The People For Whom Shakespeare Wrote

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


But it is not alone town life and court life and the society of the fine
folk that is reflected in the English drama and literature of the
seventeenth century, and here is another wide difference between it and
the French literature of the same period; rural England and the popular
life of the country had quite as much to do in giving tone and color to
the writings of the time. It is necessary to know rural England to enter
into the spirit of this literature, and to appreciate how thoroughly it
took hold of life in every phase. Shakespeare knew it well. He drew from
life the country gentleman, the squire, the parson, the pedantic
schoolmaster who was regarded as half conjurer, the yeoman or farmer, the
dairy maids, the sweet English girls, the country louts, shepherds,
boors, and fools. How he loved a fool! He had talked with all these
persons, and knew their speeches and humors. He had taken part in the
country festivals-May Day, Plow Monday, the Sheep Shearing, the Morris
Dances and Maud Marian, the Harvest Home and Twelfth Night. The rustic
merrymakings, the feasts in great halls, the games on the greensward, the
love of wonders and of marvelous tales, the regard for portents, the
naive superstitions of the time pass before us in his pages. Drake, in
his "Shakespeare and his Times," gives a graphic and indeed charming
picture of the rural life of this century, drawn from Harrison and other
sources.

In his spacious hall, floored with stones and lighted by large transom
windows, hung with coats of mail and helmets, and all military
accoutrements, long a prey to rust, the country squire, seated at a
raised table at one end, held a baronial state and dispensed prodigal
hospitality. The long table was divided into upper and lower messes by a
huge salt-cellar; and the consequence of the guests was marked by their
seats above or below the salt. The distinction extended to the fare, for
wine frequently circulated only above the salt, and below it the food was
of coarser quality. The literature of the time is full of allusions to
this distinction. But the luxury of the table and good cooking were well
understood in the time of Elizabeth and James. There was massive eating
done in those days, when the guests dined at eleven, rose from the
banquet to go to evening prayers, and returned to a supper at five or
six, which was often as substantial as the dinner. Gervase Markham in his
"English Housewife," after treating of the ordering of great feasts,
gives directions for "a more humble feast of an ordinary proportion."
This "humble feast," he says, should consist for the first course of
"sixteen full dishes, that is, dishes of meat that are of substance, and
not empty, or for shew--as thus, for example: first, a shield of brawn
with mustard; secondly, a boyl'd capon; thirdly, a boyl'd piece of beef;
fourthly, a chine of beef rosted; fifthly, a neat's tongue rosted;
sixthly, a pig rosted; seventhly, chewets bak'd; eighthly, a goose
rosted; ninthly, a swan rosted; tenthly, a turkey rosted; the eleventh, a
haunch of venison rosted; the twelfth, a pasty of venison; the
thirteenth, a kid with a pudding in the belly; the fourteenth, an
olive-pye; the fifteenth, a couple of capons; the sixteenth, a custard or
dowsets. Now to these full dishes may be added sallets, fricases,
'quelque choses,' and devised paste; as many dishes more as will make no
less than two and thirty dishes, which is as much as can conveniently
stand on one table, and in one mess; and after this manner you may
proportion both your second and third course, holding fullness on one
half the dishes, and shew in the other, which will be both frugal in the
splendor, contentment to the guest, and much pleasure and delight to the
beholders." After this frugal repast it needed an interval of prayers
before supper.

The country squire was a long-lived but not always an intellectual
animal. He kept hawks of all kinds, and all sorts of hounds that ran
buck, fox, hare, otter, and badger. His great hall was commonly strewn
with marrow-bones, and full of hawks' perches, of hounds, spaniels, and
terriers. His oyster-table stood at one end of the room, and oysters he
ate at dinner and supper. At the upper end of the room stood a small
table with a double desk, one side of which held a church Bible, the
other Fox's "Book of Martyrs." He drank a glass or two of wine at his
meals, put syrup of gilly-flower in his sack, and always had a tun-glass
of small beer standing by him, which he often stirred about with
rosemary. After dinner, with a glass of ale by his side he improved his
mind by listening to the reading of a choice passage out of the "Book of
Martyrs."

