A Gentleman Player Part 37

NOTE 8. (Page 46.)

One might fill pages with the mere names of the different cla.s.sifications 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 into puffs, 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-p.e.c.k.e.r, 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.

NOTE 9. (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 sc.r.a.ps 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 Bread Street. 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 shine I 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 rest Held up at tennis, which men do the best With the best gamesters. What things have we seen Done at the Mermaid! Heard words that have been So nimble, and so full of subtle flame.

As if that every one from whence they came Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, And had resolved to live a fool the rest Of his dull life; than when there hath been thrown Wit able enough to justify the town For three days past, wit that might warrant be For the whole city to talk foolishly.

Till that were cancelled; and when that was gone.

We left an air behind us, which alone Was able to make the two next companies Right witty, though but downright fools more wise."

NOTE 10. (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 cla.s.s of its subjects may not have been economically imperative, but a patriarchical government was bound to consult the welfare of each."

When Philip Sidney was at Oxford, his uncle solicited for him "a license to eat flesh during Lent," he being "somewhat subject to sickness."

NOTE 11. (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 of broils 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!"

NOTE 12. (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., ent.i.tled "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," is this: "Taking up a gentleman's son to be a stage player."

See John S. Burn's notices of the "Star Chamber."

NOTE 13. (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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.sociation with the company was too brief, his position too far from that of a "princ.i.p.al actor," for his name to be included in the list.

NOTE 14. (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 occupied a 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 sh.o.r.e 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.

NOTE 15. (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 arms With spear and shield; and in my tender years I 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").

NOTE 16. (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."

NOTE 17. (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 Ess.e.x a ring, which, if ever sent to her as a token of his distress, "might ent.i.tle 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 Ess.e.x. The admiral forbid her to 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, 'G.o.d 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."

NOTE 18. (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 Ess.e.x, 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 Suss.e.x dissuaded. Later, when Ess.e.x 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, G.o.d 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 n.o.bleman so incurred the queen's displeasure that, when she heard that Ess.e.x, commanding the troops in Ireland, had appointed him general of the horse, she reprimanded and ordered Ess.e.x to recall his commission. It was her unhappy fate that all her favorites, save Hatton, should marry.

NOTE 19. (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 Ess.e.x 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 Inst.i.tution of Cyrus, the method of curbing and correcting this unruly pa.s.sion." A wonderfully human and pathetic figure: the vain woman whose gla.s.s belied the gross flattery of her courtiers, yet who could delude herself into believing them sincere; the "greatest Gloriana" whose worshippers declared her favor 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 cla.s.sic author, how to keep from slapping the faces of her maids!

NOTE 20. (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 a familiar 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.

NOTE 21. (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 a.s.sumed 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 circ.u.mstance, that she never ama.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstance 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."

NOTE 22. (Page 87.)

Elizabeth's forenoons, according to Bohun, were usually thus pa.s.sed: "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 pa.s.sed 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."