The People For Whom Shakespeare Wrote

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THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM SHAKESPEARE WROTE

By Charles Dudley Warner

Queen Elizabeth being dead about ten o'clock in the morning, March 24,
1603, Sir Robert Cary posted away, unsent, to King James of Scotland to
inform him of the "accident," and got made a baron of the realm for his
ride. On his way down to take possession of his new kingdom the king
distributed the honor of knighthood right and left liberally; at
Theobald's he created eight-and-twenty knights, of whom Sir Richard
Baker, afterwards the author of "A Chronicle of the Kings of England,"
was one. "God knows how many hundreds he made the first year," says the
chronicler, "but it was indeed fit to give vent to the passage of Honour,
which during Queen Elizabeth's reign had been so stopped that scarce any
county of England had knights enow to make a jury."

Sir Richard Baker was born in 1568, and died in 1645; his "Chronicle"
appeared in 1641. It was brought down to the death of James in 1625,
when, he having written the introduction to the life of Charles I, the
storm of the season caused him to "break off in amazement," for he had
thought the race of "Stewards" likely to continue to the "world's end";
and he never resumed his pen. In the reign of James two things lost their
lustre--the exercise of tilting, which Elizabeth made a special
solemnity, and the band of Yeomen of the Guard, choicest persons both for
stature and other good parts, who graced the court of Elizabeth; James
"was so intentive to Realities that he little regarded shows," and in his
time these came utterly to be neglected. The virgin queen was the last
ruler who seriously regarded the pomps and splendors of feudalism.

It was characteristic of the age that the death of James, which occurred
in his fifty-ninth year, should have been by rumor attributed to
"poyson"; but "being dead, and his body opened, there was no sign at all
of poyson, his inward parts being all sound, but that his Spleen was a
little faulty, which might be cause enough to cast him into an Ague: the
ordinary high-way, especially in old bo'dies, to a natural death."

The chronicler records among the men of note of James's time Sir Francis
Vere, "who as another Hannibal, with his one eye, could see more in the
Martial Discipline than common men can do with two"; Sir Edward Coke; Sir
Francis Bacon, "who besides his profounder book, of Novum Organum, hath
written the reign of King Henry the Seventh, in so sweet a style, that
like Manna, it pleaseth the tast of all palats"; William Camden, whose
Description of Britain "seems to keep Queen Elizabeth alive after death";
"and to speak it in a word, the Trojan Horse was not fuller of Heroick
Grecians, than King James his Reign was full of men excellent in all
kindes of Learning." Among these was an old university acquaintance of
Baker's, "Mr. John Dunne, who leaving Oxford, lived at the Innes of
Court, not dissolute, but very neat; a great Visitor of Ladies, a great
frequenter of Playes, a great writer of conceited Verses; until such
times as King James taking notice of the pregnancy of his Wit, was a
means that he betook him to the study of Divinity, and thereupon
proceeding Doctor, was made Dean of Pauls; and became so rare a Preacher,
that he was not only commended, but even admired by all who heard him."

