The People For Whom Shakespeare Wrote

C >> Charles Dudley Warner >> The People For Whom Shakespeare Wrote


The experiences of the poet began with the rude and rural life of
England, and when he passed into the presence of the court and into the
bustle of great London in an age of amazing agitation, he felt still in
his veins the throb of the popular blood. There were classic affectations
in England, there were masks and mummeries and classic puerilities at
court and in noble houses--Elizabeth's court would well have liked to be
classical, remarks Guizot--but Shakespeare was not fettered by classic
conventionalities, nor did he obey the unities, nor attempt to separate
on the stage the tragedy and comedy of life--"immense and living stage,"
says the writer I like to quote because he is French, upon which all
things are represented, as it were, in their solid form, and in the place
which they occupied in a stormy and complicated civilization. In these
dramas the comic element is introduced whenever its character of reality
gives it the right of admission and the advantage of opportune
appearance. Falstaff appears in the train of Henry V., and Doll
Tear-Sheet in the train of Falstaff; the people surround the kings, and
the soldiers crowd around their generals; all conditions of society, all
the phases of human destiny appear by turns in juxtaposition, with the
nature which properly belongs to them, and in the position which they
naturally occupy. . . .

"Thus we find the entire world, the whole of human realities, reproduced
by Shakespeare in tragedy, which, in his eyes, was the universal theatre
of life and truth."

It is possible to make a brutal picture of the England of Shakespeare's
day by telling nothing that is not true, and by leaving out much that is
true. M. Taine, who has a theory to sustain, does it by a graphic
catalogue of details and traits that cannot be denied; only there is a
great deal in English society that he does not include, perhaps does not
apprehend. Nature, he thinks, was never so completely acted out. These
robust men give rein to all their passions, delight in the strength of
their limbs like Carmen, indulge in coarse language, undisguised
sensuality, enjoy gross jests, brutal buffooneries. Humanity is as much
lacking as decency. Blood, suffering, does not move them. The court
frequents bull and bear baitings; Elizabeth beats her maids, spits upon a
courtier's fringed coat, boxes Essex's ears; great ladies beat their
children and their servants. "The sixteenth century," he says, "is like a
den of lions. Amid passions so strong as these there is not one lacking.
Nature appears here in all its violence, but also in all its fullness. If
nothing has been softened, nothing has been mutilated. It is the entire
man who is displayed, heart, mind, body, senses, with his noblest and
finest aspirations, as with his most bestial and savage appetites,
without the preponderance of any dominant passion to cast him altogether
in one direction, to exalt or degrade him. He has not become rigid as he
will under Puritanism. He is not uncrowned as in the Restoration." He has
entered like a young man into all the lusty experiences of life, every
allurement is known, the sweetness and novelty of things are strong with
him. He plunges into all sensations. "Such were the men of this time,
Raleigh, Essex, Elizabeth, Henry VIII himself, excessive and inconstant,
ready for devotion and for crime, violent in good and evil, heroic with
strange weaknesses, humble with sudden changes of mood, never vile with
premeditation like the roisterers of the Restoration, never rigid on
principle like the Puritans of the Revolution, capable of weeping like
children, and of dying like men, often base courtiers, more than once
true knights, displaying constantly, amidst all these contradictions of
bearing, only the overflowing of nature. Thus prepared, they could take
in everything, sanguinary ferocity and refined generosity, the brutality
of shameless debauchery, and the most divine innocence of love, accept
all the characters, wantons and virgins, princes and mountebanks, pass
quickly from trivial buffoonery to lyrical sublimities, listen
alternately to the quibbles of clowns and the songs of lovers. The drama
even, in order to satisfy the prolixity of their nature, must take all
tongues, pompous, inflated verse, loaded with imagery, and side by side
with this vulgar prose; more than this, it must distort its natural style
and limits, put songs, poetical devices in the discourse of courtiers and
the speeches of statesmen; bring on the stage the fairy world of opera,
as Middleton says, gnomes, nymphs of the land and sea, with their groves
and meadows; compel the gods to descend upon the stage, and hell itself
to furnish its world of marvels. No other theatre is so complicated, for
nowhere else do we find men so complete."

