NOTES.
Note1. (Page 12.)
Mr. Fleay seems satisfied that 1601 was the year of the production of Shakespeare's first "Hamlet." But he believes it was "hurriedly prepared during the journey to Scotland," where the players had arrived by October, when they were at Aberdeen. "In their travels this year they visited the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where they performed 'Julius Cæsar' and 'Hamlet.'" That "Hamlet" was the second of these two plays produced, seems evident from the allusion of "Corambis" ("Polonius") to his having played "Julius Cæsar" at the University. But this speech might have been added to the first version after its original production, and before the publication in 1603 of the garbled first quarto; for two plays whose London productions are assigned by Fleay to 1601 ("Satiromastix" and "The Malcontent") contain allusions to "Hamlet." If the lord chamberlain's company did not act again in London in 1601 after its departure on its travels, how account for these allusions, unless "Hamlet" had been acted in London before the company's departure? Dr. Furnivall would forestall this question by saying that "the 'Hamlet'allusions in and before 1602 are to an old play." But it seems as fair to conjecture a slightly earlier production of the new play, in accounting for these allusions, as a general revival of interest in an old play; and the fact that the allusions are not true to speeches actually occurring in Shakespeare's first "Hamlet" will not weigh with those who consider the methods of satire and burlesque. The lines in the play that seemingly attribute the company's travelling to the popularity of the "little eyases" (the Chapel Royal children acting at the Blackfriars Theatre) are rather such as would have been designed for a London audience on the eve of the company's departure, as a pretext for an exile due to royal disfavor, than for University audiences, to whom the players would less willingly confess a waning of London popularity; or than for a London audience after the company's return, when the allusion, though still of interest, would be the less likely to serve a purpose. The conclusion here driven at is, that Sir Henry Marryott's narrative is not to be impugned because he places the first "Hamlet" performance before the company's departure from London, while the investigators place it after. Heaven forfend that, even on a single unimportant question, the present writer should rush in where angels fear to tread, to the arena of Shakespearean controversy, to whose confusion even such a master as Mr. Saintsbury refrains from adding!
Note2. (Page 14.)
The occasion for the lord chamberlain's players to travel was one of the numerous minor episodes of theEssex conspiracy. That plot to seize Whitehall, and dictate a change of government to the queen, was hatched at Drury House by the Earl of Essex and his friends, in January. Early in February Essex was ordered to appear before the council, and he received an anonymous letter of warning. It was decided that the rising should occur Sunday, February 8th. On Thursday, February 5th, Essex's friends went to the Globe Theatre to see Shakespeare's "Richard II." performed,—a play affording them a kind of example for their intended action. (In the trials in March, Meyrick was indicted for "having procured the out-dated tragedy of 'Richard II.' to be publicly acted at his own charge, for the entertainment of the conspirators.") Of the shareholding members of the company of players, the one who had arranged this performance was Augustine Phillips. The rising in London, when it occurred, was abortive, and Essex was taken to the Tower, those of his adherents who surrendered, or were caught, being distributed among different London prisons. On February 18th, the confessions of several of Essex's friends were taken. The next day, Essex and Southampton, Shakespeare's friend, were brought before a commission of twenty-five peers and nine judges, in Westminster Hall. Things were done expeditiously in that reign: at 7 P.M., the same day, sentence of death was pronounced upon Essex, and he was taken back to the Tower. Six days later, February 25th, he was beheaded. Southampton was kept a long time in prison. Four of Essex's associates were executed. One of several remarkable features of this littleaffair was that the band of conspirators included Catholics and Puritans, as well as men of the established church. To return to the players: Mr. Fleay says it is "clear that the subjects chosen for historical plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare were unpopular at court, but approved of by the Essex faction, and that at last the company incurred the serious displeasure of the queen. So they did not perform at court at Christmas, 1601." In the previous Christmas season, they had given three performances at court. In Elizabeth's reign, this company acted at court twenty-eight plays, twenty of which were by Shakespeare, eight by other men. This shows that the age which could produce a Shakespeare could appreciate him,—as somebody has said, or ought to have said.
Note3. (Page 18.)