The times of Elizabeth and James were visited by some awful casualties
and portents. From December, 1602, to the December following, the plague
destroyed 30,518 persons in London; the same disease that in the sixth
year of Elizabeth killed 20,500, and in the thirty-sixth year 17,890,
besides the lord mayor and three aldermen. In January, 1606, a mighty
whale came up the Thames within eight miles of London, whose body, seen
divers times above water, was judged to be longer than the largest ship
on the river; "but when she tasted the fresh water and scented the Land,
she returned into the sea." Not so fortunate was a vast whale cast upon
the Isle of Thanet, in Kent, in 1575, which was "twenty Ells long, and
thirteen foot broad from the belly to the backbone, and eleven foot
between the eyes. One of his eyes being taken out of his head was more
than a cart with six horses could draw; the Oyl being boyled out of his
head was Parmacittee." Nor the monstrous fish cast ashore in Lincolnshire
in 1564, which measured six yards between the eyes and had a tail fifteen
feet broad; "twelve men stood upright in his mouth to get the Oyl." In
1612 a comet appeared, which in the opinion of Dr. Bainbridge, the great
mathematician of Oxford, was as far above the moon as the moon is above
the earth, and the sequel of it was that infinite slaughters and
devastations followed it both in Germany and other countries. In 1613, in
Standish, in Lancashire, a maiden child was born having four legs, four
arms, and one head with two faces--the one before, the other behind, like
the picture of Janus. (One thinks of the prodigies that presaged the
birth of Glendower.) Also, the same year, in Hampshire, a carpenter,
lying in bed with his wife and a young child, "was himself and the childe
both burned to death with a sudden lightning, no fire appearing outwardly
upon him, and yet lay burning for the space of almost three days till he
was quite consumed to ashes." This year the Globe playhouse, on the
Bankside, was burned, and the year following the new playhouse, the
Fortune, in Golding Lane, "was by negligence of a candle, clean burned
down to the ground." In this year also, 1614, the town of
Stratford-on-Avon was burned. One of the strangest events, however,
happened in the first year of Elizabeth (1558), when "dyed Sir Thomas
Cheney, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, of whom it is reported for a
certain, that his pulse did beat more than three quarters of an hour
after he was dead, as strongly as if he had been still alive." In 1580 a
strange apparition happened in Somersetshire--three score personages all
clothed in black, a furlong in distance from those that beheld them; "and
after their appearing, and a little while tarrying, they vanished away,
but immediately another strange company, in like manner, color, and
number appeared in the same place, and they encountered one another and
so vanished away. And the third time appeared that number again, all in
bright armour, and encountered one another, and so vanished away. This
was examined before Sir George Norton, and sworn by four honest men that
saw it, to be true." Equally well substantiated, probably, was what
happened in Herefordshire in 1571: "A field of three acres, in Blackmore,
with the Trees and Fences, moved from its place and passed over another
field, traveling in the highway that goeth to Herne, and there stayed."
Herefordshire was a favorite place for this sort of exercise of nature.
In 1575 the little town of Kinnaston was visited by an earthquake: "On
the seventeenth of February at six o'clock of the evening, the earth
began to open and a Hill with a Rock under it (making at first a great
bellowing noise, which was heard a great way off) lifted itself up a
great height, and began to travel, bearing along with it the Trees that
grew upon it, the Sheep-folds, and Flocks of Sheep abiding there at the
same time. In the place from whence it was first moved, it left a gaping
distance forty foot broad, and fourscore Ells long; the whole Field was
about twenty Acres. Passing along, it overthrew a Chappell standing in
the way, removed an Ewe-Tree planted in the Churchyard, from the West
into the East; with the like force it thrust before it High-wayes,
Sheep-folds, Hedges, and Trees, made Tilled ground Pasture, and again
turned Pasture into Tillage. Having walked in this sort from Saturday in
the evening, till Monday noon, it then stood still." It seems not
improbable that Birnam wood should come to Dunsinane.

It was for an age of faith, for a people whose credulity was fed on such
prodigies and whose imagination glowed at such wonderful portents, that
Shakespeare wrote, weaving into the realities of sense those awful
mysteries of the supernatural which hovered not far away from every
Englishman of his time.

Shakespeare was born in 1564, when Elizabeth had been six years on the
throne, and he died in 1616, nine years before James I., of the faulty
spleen, was carried to the royal chapel in Westminster, "with great
solemnity, but with greater lamentation." Old Baker, who says of himself
that he was the unworthiest of the knights made at Theobald's,
condescends to mention William Shakespeare at the tail end of the men of
note of Elizabeth's time. The ocean is not more boundless, he affirms,
than the number of men of note of her time; and after he has finished
with the statesmen ("an exquisite statesman for his own ends was Robert
Earl of Leicester, and for his Countries good, Sir William Cecill, Lord
Burleigh"), the seamen, the great commanders, the learned gentlemen and
writers (among them Roger Askam, who had sometime been schoolmaster to
Queen Elizabeth, but, taking too great delight in gaming and
cock-fighting, lived and died in mean estate), the learned divines and
preachers, he concludes: "After such men, it might be thought ridiculous
to speak of Stage-players; but seeing excellency in the meanest things
deserve remembring, and Roscius the Comedian is recorded in History with
such commendation, it may be allowed us to do the like with some of our
Nation. Richard Bourbidge and Edward Allen, two such actors as no age
must ever look to see the like; and to make their Comedies compleat,
Richard Tarleton, who for the Part called the Clowns Part, never had his
match, never will have. For Writers of Playes, and such as have been
players themselves, William Shakespeare and Benjamin Johnson have
especially left their Names recommended to posterity."