This is a portrait of one Henry Hastings, of Dorsetshire, in Gilpin's
"Forest Scenery." He lived to be a hundred, and never lost his sight nor
used spectacles. He got on horseback without help, and rode to the death
of the stag till he was past fourscore.

The plain country fellow, plowman, or clown, is several pegs lower, and
described by Bishop Earle as one that manures his ground well, but lets
himself lie fallow and untitled. His hand guides the plow, and the plow
his thoughts. His mind is not much disturbed by objects, but he can fix a
half-hour's contemplation on a good fat cow. His habitation is under a
poor thatched roof, distinguished from his barn only by loop-holes that
let out the smoke. Dinner is serious work, for he sweats at it as much as
at his labor, and he is a terrible fastener on a piece of beef. His
religion is a part of his copyhold, which he takes from his landlord and
refers it wholly to his discretion, but he is a good Christian in his
way, that is, he comes to church in his best clothes, where he is capable
only of two prayers--for rain and fair weather.

The country clergymen, at least those of the lower orders, or readers,
were distinguished in Shakespeare's time by the appellation "Sir," as Sir
Hugh, in the "Merry Wives," Sir Topas, in "Twelfth Night," Sir Oliver, in
"As You Like It." The distinction is marked between priesthood and
knighthood when Vista says, "I am one that would rather go with Sir
Priest than Sir Knight." The clergy were not models of conduct in the
days of Elizabeth, but their position excites little wonder when we read
that they were often paid less than the cook and the minstrel.

There was great fondness in cottage and hall for merry tales of errant
knights, lovers, lords, ladies, dwarfs, friars, thieves, witches,
goblins, for old stories told by the fireside, with a toast of ale on the
hearth, as in Milton's allusion

"---to the nut-brown ale,
With stories told of many a feat"

A designation of winter in "Love's Labour's Lost" is

"When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl."

To "turne a crab" is to roast a wild apple in the fire in order to throw
it hissing hot into a bowl of nutbrown ale, into which had been put a
toast with some spice and sugar. Puck describes one of his wanton pranks:

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

I love no roast, says John Still, in "Gammer Gurton's Needle,"

"I love no rost, but a nut-browne torte,
And a crab layde in the fyre;
A lytle bread shall do me stead,
Much bread I not desire."

In the bibulous days of Shakespeare, the peg tankard, a species of
wassail or wish-health bowl, was still in use. Introduced to restrain
intemperance, it became a cause of it, as every drinker was obliged to
drink down to the peg. We get our expression of taking a man "a peg
lower," or taking him "down a peg," from this custom.

In these details I am not attempting any complete picture of the rural
life at this time, but rather indicating by illustrations the sort of
study which illuminates its literature. We find, indeed, if we go below
the surface of manners, sober, discreet, and sweet domestic life, and an
appreciation of the virtues. Of the English housewife, says Gervase
Markham, was not only expected sanctity and holiness of life, but "great
modesty and temperance, as well outwardly as inwardly. She must be of
chaste thoughts, stout courage, patient, untired, watchful, diligent,
witty, pleasant, constant in friendship, full of good neighborhood, wise
in discourse, but not frequent therein, sharp and quick of speech, but
not bitter or talkative, secret in her affairs, comportable in her
counsels, and generally skillful in the worthy knowledges which do belong
to her vocation." This was the mistress of the hospitable house of the
country knight, whose chief traits were loyalty to church and state, a
love of festivity, and an ardent attachment to field sports. His
well-educated daughter is charmingly described in an exquisite poem by
Drayton:

He had, as antique stories tell,

He had, as antique stories tell,
A daughter cleaped Dawsabel,
A maiden fair and free;
And for she was her father's heir,
Full well she ycond the leir
Of mickle courtesy.

"The silk well couth she twist and twine,
And make the fine march-pine,
And with the needle work:
And she couth help the priest to say
His matins on a holy day,
And sing a psalm in Kirk.

"She wore a frock of frolic green
Might well become a maiden queen,
Which seemly was to see;
A hood to that so neat and fine,
In color like the columbine,
Ywrought full featously.

"Her features all as fresh above
As is the grass that grows by Dove,
And lythe as lass of Kent.
Her skin as soft as Lemster wool,
As white as snow on Peakish Hull,
Or swan that swims in Trent.