"Boys were regularly apprenticed to the profession in those days," says the anonymous author of "Lights of the Old English Stage." "Each principal was entitled to have a boy or apprentice, who played the young and the female characters, and for whose services he received a certain sum." This certain sum was, of course, paid out, like the rent and other common expenses of the theatre, before money taken in was divided among the different shareholders. All the principals were shareholders. The Globe Theatre was owned by the Burbages. Hence Richard Burbage would first receive rent, as owner of the playhouse, and would later receive his part of the profits as a shareholder. As to theseapprentices, one finds mention of "coadjutors," "servitors," and "hired men," not to speak of "tire-boys," "stage-boys," etc. Those boys that played female parts must have played them effectively, notwithstanding the unwillingness of Shakespeare's Egyptian queen to see, on the Roman stage, "some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness." Else would Shakespeare have dared to write, for acting, such parts as Juliet and Beatrice, and, above all, such as Rosalind and Viola, in which a boy, dressed as a boy, should yet have to seem a girl disguised? The anonymous writer already quoted says of these boys: "Thus trained under great masters, it is not to be wondered at that they grew up to be such consummate masters of their art." It is well known that women did not appear on the stage in England before 1662, forty-six years after Shakespeare's death.
Note4. (Page 19.)
If anybody supposes that Burbage would not be thought a great or a finished actor, were he now alive and acting just as he did in his own day, let that person read the various poems written at his death and descriptive of the effect produced by him on his audiences. His Romeo "begot tears." His Brutus and Marcius "charmed the faculty of ears and eyes." "Every thought and mood might thoroughly from" his "face be understood." "And his whole action he could change with ease, from ancient Lear to youthful Pericles." In the part of the "grieved Moor," "beyond the rest he moved the heart." "His pace" suited with "his speech," and "his every action"was "grace." His tongue was "enchanting" and "wondrous." Bishop Corbet tells in verse how his host at Leicester, in describing the battle of Bosworth field, used the name of Burbage when he meant King Richard. Or let the skeptic read what Flecknoe says: "He was a delightful Proteus, so wholly transforming himself into his part, and putting off himself with his clothes, as he never (not so much as in the tyring-house) assumed himself again until the play was done.... His auditors" were "never more delighted than when he spoke, nor more sorry than when he held his peace; yet even then he was an excellent actor still, never failing in his part when he had done speaking; but with his looks and gesture, maintaining it still unto the height." His death, in 1618, so over-shadowed that of the queen of James I., as a public calamity, that after weeping for him, the people had no grief left for her Majesty.
Note5. (Page 20.)
As to false beards worn on the stage at that time, recall Nick Bottom's readiness to discharge the part of "Pyramus" in "either your straw-color beard, your orange-tawny beard, your purple-in-grain beard, or your French crown-color beard, your perfect yellow;" and, later, his injunction to his fellow actors to get good strings to their beards; regarding which injunction. George Steevens says: "As no false beard could be worn without a ligature to fasten it on, Bottom's caution must mean more than the mere security of his comrades' beards. The good strings he recommends were probably ornamental.This may merely show how little a former-day Shakespearean commentator might know of the acting stage. A bad "ligature" might give way and make the actor ridiculous by the sudden shedding of his beard. Such an accident was one against which Bottom, being of an active jaw, might be particularly precautious. In a full beard, ascending at the sides of the face to meet the hair of the head, the ligature could be completely concealed. But often glue was used, to fasten on false beards. "Some tinker's trull, with a beard glued on," says a character in Beaumont and Fletcher's "The Wild-Goose Chase." Sir Walter Raleigh wore a false beard in his betrayed attempt to escape down the Thames, night of August 9, 1618. Real beards of the time were of every form,—pointed, fan-shaped, spade-shaped, T-shaped, often dyed.
Note6. (Page 32.)
"Fencing was taught as a regular science," says George Steevens, in a note to "The Merry Wives of Windsor." "Three degrees were usually taken in this art, a master's, a provost's, and a scholar's. For each of these a prize was played. The weapons they used were the axe, the pipe, rapier and target, rapier and cloak, two-swords, the two-hand sword, the bastard-sword, the dagger and staff, the sword and buckler, the rapier and dagger, etc. The places where they exercised were, commonly, theatres, halls, or other enclosures." A party of young gallants at a tavern, says Thornbury, would often send for a fencing-master to come and breathe them. Thegreat dictator in fencing, duelling, etc., in London, about 1600, was Vincentio Savolio, whose book on the "Use of the Rapier and Dagger" and on "Honor and Honorable Quarrels" was printed in London in 1595. The Dictionary of National Biography says he was born in Padua, and, after obtaining a reputation as a fencer, came to England and was taken into the service of the Earl of Essex. "In 'As You Like It,' Touchstone's description of the various forms of a lie is obviously based on Savolio's chapter 'Of the Manner and Diversitie of Lies.'" Though a great swordsman, Savolio seems to have been anything but a brawler, or an abettor of fighting. In his book he deprecates quarrels upon insufficient causes.
