabeth's court would well have liked to

be classical, remarks Guizotbut 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 TearSheet 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

Thus we find the entire world, the whole of human realities, reproduced by Shakespeare in tragedy, which, in

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 bloodred 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,

The gibbet stands by the highways, heads of traitors and criminals grin on the city gates. Mournful legends

multiply, churchyard 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

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

loveworthy 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

extremein 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;

Thus far M. Taine's brilliant antithesesthe 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 forcessuch 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 coffeehouses 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 newfound 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

Although London at the accession of James I.(1603) had only about one hundred and fifty thousand

inhabitantsthe population of England then numbering about five millionit 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

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 playwriters 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 searovers, 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

cochinealthe whole valued at twentyfive barrels of gold; it was said to be one year and a half's tribute

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 highflown 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

Dancing was the daily occupation rather than the amusement at court and elsewhere, and the names of dances

exceeded the list of the virtuessuch 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

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 audiencechamber, where the

banquet was held, were loaded with plate of exquisite workmanship, rich vessels of gold, agate, and other

precious stones. The constable drank to the king the health of the queen from the lid of a cup of agate of

extraordinary beauty and richness, set with diamonds and rubies, praying his majesty would condescend to

drink the toast from the cup, which he did accordingly, and then the constable directed that the cup should

remain in his majesty's buffet. The constable also drank to the queen the health of the king from a very

beautiful dragonshaped cup of crystal garnished with gold, drinking from the cover, and the queen, standing

up, gave the pledge from the cup itself, and then the constable ordered that the cup should remain in the

The banquet lasted three hours, when the cloth was removed, the table was placed upon the groundthat is,

removed from the daisand their majesties, standing upon it, washed their hands in basins, as did the others.

After the dinner was the ball, and that ended, they took their places at the windows of a roam that looked out

upon a square, where a platform was raised and a vast crowd was assembled to see the king's bears fight with

greyhounds. This afforded great amusement. Presently a bull, tied to the end of a rope, was fiercely baited by

dogs. After this tumblers danced upon a rope and performed feats of agility on horseback. The constable and

his attendants were lighted home by half an hundred halberdiers with torches, and, after the fatigues of the

day, supped in private. We are not surprised to read that on Monday, the 30th, the constable awoke with a

Like Elizabeth, all her subjects were fond of the savage pastime of bear and bull baiting. It cannot be denied

that this people had a taste for blood, took delight in brutal encounters, and drew the sword and swung the

cudgel with great promptitude; nor were they fastidious in the matter of public executions. Kiechel says that

when the criminal was driven in the cart under the gallows, and left hanging by the neck as the cart moved

from under him, his friends and acquaintances pulled at his legs in order that he might be strangled the

When Shakespeare was managing his theatres and writing his plays London was full of foreigners, settled in

the city, who no doubt formed part of his audience, for they thought that English players had attained great

perfection. In 1621 there were as many as ten thousand strangers in London, engaged in one hundred and

twentyone different trades. The poet need not go far from Blackfriars to pick up scraps of German and folk

lore, for the Hanse merchants were located in great numbers in the neighborhood of the steelyard in Lower

Foreigners as well as contemporary chronicles and the printed diatribes against luxury bear witness to the

profusion in all ranks of society and the variety and richness in apparel. There was a rage for the display of

fine clothes. Elizabeth left hanging in her wardrobe above three thousand dresses when she was called to take

that unseemly voyage down the stream, on which the clown's brogan jostles the queen's slipper. The plays of

Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and of all the dramatists, are a perfect commentary on the

fashions of the day, but a knowledge of the fashions is necessary to a perfect enjoyment of the plays. We see

the fine lady in a gown of velvet (the foreigners thought it odd that velvet should be worn in the street), or

cloth of gold and silver tissue, her hair eccentrically dressed, and perhaps dyed, a great hat with waving

feathers, sometimes a painted face, maybe a mask or a muffler hiding all the features except the eyes, with a

muff, silk stockings, highheeled shoes, imitated from the "chopine" of Venice, perfumed bracelets,

necklaces, and gloves"gloves sweet as damask roses"a pockethandkerchief wrought in gold and silver,

a small lookingglass pendant at the girdle, and a lovelock hanging wantonly over the shoulder, artificial

flowers at the corsage, and a mincing step. "These fashionable women, when they are disappointed, dissolve

into tears, weep with one eye, laugh with the other, or, like children, laugh and cry they can both together,

and as much pity is to be taken of a woman weeping as of a goose going barefoot," says old Burton.