M. Taine heightens this picture in generalizations splashed with
innumerable blood-red details of English life and character. The English
is the most warlike race in Europe, most redoubtable in battle, most
impatient of slavery. "English savages" is what Cellini calls them; and
the great shins of beef with which they fill themselves nourish the force
and ferocity of their instincts. To harden them thoroughly, institutions
work in the same groove as nature. The nation is armed. Every man is a
soldier, bound to have arms according to his condition, to exercise
himself on Sundays and holidays. The State resembles an army; punishments
must inspire terror; the idea of war is ever present. Such instincts,
such a history, raises before them with tragic severity the idea of life;
death is at hand, wounds, blood, tortures. The fine purple cloaks, the
holiday garments, elsewhere signs of gayety of mind, are stained with
blood and bordered with black. Throughout a stern discipline, the axe
ready for every suspicion of treason; "great men, bishops, a chancellor,
princes, the king's relations, queens, a protector kneeling in the straw,
sprinkled the Tower with their blood; one after the other they marched
past, stretched out their necks; the Duke of Buckingham, Queen Anne
Boleyn, Queen Catherine Howard, the Earl of Surrey, Admiral Seymour, the
Duke of Somerset, Lady Jane Grey and her husband, the Duke of
Northumberland, the Earl of Essex, all on the throne, or on the steps of
the throne, in the highest ranks of honor, beauty, youth, genius; of the
bright procession nothing is left but senseless trunks, marred by the
tender mercies of the executioner."

The gibbet stands by the highways, heads of traitors and criminals grin
on the city gates. Mournful legends multiply, church-yard ghosts, walking
spirits. In the evening, before bedtime, in the vast country houses, in
the poor cottages, people talk of the coach which is seen drawn by
headless horses, with headless postilions and coachmen. All this, with
unbounded luxury, unbridled debauchery, gloom, and revelry hand in hand.
"A threatening and sombre fog veils their mind like their sky, and joy,
like the sun, pierces through it and upon them strongly and at
intervals." All this riot of passion and frenzy of vigorous life, this
madness and sorrow, in which life is a phantom and destiny drives so
remorselessly, Taine finds on the stage and in the literature of the
period.

To do him justice, he finds something else, something that might give him
a hint of the innate soundness of English life in its thousands of sweet
homes, something of that great force of moral stability, in the midst of
all violence and excess of passion and performance, which makes a nation
noble. "Opposed to this band of tragic figures," which M. Taine arrays
from the dramas, "with their contorted features, brazen fronts, combative
attitudes, is a troop (he says) of timid figures, tender before
everything, the most graceful and love-worthy whom it has been given to
man to depict. In Shakespeare you will meet them in Miranda, Juliet,
Desdemona, Virginia, Ophelia, Cordelia, Imogen; but they abound also in
the others; and it is a characteristic of the race to have furnished
them, as it is of the drama to have represented them. By a singular
coincidence the women are more of women, the men more of men, here than
elsewhere. The two natures go to its extreme--in the one to boldness, the
spirit of enterprise and resistance, the warlike, imperious, and
unpolished character; in the other to sweetness, devotion, patience,
inextinguishable affection (hence the happiness and strength of the
marriage tie), a thing unknown in distant lands, and in France especially
a woman here gives herself without drawing back, and places her glory and
duty in obedience, forgiveness, adoration, wishing, and pretending only
to be melted and absorbed daily deeper and deeper in him whom she has
freely and forever chosen." This is an old German instinct. The soul in
this race is at once primitive and serious. Women are disposed to follow
the noble dream called duty. "Thus, supported by innocence and
conscience, they introduce into love a profound and upright sentiment,
abjure coquetry, vanity, and flirtation; they do not lie, they are not
affected. When they love they are not tasting a forbidden fruit, but are
binding themselves for their whole life. Thus understood, love becomes
almost a holy thing; the spectator no longer wishes to be malicious or to
jest; women do not think of their own happiness, but of that of the loved
ones; they aim not at pleasure, but at devotion."