Richard Bourbidge (or Burbadge) was the first of the great English tragic
actors, and was the original of the greater number of Shakespeare's
heroes--Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Shylock, Macbeth, Richard III., Romeo,
Brutus, etc. Dick Tarleton, one of the privileged scapegraces of social
life, was regarded by his contemporaries as the most witty of clowns and
comedians. The clown was a permitted character in the old theatres, and
intruded not only between the acts, but even into the play itself, with
his quips and antics. It is probable that he played the part of clown,
grave-digger, etc., in Shakespeare's comedies, and no doubt took
liberties with his parts. It is thought that part of Hamlet's advice to
the players--"and let those that play your clowns speak no more than is
set down for them," etc.--was leveled at Tarleton.

The question is often asked, but I consider it an idle one, whether
Shakespeare was appreciated in his own day as he is now. That the age,
was unable to separate him from itself, and see his great stature, is
probable; that it enjoyed him with a sympathy to which we are strangers
there is no doubt. To us he is inexhaustible. The more we study him, the
more are we astonished at his multiform genius. In our complex
civilization, there is no development of passion, or character, or trait
of human nature, no social evolution, that does not find expression
somewhere in those marvelous plays; and yet it is impossible for us to
enter into a full, sympathetic enjoyment of those plays unless we can in
some measure recreate for ourselves the atmosphere in which they were
written. To superficial observation great geniuses come into the world at
rare intervals in history, in a manner independent of what we call the
progress of the race. It may be so; but the form the genius shall take is
always determined by the age in which it appears, and its expression is
shaped by the environments. Acquaintance with the Bedouin desert life of
today, which has changed little for three thousand years, illumines the
book of Job like an electric light. Modern research into Hellenic and
Asiatic life has given a new meaning to the Iliad and the Odyssey, and
greatly enhanced our enjoyment of them. A fair comprehension of the
Divina Commedia is impossible without some knowledge of the factions that
rent Florence; of the wars of Guelf and Ghibelline; of the spirit that
banished Dante, and gave him an humble tomb in Ravenna instead of a
sepulchre in the pantheon of Santa Croce. Shakespeare was a child of his
age; it had long been preparing for him; its expression culminated in
him. It was essentially a dramatic age. He used the accumulated materials
of centuries. He was playwright as well as poet. His variety and
multiform genius cannot otherwise be accounted for. He called in the
coinage of many generations, and reissued it purified and unalloyed,
stamped in his own mint. There was a Hamlet probably, there were
certainly Romeos and Juliets, on the stage before Shakespeare. In him
were received the imaginations, the inventions, the aspirations, the
superstitions, the humors, the supernatural intimations; in him met the
converging rays of the genius of his age, as in a lens, to be sent onward
thenceforth in an ever-broadening stream of light.

It was his fortune to live not only in a dramatic age, but in a
transition age, when feudalism was passing away, but while its shows and
splendors could still be seriously comprehended. The dignity that doth
hedge a king was so far abated that royalty could be put upon the stage
as a player's spectacle; but the reality of kings and queens and court
pageantry was not so far past that it did not appeal powerfully to the
imaginations of the frequenters of the Globe, the Rose, and the Fortune.
They had no such feeling as we have in regard to the pasteboard kings and
queens who strut their brief hour before us in anachronic absurdity. But,
besides that he wrote in the spirit of his age, Shakespeare wrote in the
language and the literary methods of his time. This is not more evident
in the contemporary poets than in the chroniclers of that day. They all
delighted in ingenuities of phrase, in neat turns and conceits; it was a
compliment then to be called a "conceited" writer.

Of all the guides to Shakespeare's time, there is none more profitable or
entertaining than William Harrison, who wrote for Holinshed's chronicle
"The Description of England," as it fell under his eyes from 1577 to
1587. Harrison's England is an unfailing mine of information for all the
historians of the sixteenth century; and in the edition published by the
New Shakespeare Society, and edited, with a wealth of notes and
contemporary references, by Mr. Frederick J. Furnivall, it is a new
revelation of Shakespeare's England to the general reader.