The men had even greater fondness for finery. Paul Hentzner, the Brandenburg jurist, in 1598, saw, at the

Fair at St. Bartholomew, the lord mayor, attended by twelve gorgeous aldermen, walk in a neighboring field,

dressed in a scarlet gown, and about his neck a golden chain, to which hung a Golden Fleece. Men wore the

hair long and flowing, with high hats and plumes of feathers, and carried muffs like the women; gallants

sported gloves on their hats as tokens of ladies' favors, jewels and roses in the ears, a long lovelock under

the left ear, and gems in a ribbon round the neck. This tall hat was called a "capatain." Vincentio, in the

"Taming of the Shrew," exclaims: "O fine villain! A silken doublet! A velvet hose! A scarlet cloak! And a

capatain hat! "There was no limit to the caprice and extravagance. Hose and breeches of silk, velvet, or other

rich stuff, and fringed garters wrought of gold or silver, worth five pounds apiece, are some of the items

noted. Burton says, "'Tis ordinary for a gallant to put a thousand oaks and an hundred oxen into a suit of

apparel, to wear a whole manor on his back." Even servingmen and tailors wore jewels in their shoes.

We should note also the magnificence in the furnishing of houses, the arras, tapestries, cloth of gold and

silver, silk hangings of many colors, the splendid plate on the tables and sideboards. Even in the houses of the

middle classes the furniture was rich and comfortable, and there was an air of amenity in the chambers and

parlors strewn with sweet herbs and daily decked with pretty nosegays and fragrant flowers. Lights were

placed on antique candelabra, or, wanting these at suppers, there were living candleholders. "Give me a

torch," says Romeo; "I'll be a candleholder, and look on." Knowledge of the details of luxury of an English

home of the sixteenth century will make exceedingly vivid hosts of allusions in Shakespeare.

Servants were numerous in great households, a large retinue being a mark of gentility, and hospitality was

unbounded. During the lord mayor's term in London he kept open house, and every day any stranger or

foreigner could dine at his table, if he could find an empty seat. Dinner, served at eleven in the early years of

James, attained a degree of epicureanism rivaling dinners of the present day, although the guests ate with

their fingers or their knives, forks not coming in till 1611. There was mighty eating and swigging at the

banquets, and carousing was carried to an extravagant height, if we may judge by the account of an orgy at

the king's palace in 1606, for the delectation of the King and Queen of Denmark, when the company and even

their majesties abandoned discretion and sobriety, and "the ladies are seen to roll about in intoxication."

The manners of the male population of the period, says Nathan Drake, seem to have been compounded from

the characters of the two sovereigns. Like Elizabeth, they are brave, magnanimous, and prudent; and

sometimes, like James, they are credulous, curious, and dissipated. The credulity and superstition of the age,

and its belief in the supernatural, and the sumptuousness of masques and pageants at the court and in the city,

of which we read so much in the old chronicles, are abundantly reflected in the pages of Jonson, Shakespeare,

The town was full of publichouses and pleasuregardens, but, curiously enough, the favorite place of public

parading was the middle aisle of St. Paul's Cathedral"Paul's Walk," as it was calledwhich was daily

frequented by nobles, gentry, perfumed gallants, and ladies, from ten to twelve and three to six o'clock, to

talk on business, politics, or pleasure. Hither came, to acquire the fashions, make assignations, arrange for the

night's gaming, or shun the bailiff, the gallant, the gamester, the ladies whose dresses were better than their

manners, the stale knight, the captain out of service. Here Falstaff purchased Bardolph. "I bought him," say's

the knight, "at Paul's." The tailors went there to get the fashions of dress, as the gallants did to display them,

one suit before dinner and another after. What a study was this varied, mixed, flaunting life, this dance of

pleasure and license before the very altar of the church, for the writers of satire, comedy, and tragedy!

