Part 3

Turning from the houses themselves to the home life of the time, we may notice that in the establishments of the ancient nobility the arrangements were still on a large and almost regal scale, savoring yet, in spite of the slow movements conspicuous throughout society, of the feudalism which was now on the wane, and the old customs which, in an age of transition, were gradually being left behind. In the greater households a number of young gentlemen of good family, usually the younger sons of knights and esquires, continued to offer personal service as in former days. Beneath these were the retainers, so-called, who, not living in the house or being liable to any menial duty, attended their lord on occasions of public ceremony; while, in the third place, there were the servants proper, who formed actual portions of the establishment, and on whom its various duties devolved. These were headed by the steward, under whose control was the common herd of serving men and women and pages. With these must be reckoned the poor tutor, passing rich on five marks a year, who sat below the salt, and, as Hall’s satire shows, had to endure all kinds of indignity. And, finally, there was the jester, the privileged personage of the household, who could say and do things on which no one else would venture. “There is no slander in an allowed fool, though he do nothing but rail,” says Olivia in “Twelfth Night”; while the melancholy Jaques, speaking of his desire to assume the motley dress, protests:—

“I must have liberty Withal, as large a charter as the wind, To blow on whom I please; for so fools have.”

Thus the jester was able to find in his wit and position an excuse generally, though not invariably, sufficient to cover every freedom taken with master or guests. But in Shakspere’s time this ancient and long-famous appurtenance to the larger households was already passing out of existence, a fact to which the dramatist himself makes reference in “As You Like It”: “Since the little wit that fools have was silenced, the little foolery that wise men have makes the greater show.”

But when we pass from these huge and ostentatious establishments to the dwellings of the middle and trading classes, we find the transitional character of the period far more marked. Evidences of domestic development and improvement reveal themselves on every side. The essential traits of mediævalism were gradually disappearing; and with the steady realization on the part of the commercial elements in the community of their increasing importance in the complex life of the time, there went many significant changes, indicating the slow collapse of the old _régime_ and the consolidation of society upon its modern foundations.

Nevertheless, in the internal policy and arrangement of the Elizabethan household there was still much that would strike a present-day observer as remarkable—for the older spirit still made itself felt, though ancient forms were passing away. For instance, the relations existing between the head of the house and those about him and dependent upon him, if no longer what they were a hundred years before, had not yet begun to assume their distinguishing modern characteristics. The position of servant, ’prentice, or journeyman still partook of a certain suggestion of servitude, which it has required many years of social evolution to wear partially away. Our nineteenth-century notion of contract based upon terms something like equal, at least in theory,—of so much money paid in return for such and such services rendered,—had not yet established itself; and while the understanding between employer and employed was gradually acquiring more and more of a commercial quality, it had not by any means lost all its personal implications. The ’prentices of the time, for example, were something more and something less than those occupying analogous positions in our own days. They belonged to the establishment, lived with their master, ate at his table, formed part of the family; yet at the same time wore coats of blue—the color which everywhere symbolized servitude, and even constituted, as we know from “The City Madam” and other plays, the livery of Bridewell. They not only were their master’s assistants in the work of the shop; they furnished him also a kind of body-guard, or retinue,—for on occasions when he had to make excursions after dark they went with him, bearing torches or lanterns to light the way, and stout clubs, for use in case of sudden assault. But the personal character of such relationships is perhaps most fully shown in the fact that masters and mistresses dealt out corporal punishment to their servants, a universal practice, which, as Chamberlayne tells us in his “Survey,” was expressly sanctioned by law. In Heywood’s “English Traveller,” young Geraldine accounts for the circumstance that Bess, Mrs. Winscott’s maid, tells slanderous stories about her, by the supposition that—

“Perhaps her mistress Hath stirred her anger by some word or blow, Which she would thus revenge.”

In the establishments of the gentry, the porter’s lodge was the recognized place for the corporal punishment of servants, male and female, a fact to which many references will be found in the contemporary drama; as, for instance, in Shirley’s “Grateful Servant” and “Triumph of Peace,” and Massinger’s “Duke of Milan” and “The City Madam.” Indeed, the whole domestic economy of the time still exhibited much of the semi-patriarchal character of former centuries, when those in authority not only exacted due service from the men and maidens beneath them, but held it also as part of their paternal responsibility to educate and chastise.

As for the children, they too were far differently situated from the boys and girls of the present day. There was as yet no talk of the rights of childhood, and household law was rigid and severe. At school the rudiments of knowledge were pounded into young brains by sheer force of arm; and when the children went from the schoolhouse to the home, they merely exchanged one form of despotism for another. In every well-ordered family, the young people habitually stood or knelt in the presence of their elders, not venturing to sit down without express permission; while correction by blows continued to be their lot so long as they remained under the parental roof and control. Even the children of the wealthiest and noblest families in the land were subjected to the same kind of treatment; and we know that in their early years Queen Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey had been pinched and cuffed and smacked like their less famous sisters. All this has been changed now, and we have grown in some respects wiser, in others simply more sentimental. Yet, with whatever feelings we may look back at the harshness of the past, let us, at all events, have the candor to acknowledge that the discipline which produced men like Sidney and Raleigh and Spenser, and women like the two just referred to, cannot be pronounced altogether a failure.