"This maiden in a morn betime
Went forth when May was in the prime
To get sweet setywall,
The honey-suckle, the harlock,
The lily, and the lady-smock,
To deck her summer hall."

How late such a simple and pretty picture could have been drawn to life
is uncertain, but by the middle of the seventeenth century the luxury of
the town had penetrated the country, even into Scotland. The dress of a
rich farmer's wife is thus described by Dunbar. She had "a robe of fine
scarlet, with a white hood, a gay purse and gingling keys pendant at her
side from a silken belt of silver tissue; on each finger she wore two
rings, and round her waist was bound a sash of grass-green silk, richly
embroidered with silver."

Shakespeare was the mirror of his time in things small as well as great.
How far he drew his characters from personal acquaintances has often been
discussed. The clowns, tinkers, shepherds, tapsters, and such folk, he
probably knew by name. In the Duke of Manchester's "Court and Society
from Elizabeth to Anne" is a curious suggestion about Hamlet. Reading
some letters from Robert, Earl of Essex, to Lady Rich, his sister, the
handsome, fascinating, and disreputable Penelope Devereaux, he notes, in
their humorous melancholy and discontent with mankind, something in tone
and even language which suggests the weak and fantastic side of Hamlet's
mind, and asks if the poet may not have conceived his character of Hamlet
from Essex, and of Horatio from Southampton, his friend and patron. And
he goes on to note some singular coincidences. Essex was supposed by many
to have a good title to the throne. In person he had his father's beauty
and was all that Shakespeare has described the Prince of Denmark. His
mother had been tempted from her duty while her noble and generous
husband was alive, and this husband was supposed to have been poisoned by
her and her paramour. After the father's murder the seducer had married
the guilty mother. The father had not perished without expressing
suspicion of foul play against himself, yet sending his forgiveness to
his faithless wife. There are many other agreements in the facts of the
case and the incidents of the play. The relation of Claudius to Hamlet is
the same as that of Leicester to Essex: under pretense of fatherly
friendship he was suspicious of his motives, jealous of his actions; kept
him much in the country and at college; let him see little of his mother,
and clouded his prospects in the world by an appearance of benignant
favor. Gertrude's relations with her son Hamlet were much like those of
Lettice with Robert Devereaux. Again, it is suggested, in his moodiness,
in his college learning, in his love for the theatre and the players, in
his desire for the fiery action for which his nature was most unfit,
there are many kinds of hints calling up an image of the Danish Prince.

This suggestion is interesting in the view that we find in the characters
of the Elizabethan drama not types and qualities, but individuals
strongly projected, with all their idiosyncrasies and contradictions.
These dramas touch our sympathies at all points, and are representative
of human life today, because they reflected the human life of their time.
This is supremely true of Shakespeare, and almost equally true of Jonson
and many of the other stars of that marvelous epoch. In England as well
as in France, as we have said, it was the period of the classic revival;
but in England the energetic reality of the time was strong enough to
break the classic fetters, and to use classic learning for modern
purposes. The English dramatists, like the French, used classic histories
and characters. But two things are to be noted in their use of them.
First, that the characters and the play of mind and passion in them are
thoroughly English and of the modern time. And second, and this seems at
first a paradox, they are truer to the classic spirit than the characters
in the contemporary French drama. This results from the fact that they
are truer to the substance of things, to universal human nature, while
the French seem to be in great part an imitation, having root neither in
the soil of France nor Attica. M. Guizot confesses that France, in order
to adopt the ancient models, was compelled to limit its field in some
sort to one corner of human existence. He goes on to say that the present
"demands of the drama pleasures and emotions that can no longer be
supplied by the inanimate representation of a world that has ceased to
exist. The classic system had its origin in the life of the time; that
time has passed away; its image subsists in brilliant colors in its
works, but can no more be reproduced." Our own literary monuments must
rest on other ground. "This ground is not the ground of Corneille or
Racine, nor is it that of Shakespeare; it is our own; but Shakespeare's
system, as it appears to me, may furnish the plans according to which
genius ought now to work. This system alone includes all those social
conditions and those general and diverse feelings, the simultaneous
conjuncture and activity of which constitute for us at the present day
the spectacle of human things."