But it is not alone town life and court life and the society of the fine folk that is reflected in the English drama

and literature of the seventeenth century, and here is another wide difference between it and the French

literature of the same period; rural England and the popular life of the country had quite as much to do in

giving tone and color to the writings of the time. It is necessary to know rural England to enter into the spirit

of this literature, and to appreciate how thoroughly it took hold of life in every phase. Shakespeare knew it

well. He drew from life the country gentleman, the squire, the parson, the pedantic schoolmaster who was

regarded as half conjurer, the yeoman or farmer, the dairy maids, the sweet English girls, the country louts,

shepherds, boors, and fools. How he loved a fool! He had talked with all these persons, and knew their

speeches and humors. He had taken part in the country festivalsMay Day, Plow Monday, the Sheep

Shearing, the Morris Dances and Maud Marian, the Harvest Home and Twelfth Night. The rustic

merrymakings, the feasts in great halls, the games on the greensward, the love of wonders and of marvelous

tales, the regard for portents, the naive superstitions of the time pass before us in his pages. Drake, in his

"Shakespeare and his Times," gives a graphic and indeed charming picture of the rural life of this century,

In his spacious hall, floored with stones and lighted by large transom windows, hung with coats of mail and

helmets, and all military accoutrements, long a prey to rust, the country squire, seated at a raised table at one

end, held a baronial state and dispensed prodigal hospitality. The long table was divided into upper and lower

messes by a huge saltcellar; and the consequence of the guests was marked by their seats above or below the

salt. The distinction extended to the fare, for wine frequently circulated only above the salt, and below it the

food was of coarser quality. The literature of the time is full of allusions to this distinction. But the luxury of

the table and good cooking were well understood in the time of Elizabeth and James. There was massive

eating done in those days, when the guests dined at eleven, rose from the banquet to go to evening prayers,

and returned to a supper at five or six, which was often as substantial as the dinner. Gervase Markham in his

"English Housewife," after treating of the ordering of great feasts, gives directions for "a more humble feast

of an ordinary proportion." This "humble feast," he says, should consist for the first course of "sixteen full

dishes, that is, dishes of meat that are of substance, and not empty, or for shewas thus, for example: first, a

shield of brawn with mustard; secondly, a boyl'd capon; thirdly, a boyl'd piece of beef; fourthly, a chine of

beef rosted; fifthly, a neat's tongue rosted; sixthly, a pig rosted; seventhly, chewets bak'd; eighthly, a goose

rosted; ninthly, a swan rosted; tenthly, a turkey rosted; the eleventh, a haunch of venison rosted; the twelfth, a

pasty of venison; the thirteenth, a kid with a pudding in the belly; the fourteenth, an olive pye; the fifteenth,

a couple of capons; the sixteenth, a custard or dowsets. Now to these full dishes may be added sallets,

fricases, 'quelque choses,' and devised paste; as many dishes more as will make no less than two and thirty

dishes, which is as much as can conveniently stand on one table, and in one mess; and after this manner you

may proportion both your second and third course, holding fullness on one half the dishes, and shew in the

other, which will be both frugal in the splendor, contentment to the guest, and much pleasure and delight to

the beholders." After this frugal repast it needed an interval of prayers before supper.

The country squire was a longlived but not always an intellectual animal. He kept hawks of all kinds, and all

sorts of hounds that ran buck, fox, hare, otter, and badger. His great hall was commonly strewn with

marrowbones, and full of hawks' perches, of hounds, spaniels, and terriers. His oystertable stood at one

end of the room, and oysters he ate at dinner and supper. At the upper end of the room stood a small table

with a double desk, one side of which held a church Bible, the other Fox's "Book of Martyrs." He drank a

glass or two of wine at his meals, put syrup of gillyflower in his sack, and always had a tunglass of small

beer standing by him, which he often stirred about with rosemary. After dinner, with a glass of ale by his side

he improved his mind by listening to the reading of a choice passage out of the "Book of Martyrs."