Thus far M. Taine's brilliant antitheses--the most fascinating and most
dangerous model for a young writer. But we are indebted to him for a most
suggestive study of the period. His astonishment, the astonishment of the
Gallic mind, at what he finds, is a measure of the difference in the
literature of the two races as an expression of their life. It was
natural that he should somewhat exaggerate what he regards as the source
of this expression, leaving out of view, as he does, certain great forces
and currents which an outside observer cannot feel as the race itself
feels. We look, indeed, for the local color of this English literature in
the manners and habits of the times, traits of which Taine has so
skillfully made a mosaic from Harrison, Stubbes, Stowe, Holinshed, and
the pages of Reed and Drake; but we look for that which made it something
more than a mirror of contemporary manners, vices, and virtues, made it
representative of universal men, to other causes and forces-such as the
Reformation, the immense stir, energy, and ambition of the age (the
result of invention and discovery), newly awakened to the sense that
there was a world to be won and made tributary; that England, and, above
all places on the globe at that moment, London, was the centre of a
display of energy and adventure such as has been scarcely paralleled in
history. And underneath it all was the play of an uneasy, protesting
democracy, eager to express itself in adventure, by changing its
condition, in the joy of living and overcoming, and in literature, with
small regard for tradition or the unities.

When Shakespeare came up to London with his first poems in his pocket,
the town was so great and full of marvels, and luxury, and entertainment,
as to excite the astonishment of continental visitors. It swarmed with
soldiers, adventurers, sailors who were familiar with all seas and every
port, men with projects, men with marvelous tales. It teemed with schemes
of colonization, plans of amassing wealth by trade, by commerce, by
planting, mining, fishing, and by the quick eye and the strong hand.
Swaggering in the coffee-houses and ruffling it in the streets were the
men who had sailed with Frobisher and Drake and Sir Humphrey Gilbert,
Hawkins, and Sir Richard Granville; had perhaps witnessed the heroic
death of Sir Philip Sidney, at Zutphen; had served with Raleigh in Anjou,
Picardy, Languedoc, in the Netherlands, in the Irish civil war; had taken
part in the dispersion of the Spanish Armada, and in the bombardment of
Cadiz; had filled their cups to the union of Scotland with England; had
suffered shipwreck on the Barbary Coast, or had, by the fortune of war,
felt the grip of the Spanish Inquisition; who could tell tales of the
marvels seen in new-found America and the Indies, and, perhaps, like
Captain John Smith, could mingle stories of the naive simplicity of the
natives beyond the Atlantic, with charming narratives of the wars in
Hungary, the beauties of the seraglio of the Grand Turk, and the barbaric
pomp of the Khan of Tartary. There were those in the streets who would
see Raleigh go to the block on the scaffold in Old Palace Yard, who would
fight against King Charles on the fields of Newbury or Naseby, Kineton or
Marston Moor, and perchance see the exit of Charles himself from another
scaffold erected over against the Banqueting House.

Although London at the accession of James I.(1603) had only about one
hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants--the population of England then
numbering about five million--it was so full of life and activity that
Frederick, Duke of Wurtemberg, who saw it a few years before, in 1592,
was impressed with it as a large, excellent, and mighty city of business,
crowded with people buying and selling merchandise, and trading in almost
every corner of the world, a very populous city, so that one can scarcely
pass along the streets on account of the throng; the inhabitants, he
says, are magnificently appareled, extremely proud and overbearing, who
scoff and laugh at foreigners, and no one dare oppose them lest the
street boys and apprentices collect together in immense crowds and strike
to right and left unmercifully without regard to persons.