Note7. (Page 45.)
Nobody needs to be reminded that the original of Justice Shallow is supposed to have been Sir Thomas Lucy, the knight of Charlecote Hall, whose deer the legend has it Shakespeare stole; as steal them he probably did, if deer there were to steal, and if Shakespeare was not totally different from other boys with the opportunities for dangerous frolic afforded by a rustic environment and a middle-class condition of life. On this subject one might pleasurably re-read Washington Irving's account (in "The Sketch Book") of his visit to Charlecote Hall. Regarding the proneness of provincial great men to boast of their wickedness in the metropolis, Falstaff hits off the type, as it is not yet entirely dead, when he says of Shallow: "This same starved justice hath done nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth, and the featshe hath done about Turnbull Street: and every third word a lie, duer paid to the hearer than the Turk's tribute." The rest of the speech, wherein it is shown what figure Master Shallow really made in Turnbull Street, is not here quotable; but it is none the less readable.
Note8. (Page 46.)
One might fill pages with the mere names of the different classifications of Elizabethan rogues, and of the several members of each kind of gang. We have not at all advanced in thievery since Elizabeth's day. The "confidence game" played by New York "crooks" on visitors from the interior, this present year, was played under another name, in Shakespeare's time. The "come-on" of present-day New York is but the lineal descendant of the "cony" of Sixteenth Century London. Of thieves, impostors, and beggars, a few of the varieties were: Rufflers, upright men, hookers, wild rogues, priggers of prancers (horse-thieves), pallyards, fraters, prigs, curtals, Irish rogues, ragmen, jackmen, abram men, mad Toms of Bedlam, whipjacks, cranks, dommerers, glimmerers, travelling tinkers, and counterfeit soldiers, besides the real soldiers who turned to crime. "Laws were made against disbanded soldiers who took to robbing and murder," says Thornbury; "and the pursuit by hue and cry, on horse and foot, was rendered imperative in every township." There were ferreters, falconers, shifters, rank riders,—the list is endless. The generic name for gambling cheats was rooks, and these were divided intopuffs, setters, gilts, pads, biters, droppers, filers. Gull-gropers were gamblers who hunted fools in the ordinaries (eating-houses); each gang was composed of four men,—leader, eagle, wood-pecker, gull-groper (this name serving for the variety as well as for the species). A gambling gang with another method of operation was made up of the setter or decoy duck, the verser and barnacle, the accomplice, the rutter or bully. Some gamesters used women as decoys. Of dice tricks, there were those known as topping, slurring, stabbing, palming, knapping, besides various others. In addition to having all these—and many more—varieties of rogues to support, the nation was overrun with gipsies, who thieved in a world of ways. The whole population of England in 1604 is said to have been only about 5,000,000; that of London was little more than 150,000. And yet, the known rogues being deducted, and the secret rogues, there seem to have been some honest people left.
Note9. (Page 48.)
The Marryott memoirs (chief source of this narrative), in recounting the talk at the Mermaid, naturally do not pause to describe the tavern. The slight description here given has had to be pieced together, of scraps found in various places, one being a magazine article containing what purport to be actual details, but which have the look of coming from some bygone work of fiction. Stow, in his "Survay of London" (1598), has nothing to say of the Mermaid; he twice mentions the "fair inns" in BreadStreet. I fancy that if there were anywhere the authentic materials for a full description of the house, such zealous lighters-up of the past as Besant (who in his "London" describes the Falcon but not the Mermaid), F. F. Ordish ("Shakespeare's London," a charming little book, inside and out), Loftie (in his excellent history of London). Hubert Hall (who in his "Society in the Elizabethan Age" describes the Tabard in Southwark but not the Mermaid), Walter Thornbury (whose two volumes on the England of Shakespeare are rich especially on tavern life, mainly as reflected in plays and pamphlets of the time). Edwin Goadby (whose compact little book on the same subject is crowded with matter), and the host of others, including the most recent biographers of Shakespeare, would have found it out. A thing we certainly know of the Mermaid, in addition to its location and its three entrances, is that the wine and the wit there elicited from Francis Beaumont to Ben Jonson these famous "Lines sent from the country with two unfinished comedies, which deferred their merry meetings at the Mermaid:"
"In this warm shineI lie and dream of your full Mermaid wine.