This is a portrait of one Henry Hastings, of Dorsetshire, in Gilpin's "Forest Scenery." He lived to be a

hundred, and never lost his sight nor used spectacles. He got on horseback without help, and rode to the death

The plain country fellow, plowman, or clown, is several pegs lower, and described by Bishop Earle as one

that manures his ground well, but lets himself lie fallow and untitled. His hand guides the plow, and the plow

his thoughts. His mind is not much disturbed by objects, but he can fix a halfhour's contemplation on a good

fat cow. His habitation is under a poor thatched roof, distinguished from his barn only by loopholes that let

out the smoke. Dinner is serious work, for he sweats at it as much as at his labor, and he is a terrible fastener

on a piece of beef. His religion is a part of his copyhold, which he takes from his landlord and refers it wholly

to his discretion, but he is a good Christian in his way, that is, he comes to church in his best clothes, where

The country clergymen, at least those of the lower orders, or readers, were distinguished in Shakespeare's

time by the appellation "Sir," as Sir Hugh, in the "Merry Wives," Sir Topas, in "Twelfth Night," Sir Oliver, in

"As You Like It." The distinction is marked between priesthood and knighthood when Vista says, "I am one

that would rather go with Sir Priest than Sir Knight." The clergy were not models of conduct in the days of

Elizabeth, but their position excites little wonder when we read that they were often paid less than the cook

There was great fondness in cottage and hall for merry tales of errant knights, lovers, lords, ladies, dwarfs,

friars, thieves, witches, goblins, for old stories told by the fireside, with a toast of ale on the hearth, as in

To "turne a crab" is to roast a wild apple in the fire in order to throw it hissing hot into a bowl of nutbrown

ale, into which had been put a toast with some spice and sugar. Puck describes one of his wanton pranks:

"And sometimes I lurk in a gossip's bowl, In very likeness of a roasted crab, And when she drinks against her

"I love no rost, but a nutbrowne torte, And a crab layde in the fyre; A lytle bread shall do me stead, Much

In the bibulous days of Shakespeare, the peg tankard, a species of wassail or wishhealth bowl, was still in

use. Introduced to restrain intemperance, it became a cause of it, as every drinker was obliged to drink down

to the peg. We get our expression of taking a man "a peg lower," or taking him "down a peg," from this

In these details I am not attempting any complete picture of the rural life at this time, but rather indicating by

illustrations the sort of study which illuminates its literature. We find, indeed, if we go below the surface of

manners, sober, discreet, and sweet domestic life, and an appreciation of the virtues. Of the English

housewife, says Gervase Markham, was not only expected sanctity and holiness of life, but "great modesty

and temperance, as well outwardly as inwardly. She must be of chaste thoughts, stout courage, patient,

untired, watchful, diligent, witty, pleasant, constant in friendship, full of good neighborhood, wise in

discourse, but not frequent therein, sharp and quick of speech, but not bitter or talkative, secret in her affairs,

comportable in her counsels, and generally skillful in the worthy knowledges which do belong to her

vocation." This was the mistress of the hospitable house of the country knight, whose chief traits were loyalty

to church and state, a love of festivity, and an ardent attachment to field sports. His well educated daughter

He had, as antique stories tell, A daughter cleaped Dawsabel, A maiden fair and free; And for she was her

"The silk well couth she twist and twine, And make the fine marchpine, And with the needle work: And she

couth help the priest to say His matins on a holy day, And sing a psalm in Kirk.

"She wore a frock of frolic green Might well become a maiden queen, Which seemly was to see; A hood to

"Her features all as fresh above As is the grass that grows by Dove, And lythe as lass of Kent. Her skin as

soft as Lemster wool, As white as snow on Peakish Hull, Or swan that swims in Trent.

"This maiden in a morn betime Went forth when May was in the prime To get sweet setywall, The

honeysuckle, the harlock, The lily, and the ladysmock, To deck her summer hall."