Harrison himself is an interesting character, and trustworthy above the
general race of chroniclers. He was born in 1534, or, to use his
exactness of statement, "upon the 18th of April, hora ii, minut 4,
Secunde 56, at London, in Cordwainer streete, otherwise called
bowe-lane." This year was also remarkable as that in which "King Henry 8
polleth his head; after whom his household and nobility, with the rest of
his subjects do the like." It was the year before Anne Boleyn, haled away
to the Tower, accused, condemned, and executed in the space of fourteen
days, "with sigheing teares" said to the rough Duke of Norfolk, "Hither I
came once my lord, to fetch a crown imperial; but now to receive, I hope,
a crown immortal." In 1544, the boy was at St. Paul's school; the litany
in the English tongue, by the king's command, was that year sung openly
in St. Paul's, and we have a glimpse of Harrison with the other children,
enforced to buy those books, walking in general procession, as was
appointed, before the king went to Boulogne. Harrison was a student at
both Oxford and Cambridge, taking the degree of bachelor of divinity at
the latter in 1569, when he had been an Oxford M.A. of seven years'
standing. Before this he was household chaplain to Sir William Brooke,
Lord Cobham, who gave him, in 1588-89, the rectory of Radwinter, in
Essex, which he held till his death, in 1593. In 1586 he was installed
canon of Windsor. Between 1559 and 1571 he married Marion Isebrande,--of
whom he said in his will, referring to the sometime supposed unlawfulness
of priests' marriages, "by the laws of God I take and repute in all
respects for my true and lawful wife." At Radwinter, the old parson,
working in his garden, collected Roman coins, wrote his chronicles, and
expressed his mind about the rascally lawyers of Essex, to whom flowed
all the wealth of the land. The lawyers in those days stirred up
contentions, and then reaped the profits. "Of all that ever I knew in
Essex," says Harrison, "Denis and Mainford excelled, till John of Ludlow,
alias Mason, came in place, unto whom in comparison these two were but
children." This last did so harry a client for four years that the
latter, still called upon for new fees, "went to bed, and within four
days made an end of his woeful life, even with care and pensiveness." And
after his death the lawyer so handled his son "that there was never sheep
shorn in May, so near clipped of his fleece present, as he was of many to
come." The Welsh were the most litigious people. A Welshman would walk up
to London bare-legged, carrying his hose on his neck, to save wear and
because he had no change, importune his countrymen till he got half a
dozen writs, with which he would return to molest his neighbors, though
no one of his quarrels was worth the money he paid for a single writ.

The humblest mechanic of England today has comforts and conveniences
which the richest nobles lacked in Harrison's day, but it was
nevertheless an age of great luxury and extravagance; of brave apparel,
costly and showy beyond that of any Continental people, though wanting in
refined taste; and of mighty banquets, with service of massive plate,
troops of attendants, and a surfeit of rich food and strong drink.

In this luxury the clergy of Harrison's rank did not share. Harrison was
poor on forty pounds a year. He complains that the clergy were taxed more
than ever, the church having become "an ass whereon every man is to ride
to market and cast his wallet." They paid tenths and first-fruits and
subsidies, so that out of twenty pounds of a benefice the incumbent did
not reserve more than L 13 6s. 8d. for himself and his family. They had
to pay for both prince and laity, and both grumbled at and slandered
them. Harrison gives a good account of the higher clergy; he says the
bishops were loved for their painful diligence in their calling, and that
the clergy of England were reputed on the Continent as learned divines,
skillful in Greek and Hebrew and in the Latin tongue.

There was, however, a scarcity of preachers and ministers in Elizabeth's
time, and their character was not generally high. What could be expected
when covetous patrons canceled their debts to their servants by bestowing
advowsons of benefices upon their bakers, butlers, cooks, grooms, pages,
and lackeys--when even in the universities there was cheating at
elections for scholarships and fellowships, and gifts were for sale! The
morals of the clergy were, however, improved by frequent conferences, at
which the good were praised and the bad reproved; and these conferences
were "a notable spur unto all the ministers, whereby to apply their
books, which otherwise (as in times past) would give themselves to
hawking, hunting, tables, cards, dice, tipling at the ale house,
shooting, and other like vanities." The clergy held a social rank with
tradespeople; their sons learned trades, and their daughters might go out
to service. Jewell says many of them were the "basest sort of people"
unlearned, fiddlers, pipers, and what not. "Not a few," says Harrison,
"find fault with our threadbare gowns, as if not our patrons but our
wives were the causes of our woe." He thinks the ministers will be better
when the patrons are better, and he defends the right of the clergy to
marry and to leave their goods, if they have any, to their widows and
children instead of to the church, or to some school or almshouse. What
if their wives are fond, after the decease of their husbands, to bestow
themselves not so advisedly as their calling requireth; do not duchesses,
countesses, and knights' wives offend in the like fully so often as they?
And Eve, remarks the old philosopher of Radwinter--"Eve will be Eve,
though Adam would say nay."