Methinks the little wit I had is lost.Since I saw you, for wit is like a restHeld up at tennis, which men do the bestWith the best gamesters. What things have we seenDone at the Mermaid! Heard words that have beenSo nimble, and so full of subtle flame.As if that every one from whence they cameHad meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the restOf his dull life; than when there hath been thrownWit able enough to justify the townFor three days past, wit that might warrant beFor the whole city to talk foolishly.Till that were cancelled; and when that was gone.We left an air behind us, which aloneWas able to make the two next companiesRight witty, though but downright fools more wise."
Note10. (Page 48.)
For the better observance of the Lenten statutes, in every ward of London a jury was sworn, and charged by the aldermen, "for the true inquisition of killing, selling, dressing, or eating of flesh this present Lent, contrary to the laws and statutes of this realm and her Majesty's proclamation and express commandment." In accordance with this the jury "made diligent search divers and sundry times in all inns, tabling-houses, taverns, cook-houses, and victualling-houses within their ward," and thereupon either "resolved that they" had "not hitherto found any to offend against these laws," or they presented the names of those who had "so continued to offend, to the officer." Mr. Hubert Hall says: "The non-observance of these fast-days was no slight matter. Not only did the fisheries suffer in consequence, but the benefits of an occasional variation of the interminable diet of salt beef and bad beer must have been incalculable. The obligation of the crown toward one class of its subjects may not have been economically imperative, but a patriarchical government was bound to consult the welfare ofeach." When Philip Sidney was at Oxford, his uncle solicited for him "a license to eat flesh during Lent," he being "somewhat subject to sickness."
Note11. (Page 50.)
According to Mr. Fleay, "Every Man out of His Humor," produced at the Globe Theatre in 1599, was the first of Ben Jonson's personal satires against his contemporaries. Jonson had to remove these satires to the Blackfriars, that same year; when began the "war of the theatres," a war conducted, through plays laden with personalities, by the writers and actors of one theatre against the writers and actors of another. This "war" seems to have endured till after the time of our narrative, and to have died a natural death. Its most celebrated productions were Jonson's "The Poetaster" and Thomas Dekker's reply thereto, "Satiromastix." Jonson's "comical satires" were acted at the Blackfriars by the Chapel Royal boys, the "little eyases" derided in "Hamlet." Mr. Fleay finds that Jonson's satires were directed against Shakespeare as well as against Dekker and Marston. Certain allusions and characters, in Shakespeare's plays produced apparently about this time, have been taken as his contributions to this war. With another rival company, also of boys,—those of St. Paul's cathedral,—the lord chamberlain's players were friendly. Mr. Saintsbury says that Jonson, Dekker, Chapman, and Marston "were mixed up, as regards one another, in an extricable but not uninteresting series ofbroils and friendships, to some part of which Shakespeare himself was, it is clear, by no means a stranger." But he observes that the direct connection of these quarrels, "even with the literary work which is usually linked to them, will be better established when critics have left being uncertain whether A was B, or B, C." I have heard it suggested, in fun, that the war may have been a device to stimulate public interest in the theatres. The Elizabethan age had its visitations of the plague, and was therefore, by the not too cruel dispensers of good and evil, spared the advertising malady of our nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Should anything like this war of the theatres occur to-day, it would not take a Scotland Yard or Mulberry Street detective to smell out ulterior motives at the back of it. The Elizabethans, besides their other advantages, enjoyed that of living too soon to know or even foresee the crafty self-advertiser or the "clever press agent;" else had there surely been an additional verse in their Litany, followed by a most fervent "Good Lord, deliver us!"
Note12. (Page 51.)
"But that a gentleman should turn player hath puzzled me." To make an actor of a young gentleman, might, indeed, become a "Star Chamber matter." Among other "misdemeanors not reducible to heads," given in a Bodleian Library MS., entitled "A Short View of Criminal Cases Punishable and Heretofore Punished in the Court of the Star Chamber in the Times of Queen Elizabeth. King James, and His Late Majesty King Charles," isthis: "Taking up a gentleman's son to be a stage player." See John S. Burn's notices of the "Star Chamber."
Note13. (Page 56.)
All the world knows that in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, the first collected edition of his plays appeared, under the supervision of, and from manuscripts provided by, Masters Heminge and Condell. "We have but collected them," say they in their dedication inserted in the subsequent folio (1632), "and done an office to the dead, to procure his orphans, guardians; without ambition either of self-profit or fame: only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare." In the first folio are printed "The names of the principal actors in all these plays." "William Shakespeare," heading the list, is followed in order by "Richard Burbadge," "John Hemings," and "Augustine Philips;" further down come "William Slye" and "Henry Condell." Harry Marryott's association with the company was too brief, his position too far from that of a "principal actor," for his name to be included in the list.