How late such a simple and pretty picture could have been drawn to life is uncertain, but by the middle of the

seventeenth century the luxury of the town had penetrated the country, even into Scotland. The dress of a rich

farmer's wife is thus described by Dunbar. She had "a robe of fine scarlet, with a white hood, a gay purse and

gingling keys pendant at her side from a silken belt of silver tissue; on each finger she wore two rings, and

round her waist was bound a sash of grassgreen silk, richly embroidered with silver."

Shakespeare was the mirror of his time in things small as well as great. How far he drew his characters from

personal acquaintances has often been discussed. The clowns, tinkers, shepherds, tapsters, and such folk, he

probably knew by name. In the Duke of Manchester's "Court and Society from Elizabeth to Anne" is a

curious suggestion about Hamlet. Reading some letters from Robert, Earl of Essex, to Lady Rich, his sister,

the handsome, fascinating, and disreputable Penelope Devereaux, he notes, in their humorous melancholy and

discontent with mankind, something in tone and even language which suggests the weak and fantastic side of

Hamlet's mind, and asks if the poet may not have conceived his character of Hamlet from Essex, and of

Horatio from Southampton, his friend and patron. And he goes on to note some singular coincidences. Essex

was supposed by many to have a good title to the throne. In person he had his father's beauty and was all that

Shakespeare has described the Prince of Denmark. His mother had been tempted from her duty while her

noble and generous husband was alive, and this husband was supposed to have been poisoned by her and her

paramour. After the father's murder the seducer had married the guilty mother. The father had not perished

without expressing suspicion of foul play against himself, yet sending his forgiveness to his faithless wife.

There are many other agreements in the facts of the case and the incidents of the play. The relation of

Claudius to Hamlet is the same as that of Leicester to Essex: under pretense of fatherly friendship he was

suspicious of his motives, jealous of his actions; kept him much in the country and at college; let him see

little of his mother, and clouded his prospects in the world by an appearance of benignant favor. Gertrude's

relations with her son Hamlet were much like those of Lettice with Robert Devereaux. Again, it is suggested,

in his moodiness, in his college learning, in his love for the theatre and the players, in his desire for the fiery

action for which his nature was most unfit, there are many kinds of hints calling up an image of the Danish

This suggestion is interesting in the view that we find in the characters of the Elizabethan drama not types

and qualities, but individuals strongly projected, with all their idiosyncrasies and contradictions. These

dramas touch our sympathies at all points, and are representative of human life today, because they reflected

the human life of their time. This is supremely true of Shakespeare, and almost equally true of Jonson and

many of the other stars of that marvelous epoch. In England as well as in France, as we have said, it was the

period of the classic revival; but in England the energetic reality of the time was strong enough to break the

classic fetters, and to use classic learning for modern purposes. The English dramatists, like the French, used

classic histories and characters. But two things are to be noted in their use of them. First, that the characters

and the play of mind and passion in them are thoroughly English and of the modern time. And second, and

this seems at first a paradox, they are truer to the classic spirit than the characters in the contemporary French

drama. This results from the fact that they are truer to the substance of things, to universal human nature,

while the French seem to be in great part an imitation, having root neither in the soil of France nor Attica. M.

Guizot confesses that France, in order to adopt the ancient models, was compelled to limit its field in some

sort to one corner of human existence. He goes on to say that the present "demands of the drama pleasures

and emotions that can no longer be supplied by the inanimate representation of a world that has ceased to

exist. The classic system had its origin in the life of the time; that time has passed away; its image subsists in

brilliant colors in its works, but can no more be reproduced." Our own literary monuments must rest on other

ground. "This ground is not the ground of Corneille or Racine, nor is it that of Shakespeare; it is our own; but

Shakespeare's system, as it appears to me, may furnish the plans according to which genius ought now to

work. This system alone includes all those social conditions and those general and diverse feelings, the

simultaneous conjuncture and activity of which constitute for us at the present day the spectacle of human

That is certainly all that any one can claim for Shakespeare and his fellowdramatists. They cannot be

models in form any more than Sophocles and Euripides; but they are to be followed in making the drama, or

any literature, expressive of its own time, while it is faithful to the emotions and feeling of universal human

nature. And herein, it seems to me, lies the broad distinction between most of the English and French

literature of the latter part of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. Perhaps I may be

indulged in another observation on this topic, touching a later time. Notwithstanding the prevalent notion that

the French poets are the sympathetic heirs of classic culture, it appears to me that they are not so imbued with

the true classic spirit, art, and mythology as some of our English poets, notably Keats and Shelley.