That is certainly all that any one can claim for Shakespeare and his
fellow-dramatists. They cannot be models in form any more than Sophocles
and Euripides; but they are to be followed in making the drama, or any
literature, expressive of its own time, while it is faithful to the
emotions and feeling of universal human nature. And herein, it seems to
me, lies the broad distinction between most of the English and French
literature of the latter part of the sixteenth and the beginning of the
seventeenth centuries. Perhaps I may be indulged in another observation
on this topic, touching a later time. Notwithstanding the prevalent
notion that the French poets are the sympathetic heirs of classic
culture, it appears to me that they are not so imbued with the true
classic spirit, art, and mythology as some of our English poets, notably
Keats and Shelley.

Ben Jonson was a man of extensive and exact classical erudition; he was a
solid scholar in the Greek and Roman literatures, in the works of the
philosophers, poets, and historians. He was also a man of uncommon
attainments in all the literary knowledge of his time. In some of his
tragedies his classic learning was thought to be ostentatiously
displayed, but this was not true of his comedy, and on the whole he was
too strong to be swamped in pseudo-classicism. For his experience of men
and of life was deep and varied. Before he became a public actor and
dramatist, and served the court and fashionable society with his
entertaining, if pedantic, masques, he had been student, tradesman, and
soldier; he had traveled in Flanders and seen Paris, and wandered on foot
through the length of England. London he knew as well as a man knows his
own house and club, the comforts of its taverns, the revels of lords and
ladies, the sports of Bartholomew Fair, and the humors of suburban
villages; all the phases, language, crafts, professions of high and low
city life were familiar to him. And in his comedies, as Mr. A. W. Ward
pertinently says, his marvelously vivid reproduction of manners is
unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries. "The age lives in his men and
women, his country gulls and town gulls, his imposters and skeldering
captains, his court ladies and would-be court ladies, his puling
poetasters and whining Puritans, and, above all, in the whole ragamuffin
rout of his Bartholomew Fair. Its pastimes, fashionable and
unfashionable, its games and vapors and jeering, its high-polite
courtships and its pulpit-shows, its degrading superstitions and
confounding hallucinations, its clubs of naughty ladies and its offices
of lying news, its taverns and its tobacco shops, its giddy heights and
its meanest depths--all are brought before us by our author."

No, he was not swamped by classicism, but he was affected by it, and just
here, and in that self-consciousness which Shakespeare was free from, and
which may have been more or less the result of his classic erudition, he
fails of being one of the universal poets of mankind. The genius of
Shakespeare lay in his power to so use the real and individual facts of
life as to raise in the minds of his readers a broader and nobler
conception of human life than they had conceived before. This is creative
genius; this is the idealist dealing faithfully with realistic material;
this is, as we should say in our day, the work of the artist as
distinguished from the work of the photographer. It may be an admirable
but it is not the highest work of the sculptor, the painter, or the
writer, that does not reveal to the mind--that comes into relation with
it something before out of his experience and beyond the facts either
brought before him or with which he is acquainted.

What influence Shakespeare had upon the culture and taste of his own time
and upon his immediate audience would be a most interesting inquiry. We
know what his audiences were. He wrote for the people, and the theatre in
his day was a popular amusement for the multitude, probably more than it
was a recreation for those who enjoyed the culture of letters. A taste
for letters was prevalent among the upper class, and indeed was
fashionable among both ladies and gentlemen of rank. In this the court of
Elizabeth set the fashion. The daughter of the duchess was taught not
only to distill strong waters, but to construe Greek. When the queen was
translating Socrates or Seneca, the maids of honor found it convenient to
affect at least a taste for the classics. For the nobleman and the
courtier an intimacy with Greek, Latin, and Italian was essential to
"good form." But the taste for erudition was mainly confined to the
metropolis or the families who frequented it, and to persons of rank, and
did not pervade the country or the middle classes. A few of the country
gentry had some pretension to learning, but the majority cared little
except for hawks and hounds, gaming and drinking; and if they read it was
some old chronicle, or story of knightly adventure, "Amadis de Gaul," or
a stray playbook, or something like the "History of Long Meg of
Westminster," or perhaps a sheet of news. To read and write were still
rare accomplishments in the country, and Dogberry expressed a common
notion when he said reading and writing come by nature. Sheets of news
had become common in the town in James's time, the first newspaper being
the English Mercury, which appeared in April, 1588, and furnished food
for Jonson's satire in his "Staple of News." His accusation has a
familiar sound when he says that people had a "hunger and thirst after
published pamphlets of news, set out every Saturday, but made all at
home, and no syllable of truth in them."