Note14. (Page 59.)
Shakespeare's London residence in October, 1598, was in the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate (Fleay, Ordish, and others). Countless biographers make him a resident of the Southwark side of the river, as, "He lived near the Bear Garden, Southwark, in 1596. In 1609 he occupieda good house within the liberty of the Clink." "His house was somewhere in Clink Street. As he grew more prosperous, he purchased a dwelling on the opposite shore near the Wardrobe, but he does not seem to have occupied it." But it turns out that William Shakespeare had two brothers, either or both of whom dwelt in Southwark, a fact that confuses the apparent evidence of his own residence there. His house in Blackfriars, "near the Wardrobe," descended by will to his daughter, Susannah Hall. His purchase of New Place, at Stratford, was made in 1597; but, though he may have at once installed his family there, he certainly remained for some years afterward a Londoner.
Note15. (Page 63.)
Turnbull Street was a notorious nest of women of ill fame, and of men equally low in character. Falstaff's mention of it has been quoted in a previous note. In Beaumont and Fletcher's burlesque, "The Knight of the Burning Pestle," the speech of a prisoner, alluding to his fair companion, contains this bit of humor:
"I am an errant knight that followed armsWith spear and shield; and in my tender yearsI stricken was with Cupid's fiery shaft.And fell in love with this my lady dear.And stole her from her friends in Turnbull Street."
It was also known as Turnmill Street. "Turnemill Street," says Stow, "which stretcheth up to the west of Clerkenwell" (from the "lane called Cow Cross, of a cross sometime standing there").
Note16. (Page 69.)
Concerning Queen Elizabeth's temper, there is, besides a wealth of other evidence, this from the "Character of Queen Elizabeth," by Edmund Bohun, Esq., published in Nichols's "Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth:" "She was subject to be vehemently transported with anger, and when she was so, she would show it by her voice, her countenance, and her hands. She would chide her familiar servants so loud, that they that stood afar off might sometimes hear her voice. And it was reported that for small offences she would strike her maids of honor with her hand; but then her anger was short and very innocent. And when her friends acknowledged their offences, she, with an appeased mind, easily forgave them many things."
Note17. (Page 78.)
The famous story of the ring is perhaps too well known to be repeated here. The queen had once given the Earl of Essex a ring, which, if ever sent to her as a token of his distress, "might entitle him to her protection." While under sentence of death, the earl, looking out of his prison window one morning, engaged a boy to carry the ring to Lady Scroope, the Countess of Nottingham's sister, an attendant on the queen, and to beg that she would present it to her Majesty. "The boy, by mistake," continues Birch's version of the story, "carried it to the Lady Nottingham, who showed it to her husband, the admiral, an enemy of Lord Essex. The admiral forbid herto carry it, or return any answer to the message, but insisted on her keeping the ring." When, two years later, this countess was on her death-bed, she sent for the queen, told her all, and begged forgiveness. "But her Majesty answered, 'God may forgive you, but I never can,' and left the room with great emotion. Her mind was so struck with the story, that she never went into bed, nor took any sustenance from that instant, for Camden is of opinion that her chief reason for suffering the earl to be executed was his supposed obstinacy in not applying to her for mercy."
Note18. (Page 80.)
Of one of Queen Elizabeth's most characteristic traits. Miss Aikin says: "It has been already remarked that she was habitually, or systematically, an enemy to matrimony in general; and the higher any persons stood in her good graces, and the more intimate their intercourse with her, the greater was her resentment at detecting in them any aspirations after this state; for a kind of jealousy was in these cases superadded to her malignity; and it offended her pride that those who were honored with her favor should find room in their thoughts to covet another kind of happiness, of which she was not the dispenser." When Leicester married the widowed Countess of Essex, the queen had him confined in a small fort in Greenwich Park, and would probably have sent him to the Tower, but that the Earl of Sussex dissuaded. Later, when Essex married Sir Philip Sidney's widow,Walsingham's daughter, Elizabeth showed rage and chagrin in a degree only less than in the case of Leicester. One of her attendants wrote, "Yet she doth use it more temperately than was thought for, and, God be thanked, doth not strike at all she threats." Both these marriages were conducted secretly, and without previous request for the permission her Majesty would have refused. So was that of Southampton, in 1598, by which that nobleman so incurred the queen's displeasure that, when she heard that Essex, commanding the troops in Ireland, had appointed him general of the horse, she reprimanded and ordered Essex to recall his commission. It was her unhappy fate that all her favorites, save Hatton, should marry.