Ben Jonson was a man of extensive and exact classical erudition; he was a solid scholar in the Greek and

Roman literatures, in the works of the philosophers, poets, and historians. He was also a man of uncommon

attainments in all the literary knowledge of his time. In some of his tragedies his classic learning was thought

to be ostentatiously displayed, but this was not true of his comedy, and on the whole he was too strong to be

swamped in pseudoclassicism. For his experience of men and of life was deep and varied. Before he became

a public actor and dramatist, and served the court and fashionable society with his entertaining, if pedantic,

masques, he had been student, tradesman, and soldier; he had traveled in Flanders and seen Paris, and

wandered on foot through the length of England. London he knew as well as a man knows his own house and

club, the comforts of its taverns, the revels of lords and ladies, the sports of Bartholomew Fair, and the

humors of suburban villages; all the phases, language, crafts, professions of high and low city life were

familiar to him. And in his comedies, as Mr. A. W. Ward pertinently says, his marvelously vivid reproduction

of manners is unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries. "The age lives in his men and women, his country

gulls and town gulls, his imposters and skeldering captains, his court ladies and wouldbe court ladies, his

puling poetasters and whining Puritans, and, above all, in the whole ragamuffin rout of his Bartholomew Fair.

Its pastimes, fashionable and unfashionable, its games and vapors and jeering, its highpolite courtships and

its pulpitshows, its degrading superstitions and confounding hallucinations, its clubs of naughty ladies and

its offices of lying news, its taverns and its tobacco shops, its giddy heights and its meanest depthsall are

No, he was not swamped by classicism, but he was affected by it, and just here, and in that

selfconsciousness which Shakespeare was free from, and which may have been more or less the result of his

classic erudition, he fails of being one of the universal poets of mankind. The genius of Shakespeare lay in his

power to so use the real and individual facts of life as to raise in the minds of his readers a broader and nobler

conception of human life than they had conceived before. This is creative genius; this is the idealist dealing

faithfully with realistic material; this is, as we should say in our day, the work of the artist as distinguished

from the work of the photographer. It may be an admirable but it is not the highest work of the sculptor, the

painter, or the writer, that does not reveal to the mindthat comes into relation with it something before out

of his experience and beyond the facts either brought before him or with which he is acquainted.

What influence Shakespeare had upon the culture and taste of his own time and upon his immediate audience

would be a most interesting inquiry. We know what his audiences were. He wrote for the people, and the

theatre in his day was a popular amusement for the multitude, probably more than it was a recreation for

those who enjoyed the culture of letters. A taste for letters was prevalent among the upper class, and indeed

was fashionable among both ladies and gentlemen of rank. In this the court of Elizabeth set the fashion. The

daughter of the duchess was taught not only to distill strong waters, but to construe Greek. When the queen

was translating Socrates or Seneca, the maids of honor found it convenient to affect at least a taste for the

classics. For the nobleman and the courtier an intimacy with Greek, Latin, and Italian was essential to "good

form." But the taste for erudition was mainly confined to the metropolis or the families who frequented it, and

to persons of rank, and did not pervade the country or the middle classes. A few of the country gentry had

some pretension to learning, but the majority cared little except for hawks and hounds, gaming and drinking;

and if they read it was some old chronicle, or story of knightly adventure, "Amadis de Gaul," or a stray

playbook, or something like the "History of Long Meg of Westminster," or perhaps a sheet of news. To read

and write were still rare accomplishments in the country, and Dogberry expressed a common notion when he

said reading and writing come by nature. Sheets of news had become common in the town in James's time,

the first newspaper being the English Mercury, which appeared in April, 1588, and furnished food for