Though Elizabeth and James were warm patrons of the theatre, the court
had no such influence over the plays and players as had the court in
Paris at the same period. The theatres were built for the people, and the
audiences included all classes. There was a distinction between what were
called public and private theatres, but the public frequented both. The
Shakespeare theatres, at which his plays were exclusively performed, were
the Globe, called public, on the Bankside, and the Blackfriars, called
private, on the City side, the one for summer, the other for winter
performances. The Blackfriars was smaller than the Globe, was roofed
over, and needed to be lighted with candles, and was frequented more by
the better class than the more popular Globe. There is no evidence that
Elizabeth ever attended the public theatres, but the companies were often
summoned to play before her in Whitehall, where the appointments and
scenery were much better than in the popular houses.

The price of general admission to the Globe and Blackfriars was sixpence,
at the Fashion Theatre twopence, and at some of the inferior theatres one
penny. The boxes at the Globe were a shilling, at the Blackfriars
one-and-six. The usual net receipts of a performance were from nine to
ten pounds, and this was about the sum that Elizabeth paid to companies
for a performance at Whitehall, which was always in the evening and did
not interfere with regular hours. The theatres opened as early as one
o'clock and not later than three in the afternoon. The crowds that filled
the pit and galleries early, to secure places, amused themselves
variously before the performance began: they drank ale, smoked, fought
for apples, cracked nuts, chaffed the boxes, and a few read the cheap
publications of the day that were hawked in the theatre. It was a rough
and unsavory audience in pit and gallery, but it was a responsive one,
and it enjoyed the acting with little help to illusion in the way of
scenery. In fact, scenery did not exist, as we understand it. A board
inscribed with the name of the country or city indicated the scene of
action. Occasionally movable painted scenes were introduced. The interior
roof of the stage was painted sky-blue, or hung with drapery of that
tint, to represent the heavens. But when the idea of a dark, starless
night was to be imposed, or tragedy was to be acted, these heavens were
hung with black stuffs, a custom illustrated in many allusions in
Shakespeare, like that in the line,

"Hung be the heavens in black, yield day to night"

To hang the stage with black was to prepare it for tragedy. The costumes
of the players were sometimes less niggardly than the furnishing of the
stage, for it was an age of rich and picturesque apparel, and it was not
difficult to procure the cast-off clothes of fine gentlemen for stage
use. But there was no lavishing of expense. I am recalling these details
to show that the amusement was popular and cheap. The ordinary actors,
including the boys and men who took women's parts (for women did not
appear on the stage till after the Restoration) received only about five
or six shillings a week (for Sundays and all), and the first-class actor,
who had a share in the net receipts, would not make more than ninety
pounds a year. The ordinary price paid for a new play was less than seven
pounds; Oldys, on what authority is not known, says that Shakespeare
received only five pounds for "Hamlet."

The influence of the theatre upon politics, contemporary questions that
interested the public, and morals, was early recognized in the restraints
put upon representations by the censorship, and in the floods of attacks
upon its licentious and demoralizing character. The plays of Shakespeare
did not escape the most bitter animadversions of the moral reformers. We
have seen how Shakespeare mirrored his age, but we have less means of
ascertaining what effect he produced upon the life of his time. Until
after his death his influence was mainly direct, upon the play-goers, and
confined to his auditors. He had been dead seven years before his plays
were collected. However the people of his day regarded him, it is safe to
say that they could not have had any conception of the importance of the
work he was doing. They were doubtless satisfied with him. It was a great
age for romances and story-telling, and he told stories, old in new
dresses, but he was also careful to use contemporary life, which his
hearers understood.