Note19. (Page 82.)
"She was jealous of her reputation with the old and cool-headed lords about her," writes Leigh Hunt, of Elizabeth at the time of the Essex conspiracy. That she had grown loath to betray the weaknesses which in earlier years she had made no attempt to conceal, is to be inferred also from the lessening degrees of wrath she evinced as her favorites, one after another, married; and from Bohun's statement, regarding her anger, that "she learned from Xenophon's book of the Institution of Cyrus, the method of curbing and correcting this unruly passion." A wonderfully human and pathetic figure: the vain woman whose glass belied the gross flattery of her courtiers, yet who could delude herself into believing them sincere; the "greatest Gloriana" whose worshippers declared herfavor their breath of life, yet risked it for the smiles of mere gentlewomen; the stateswoman, wise enough to see her kingdom's future safety in the death of her beautiful rival, courageous enough to sanction that death, weak enough to shift the blame on poor Davison; the queen, who could say on horseback, to her "loving people," "I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England, too, and think foul scorn that Parma, or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realms;" and yet had to study in a classic author, how to keep from slapping the faces of her maids!
Note20. (Page 85.)
The pursuivants who, in this and the next reign, executed warrants of arrest, are not to be confused with the pursuivants of the Heralds' College. "Send for his master with a pursuivant, presently," orders Suffolk, concerning an apprentice's master accused of treason, in "Henry VI., Part II." It is of these pursuivants that Hume writes as follows, concerning persons who sued great lords for debt in Elizabeth's reign: "It was usual to send for people by pursuivants, a kind of harpies, who then attended the orders of the council and high commission; and they were brought up to London, and constrained by imprisonment, not only to withdraw their lawful suits, but also to pay the pursuivants great sums of money." The pursuivant, with his warrants, proclamations, and his constant "In the queen's name," is afamiliar figure in Elizabethan literature. In Sir Valentine Fleetwood's case, the council would have been perhaps equally or more in custom had it entrusted the prisoner's conveyance to London to some gentleman of equal rank to his.
Note21. (Page 86.)
In telling Marryott that she was "not wont to go so strong in purse," the queen spoke figuratively, rather than meant that she had for once assumed the functions of purse-bearer, or that a purse habitually carried by her was now uncommonly well provided. True, either of these may have been the case. Shakespeare must have modelled the minor habits of his queens somewhat upon those of Elizabeth; and he makes Cleopatra give a messenger gold, presumably with her own hand. But Elizabeth's allusion was to her poverty, and in keeping with her extreme economy, concerning which Hume says: "But that in reality there was little or no avarice in the queen's temper, appears from this circumstance, that she never amassed any treasure, and even refused subsidies from the Parliament, when she had no present occasion for them. Yet we must not conclude that her economy proceeded from a tender concern for her people; she loaded them with monopolies and exclusive patents. The real source of her frugal conduct was derived from her desire of independency, and her care to preserve her dignity, which would have been endangered had she reduced herself to the necessity of having frequent recourse to Parliamentary supplies. The splendor of a court was,during this age, a great part of the public charge; and as Elizabeth was a single woman, and expensive in no kind of magnificence except clothes, this circumstance enabled her to perform great things by her narrow revenue. She is said to have paid four millions of debt, left on the crown by her father, brother, and sister,—an incredible sum for that age."
Note22. (Page 87.)
Elizabeth's forenoons, according to Bohun, were usually thus passed: "First in the morning, she spent some time at her devotions; then she betook herself to the despatch of her civil affairs, reading letters, ordering answers, considering what should be brought before the council, and consulting with her ministers. When she had thus wearied herself, she would walk in a shady garden, or pleasant gallery, without any other attendance than that of a few learned men. Then she took her coach, and passed in sight of her people to the neighboring groves and fields; and sometimes would hunt or hawk. There was scarce a day but she employed some part of it in reading and study."
Note23. (Page 92.)
"The circuit of the wall of London on the land side" (writes Stow in 1598), "to wit, from the Tower of London in the east unto Aldgate, is 82 perches; from Aldgate to Bishopsgate, 86 perches; from Bishopsgate in the north, to the postern of Cripplegate, 162 perches; from Cripplegate to Aldersgate, 75 perches; from Aldersgate toNewgate, 66 perches; from Newgate in the west, to Ludgate, 42 perches; in all, 513 perches of assize. From Ludgate to the Fleet Dike west, about 60 perches; from Fleet Bridge south, to the river Thames, about 70 perches; and so the total of these perches amounteth to 643, ... w hich make up two English miles, and more by 608 feet." The gates here mentioned, as Besant says, "still stood, and were closed at sunset, until 1760. Then they were all pulled down, and the materials sold." Even in Stow's time, the city had much outgrown its walls; of its outer part, the highways leading to the country had post-and-chain bars, which were closed at night.