The apparel of the clergy, at any rate, was more comely and decent than
it ever was in the popish church, when the priests "went either in divers
colors like players, or in garments of light hue, as yellow, red, green,
etc.; with their shoes piked, their hair crisped, their girdles armed
with silver; their shoes, spurs, bridles, etc., buckled with like metal;
their apparel (for the most part) of silk, and richly furred; their caps
laced and buttoned with gold; so that to meet a priest, in those days,
was to behold a peacock that spreadeth his tail when he danceth before
the hen."

Hospitality among the clergy was never better used, and it was increased
by their marriage; for the meat and drink were prepared more orderly and
frugally, the household was better looked to, and the poor oftener fed.
There was perhaps less feasting of the rich in bishops' houses, and "it
is thought much peradventure, that some bishops in our time do come short
of the ancient gluttony and prodigality of their predecessors;" but this
is owing to the curtailing of their livings, and the excessive prices
whereunto things are grown.

Harrison spoke his mind about dignitaries. He makes a passing reference
to Thomas a Becket as "the old Cocke of Canturburie," who did crow in
behalf of the see of Rome, and the "young cockerels of other sees did
imitate his demeanour." He is glad that images, shrines, and tabernacles
are removed out of churches. The stories in glass windows remain only
because of the cost of replacing them with white panes. He would like to
stop the wakes, guilds, paternities, church-ales, and brides-ales, with
all their rioting, and he thinks they could get on very well without the
feasts of apostles, evangelists, martyrs, the holy-days after Christmas,
Easter, and Whitsuntide, and those of the Virgin Mary, with the rest. "It
is a world to see," he wrote of 1552, "how ready the Catholicks are to
cast the communion tables out of their churches, which in derision they
call Oysterboards, and to set up altars whereon to say mass." And he
tells with sinful gravity this tale of a sacrilegious sow: "Upon the 23rd
of August, the high altar of Christ Church in Oxford was trimly decked up
after the popish manner and about the middest of evensong, a sow cometh
into the quire, and pulled all to the ground; for which heinous fact, it
is said she was afterwards beheaded; but to that I am not privy." Think
of the condition of Oxford when pigs went to mass! Four years after this
there was a sickness in England, of which a third part of the people did
taste, and many clergymen, who had prayed not to live after the death of
Queen Mary, had their desire, the Lord hearing their prayer, says
Harrison, "and intending thereby to give his church a breathing time."

There were four classes in England--gentlemen, citizens, yeomen, and
artificers or laborers. Besides the nobles, any one can call himself a
gentleman who can live without work and buy a coat of arms--though some
of them "bear a bigger sail than his boat is able to sustain." The
complaint of sending abroad youth to be educated is an old one; Harrison
says the sons of gentlemen went into Italy, and brought nothing home but
mere atheism, infidelity, vicious conversation, and ambitious, proud
behavior, and retained neither religion nor patriotism. Among citizens
were the merchants, of whom Harrison thought there were too many; for,
like the lawyers, they were no furtherance to the commonwealth, but
raised the price of all commodities. In former, free-trade times, sugar
was sixpence a pound, now it is two shillings sixpence; raisins were one
penny, and now sixpence. Not content with the old European trade, they
have sought out the East and West Indies, and likewise Cathay and
Tartary, whence they pretend, from their now and then suspicious voyages,
they bring home great commodities. But Harrison cannot see that prices
are one whit abated by this enormity, and certainly they carry out of
England the best of its wares.

The yeomen are the stable, free men, who for the most part stay in one
place, working the farms of gentlemen, are diligent, sometimes buy the
land of unthrifty gentlemen, educate their sons to the schools and the
law courts, and leave them money to live without labor. These are the men
that made France afraid. Below these are the laborers and men who work at
trades, who have no voice in the commonwealth, and crowds of young
serving-men who become old beggars, highway-robbers, idle fellows, and
spreaders of all vices. There was a complaint then, as now, that in many
trades men scamped their work, but, on the whole, husbandmen and
artificers had never been so good; only there were too many of them, too
many handicrafts of which the country had no need. It appears to be a
fault all along in history that there are too many of almost every sort
of people.