There prevailed an insatiable curiosity for seeing strange sights and
hearing strange adventures, with an eager desire for visiting foreign
countries, which Shakespeare and all the play-writers satirize.
Conversation turned upon the wonderful discoveries of travelers, whose
voyages to the New World occupied much of the public attention. The
exaggeration which from love of importance inflated the narratives, the
poets also take note of. There was also a universal taste for hazard in
money as well as in travel, for putting it out on risks at exorbitant
interest, and the habit of gaming reached prodigious excess. The passion
for sudden wealth was fired by the success of the sea-rovers, news of
which inflamed the imagination. Samuel Kiechel, a merchant of Ulm, who
was in London in 1585, records that, "news arrived of a Spanish ship
captured by Drake, in which it was said there were two millions of
uncoined gold and silver in ingots, fifty thousand crowns in coined
reals, seven thousand hides, four chests of pearls, each containing two
bushels, and some sacks of cochineal--the whole valued at twenty-five
barrels of gold; it was said to be one year and a half's tribute from
Peru."

The passion for travel was at such a height that those who were unable to
accomplish distant journeys, but had only crossed over into France and
Italy, gave themselves great airs on their return. "Farewell, monsieur
traveler," says Shakespeare; "look, you lisp, and wear strange suits;
disable all the benefits of your own country; be out of love with your
nativity, and almost chide God for making you that countenance you are,
or I will scarce think you have swam in a gondola." The Londoners dearly
loved gossip, and indulged in exaggeration of speech and high-flown
compliment. One gallant says to another: "O, signior, the star that
governs my life is contentment; give me leave to interre myself in your
arms."--"Not so, sir, it is too unworthy an enclosure to contain such
preciousness!"

Dancing was the daily occupation rather than the amusement at court and
elsewhere, and the names of dances exceeded the list of the virtues--such
as the French brawl, the pavon, the measure, the canary, and many under
the general titles of corantees, jigs, galliards, and fancies. At the
dinner and ball given by James I. to Juan Fernandez de Velasco, Constable
of Castile, in 1604, fifty ladies of honor, very elegantly dressed and
extremely beautiful, danced with the noblemen and gentlemen. Prince Henry
danced a galliard with a lady, "with much sprightliness and modesty,
cutting several capers in the course of the dance"; the Earl of
Southampton led out the queen, and with three other couples danced a
brando, and so on, the Spanish visitors looking on. When Elizabeth was
old and had a wrinkled face and black teeth, she was one day discovered
practicing the dance step alone, to the sound of a fiddle, determined to
keep up to the last the limberness and agility necessary to impress
foreign ambassadors with her grace and youth. There was one custom,
however, that may have made dancing a labor of love: it was considered
ill manners for the gentleman not to kiss his partner. Indeed, in all
households and in all ranks of society the guest was expected to salute
thus all the ladies a custom which the grave Erasmus, who was in England
in the reign of Henry VIII., found not disagreeable.

Magnificence of display went hand in hand with a taste for cruel and
barbarous amusements. At this same dinner to the Constable of Castile,
the two buffets of the king and queen in the audience-chamber, where the
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 dragon-shaped 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 queen's buffet.

The banquet lasted three hours, when the cloth was removed, the table was
placed upon the ground--that is, removed from the dais--and 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 slight attack of lumbago.

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 sooner.

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 twenty-one 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 steel-yard in Lower Thames Street.

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, high-heeled
shoes, imitated from the "chopine" of Venice, perfumed bracelets,
necklaces, and gloves--"gloves sweet as damask roses"--a
pocket-handkerchief wrought in gold and silver, a small looking-glass
pendant at the girdle, and a love-lock 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 love-lock 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
serving-men 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
candle-holder, 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, and other writers.

The town was full of public-houses and pleasure-gardens, but, curiously
enough, the favorite place of public parading was the middle aisle of St.
Paul's Cathedral--"Paul's Walk," as it was called--which 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!