Note24. (Page 100.)
Plays of the time, notably Ben Jonson's "Bartholomew Fair," show in what contempt and ridicule the first Puritans were held. Shakespeare's Malvolio, as Maria says, is "sometimes a kind of Puritan." The attitude of the obtrusive kind of Puritanism to the world, and of the world to that kind of Puritanism, is expressed once and forever in what Hazlitt terms Sir Toby's "unanswerable answer" to Malvolio, "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" Though fellow sufferers of governmental severity, the Catholics and Puritans were no less naturally antipathetic to each other. Ben Jonson, satirist of the Puritans, was, in his time, alternately Catholic and Anglican. But if the government, in support of the established church, was outwardly severe against the Puritans, they had muchcovert protection at court, some of the chief lords and ministers inclining their way. As to the quality of voice affected by these early Puritans in their devotions, recall the clown's speech in the "Winter's Tale:" "Three-man songmen all, and very good ones; but they are most of them means and bases; but one Puritan amongst them, and he sings psalms to hornpipes."
Note25. (Page 131.)
The Babington conspiracy gave the occasion for removing that constant menace to England's future peace,—Mary Stuart. The skill with which Sir Francis Walsingham possessed himself, one by one, of the secrets of the conspirators, and nursed the plot forward until he had complete evidence of every participant's guilt, and of Mary's complicity, is fascinating to study. Mary of course, as an unwilling prisoner, had a perfect moral right to plot for herself; but she knew what she risked in doing so, and she and her adherents ran against their fatal rock in Walsingham. This man's journal is characteristic of himself: merely the briefest entries, of this messenger's arrival from France, or that one's departure for the Low Countries, or of a letter from X, or an order transmitted to B. What news the messengers brought, what the letters told, or the orders were, is not confided to the paper. In vigilance and craft, he was the Elizabethan predecessor of Richelieu and Fouché; yet a quiet, virtuous man, who loved his wife, died poor, and leaned toward Puritanism. His spy system hasexcited the righteous horror of certain historians who would never have ceased to admire it, had it been exercised for, not against, their heroine, Mary Stuart. His own direct instruments served him better than he was served by the rank and file of the law's servants, as this letter to him, from Lord Burleigh, August 10, 1586, shows: "As I came from London homeward in my coach, I saw at every town's end, a number of ten or twelve, standing with long staves, and until I came to Enfield I thought no other of them but that they had staid for the avoiding of the rain, or to drink at some ale-houses, for so they did stand under pentices at ale-houses; but at Enfield, finding a dozen in a plump, when there was no rain, I bethought myself that they were appointed as watchmen for the apprehending of such as are missing; and thereupon I called some of them to me apart, and asked them wherefore they stood there, and one of them answered, to take three young men; and, demanding how they should know the persons, one answered with the words, 'Marry, my lord, by intelligence of their favor.' 'What mean you by that?' 'Marry,' said they, 'one of the parties hath a hooked nose.' 'And have you,' quoth I,'no other mark?' 'No,' said they. And then I asked who appointed them, and they answered one Banks, a head constable, whom I willed to be sent to me. Surely, sir, whosoever had the charge from you hath used the matter negligently; for these watchmen stand so openly in plumps as no suspected person will come near them, and if they be no better instructed but to find three persons by one of them having a hooked nose, they may miss thereof. And thisI thought good to advertise you, that the justices who had the charge, as I think, may use the matter more circumspectly." Harrison (writing 1577-87) complains of the laxity of these lesser arms of the law, saying: "That when hue and cry have been made even to the faces of some constables, they have said, 'God restore your loss! I have other business at this time.'"
Note26. (Page 229.)
"But now of late years," writes Stow (1598), "the use of coaches, brought out of Germany, is taken up, and made so common, as there is neither distinction of time nor difference of persons observed; for the world runs on wheels with many whose parents were glad to go on foot." As to their rate of travel, Mr. Goadby instances that Mary, Queen of Scots, was from early morning to late evening of a January day, in going from Bolton Castle to Ripon, sixteen miles. Charles Dudley Warner (in "The People for Whom Shakespeare Wrote") says that, in 1640. Queen Henrietta was four days on the way from Dover to London, the best road in England (distance, 71 miles); and quotes the Venetian ambassador, whose journey to Oxford and back (in all, 150 miles, as he travelled) consumed six days, his coach often sticking in the mud, and once breaking down. Queen Mary had established a kind of postal service. Elizabeth had a postmaster-general in 1581. After the Armada, a horse-post was ordered established in every town, a foot-post (to live near the church) in every parish. But letter-writersusually sent their own messengers, or relied on the slow carriers' wagons.