Jonson's satire in his " Staple of News." His accusation has a familiar sound when he says that people had a

"hunger and thirst after published pamphlets of news, set out every Saturday, but made all at home, and no

Though Elizabeth and James were warm patrons of the theatre, the court had no such influence over the plays

and players as had the court in Paris at the same period. The theatres were built for the people, and the

audiences included all classes. There was a distinction between what were called public and private theatres,

but the public frequented both. The Shakespeare theatres, at which his plays were exclusively performed,

were the Globe, called public, on the Bankside, and the Blackfriars, called private, on the City side, the one

for summer, the other for winter performances. The Blackfriars was smaller than the Globe, was roofed over,

and needed to be lighted with candles, and was frequented more by the better class than the more popular

Globe. There is no evidence that Elizabeth ever attended the public theatres, but the companies were often

summoned to play before her in Whitehall, where the appointments and scenery were much better than in the

The price of general admission to the Globe and Blackfriars was sixpence, at the Fashion Theatre twopence,

and at some of the inferior theatres one penny. The boxes at the Globe were a shilling, at the Blackfriars one

andsix. The usual net receipts of a performance were from nine to ten pounds, and this was about the sum

that Elizabeth paid to companies for a performance at Whitehall, which was always in the evening and did

not interfere with regular hours. The theatres opened as early as one o'clock and not later than three in the

afternoon. The crowds that filled the pit and galleries early, to secure places, amused themselves variously

before the performance began: they drank ale, smoked, fought for apples, cracked nuts, chaffed the boxes,

and a few read the cheap publications of the day that were hawked in the theatre. It was a rough and unsavory

audience in pit and gallery, but it was a responsive one, and it enjoyed the acting with little help to illusion in

the way of scenery. In fact, scenery did not exist, as we understand it. A board inscribed with the name of the

country or city indicated the scene of action. Occasionally movable painted scenes were introduced. The

interior roof of the stage was painted skyblue, or hung with drapery of that tint, to represent the heavens.

But when the idea of a dark, starless night was to be imposed, or tragedy was to be acted, these heavens were

hung with black stuffs, a custom illustrated in many allusions in Shakespeare, like that in the line,

To hang the stage with black was to prepare it for tragedy. The costumes of the players were sometimes less

niggardly than the furnishing of the stage, for it was an age of rich and picturesque apparel, and it was not

difficult to procure the castoff clothes of fine gentlemen for stage use. But there was no lavishing of

expense. I am recalling these details to show that the amusement was popular and cheap. The ordinary actors,

including the boys and men who took women's parts (for women did not appear on the stage till after the

Restoration) received only about five or six shillings a week (for Sundays and all), and the firstclass actor,

who had a share in the net receipts, would not make more than ninety pounds a year. The ordinary price paid

for a new play was less than seven pounds; Oldys, on what authority is not known, says that Shakespeare

The influence of the theatre upon politics, contemporary questions that interested the public, and morals, was

early recognized in the restraints put upon representations by the censorship, and in the floods of attacks upon

its licentious and demoralizing character. The plays of Shakespeare did not escape the most bitter

animadversions of the moral reformers. We have seen how Shakespeare mirrored his age, but we have less

means of ascertaining what effect he produced upon the life of his time. Until after his death his influence

was mainly direct, upon the playgoers, and confined to his auditors. He had been dead seven years before

his plays were collected. However the people of his day regarded him, it is safe to say that they could not

have had any conception of the importance of the work he was doing. They were doubtless satisfied with

him. It was a great age for romances and storytelling, and he told stories, old in new dresses, but he was also

It is not to his own age, but to those following, and especially to our own time, that we are to look for the

shaping and enormous influence upon human life of the genius of this poet. And it is measured not by the

libraries of comments that his works have called forth, but by the prevalence of the language and thought of

his poetry in all subsequent literature, and by its entrance into the current of common thought and speech. It

may be safely said that the Englishspeaking world and almost every individual of it are different from what

they would have been if Shakespeare had never lived. Of all the forces that have survived out of his creative