Note27. (Page 255.)
In this reign, many were the cases wherein people took vengeance into their own hands, in true feudal fashion, whether from the heat of their impulses, or in view of that "bad execution of the laws" and "neglect of police," for which Hume found it not easy to account. Miss Aikin gives an instance, arising from a long-standing feud between two proud families. Orme, a servant of Sir John Holles, killed in a duel the master of horse to the Earl of Shrewsbury. "The earl prosecuted Orme, and sought to take away his life; but Sir John Holles caused him to be conveyed away to Ireland, and afterward obtained his pardon of the queen. For his conduct in this business, he was himself challenged by Gervase Markham, champion and gallant to the Countess of Shrewsbury; but Holles refused the duel, because the demand of Markham, that it should take place in a park belonging to the earl, his enemy, gave him ground to apprehend treachery. Anxious, however, to wipe away the aspersions cast upon his courage, he sought a reëncounter which might wear the appearance of accident; and soon after he met Markham on the road, when the parties immediately dismounted and attacked each other with their rapiers; Markham fell, severely wounded; and the Earl of Shrewsbury lost no time in raising his servants and tenantry to the number of 120, in order toapprehend Holles, in case Markham's hurt should prove fatal. On the other side Lord Sheffield, the kinsman of Holles, joined him with sixty men; and he and his company remained at Houghton till the wounded man was out of danger. We do not find the queen and council interfering to put a stop to this private war." Markham, who wrote the poem on the last fight of "The Revenge," is a minor but prolific figure in Elizabethan literature.
Note28. (Page 266.)
Moll Cutpurse, whose real name was Mary Frith, a shoemaker's daughter, born probably in 1584, is described by her biographer as in her girlhood a "very tomrig or rumpscuttle" who "delighted and sported only in boy's plays and costume." She was put to domestic service, but her calling lay not in tending children. She donned man's attire and found true outlet for her talents as a "bully, pick-purse, fortune-teller, receiver, and forger." She is the heroine of Middleton and Dekker's breezy comedy, "The Roaring Girl" (1611), and of a work thus entered on the Stationers' Register in August, 1610: "A Booke called the Madde Prancks of Merry Mall of the Bankside, with her walkes in Man's Apparel, and to what purpose. Written by John Day." Her career is set forth in the very interesting "Lives of Twelve Bad Women," recently published in a beautiful edition.
Note29. (Page 314.)
The use of firearms was slow work in the earlier centuries. Concerning the wheel-lock, invented in 1515, atNuremburg, Greener says: "When ready for firing, the wheel was wound up, the flash-pan lid pushed back, and the pyrites held in the cock allowed to come in contact with the wheel. By pressure on the trigger a stop was drawn back out of the wheel, and the latter, turning round its pivot at considerable speed, produced sparks by the friction against the pyrites, and thus ignited the priming." "We find the greater portion of the pistols of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fitted with wheel-locks." Wheel-locks being expensive, the old match-locks, as a rule, were still fitted to the longer firearms, such as the arquebus, of which Greener says: "The slow match is kept burning in a holder on the top of the barrel; the flash-pan and touch-hole are at the side. The serpentine is hung upon a pivot passing through the stock, and continued past the pivot, forming a lever for the hand. To discharge the piece, the match in the serpentine is first brought into contact with the burning match on the barrel until ignited; then by raising the lever and moving it to one side, the serpentine is brought into the priming in the touch-hole, and the gun discharged,—though it is highly probable that the first arquebuses did not carry the fire in a holder on the barrel, but only the match in the serpentine." "All the early firearms were so slow to load, that, as late as the battle of Kuisyingen in 1636, the slowest soldiers managed to fire seven shots only during eight hours."
Note30. (Page 374.)
In London the playhouses were allowed to be openin Lent on all days but sermon days,—Wednesday and Friday. In 1601, Lent began February 25th; Easter Sunday was April 12th. The historical year—conforming to our present calendar—is here meant. The civil year then began March 25th.
SELECTIONS FROML. C. PAGE AND COMPANY'SLIST OF FICTION