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And now a word or two about some of the every-day habits of the time. Among the middle classes, as a whole, the ancient doctrine of early to bed and early to rise, upon which Charles Lamb threw such well-merited ridicule, was currently accepted, and this almost of necessity. Artificial lights were as yet in little use, and being thus more dependent upon the natural alternations of day and night, the good folks under the Virgin Queen inevitably kept better hours than do the Londoners of the present time. In Dekker’s “Shoemaker’s Holiday,” the master shoemaker is depicted roundly rating his wife and maids for their laziness in not having breakfast ready, and his anger seems at least a trifle excessive to the modern Cockney, since it subsequently turns out that it is not yet seven o’clock. In reading the old comedies, we are again and again struck by the complementary facts that the activities of life were well advanced while the day was still young, and that few scenes of a social character are laid in the evening time.

As regards eating, important as the subject doubtless is, we need not say much. Comparing the Elizabethan age with the immediate past, we may safely assert that men were more temperate now than they had been—that they fed less grossly, and spent less time at table. But the abstemiousness was, after all, only relative. It was still, from our point of view, a period of gluttony. The early breakfast of meat and ale; the morning luncheon, or bever; the twelve-o’clock dinner, with its exceedingly substantial fare; and, finally, in the evening, what Don Armado, in “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” described as “the nourishment which is called supper,”—all these made up a series of gastronomic undertakings at which we can look back only with mingled amazement and disgust. The staple articles of diet were the various kinds of meat, which were partaken of in immense quantities, with but little bread and only a limited accompaniment of vegetables. But almost as important as the meats was the pudding, for which the English had acquired so great a reputation that a contemporary foreigner fairly goes into a transport of enthusiasm about it. The worst feature of all was the enormous consumption of intoxicating liquors. Tea, coffee, and cocoa—those delightful cups that cheer but not inebriate, for which we moderns can hardly be too thankful—were as yet unknown in England; and, in their absence, every meal was washed down with mighty draughts of ale and sack. Testimony to the drunkenness of the English at this time is appalling, whether we turn to the plays themselves, or to the writings of professed moralists, such as Camden’s “Elizabeth,” Reeve’s “God’s Plea for Nineveh,” Tryon’s “Way to Health,” Dekker’s “Seven Deadly Sins,” Wither’s “Abuses Stript and Whipt,” and Thomas Young’s “England’s Bane,” which may be mentioned as specimens of a voluminous output of similar character. No wonder that, as Iago and Hamlet remind us, the English people had become a byword for inebriety among the nations of the continent.

It must, however, be added, as one favorable sign of the times, that table manners were, on the whole, distinctly improving. Bad as they still were in many important particulars, a change for the better was quite perceptible. For instance, people thought it incumbent on them now to wash before and after dinner, a ceremony all the more needful, as fingers were still commonly used where we use forks, “the laudable use” of which, as Jonson has it, came in towards the close of Shakspere’s life; and generally a certain amount of delicacy in what Ouida has pronounced the essentially disgusting operation of eating, was for the first time beginning to be looked for, at any rate amongst those in the higher ranks of society.

Hardly less important in social economy than eating is dress, which in turn demands a share of our attention. Unfortunately, however, it is impossible in the small space here at our disposal to give any adequate idea of the extent, variety, and extravagance of the fashions prevalent during the period with which we are now dealing, and which form a curious offset to the crudities we have noticed in household furniture and appliances. Harrison, in his “Description of England,” declares that the taste for change and novelty had simply run wild; and he and the outspoken Stubbs are never weary of declaring that while other nations have their own special extravagances, the English gather up and adopt the follies of all the rest of Europe. Here is a passage from another contemporary writer, Thomas Becon, on the same subject: “I think no realm in the world, no, not among the Turks and Saracens, doth so much in the variety of their apparel as the Englishmen do at this present. Their coat must be made after the Italian fashion, their cloak after the use of the Spaniards, their gown after the manner of the Turks; their cap must be of the French fashion; and at the last their dagger must be Scottish with a Venetian tassel of silk. To whom may the Englishman be compared worthily, but to Esop’s crow? For as the crow decked himself with feathers of all kinds of birds, even so doth the vain Englishman.... He is an Englishman; but he is also an Italian, a Spaniard, a Turk, a Frenchman, a Scotch, a Venetian, and at last what not?”

This is only a sample; passages of similar import might be multiplied almost without number. The fashions of the day were indeed absurd and extravagant to the last degree. Richness and picturesqueness were the two things aimed at alike in male and in female costume; and in both cases the colors were as brilliant as the stuffs were costly. The following speech of Sir Glorious Tipto, in Jonson’s “New Inn,” will give some idea of the run of masculine modes, as seen by the vigorous old satirist:—

“I would put on The Savoy chain about my neck, the ruff And cuffs of Flanders; then the Naples hat With the Rome hatband and the Florentine agate, The Milan sword, the cloak of Genoa, set With Brabant buttons—all my given pieces, Except my gloves, the natives of Madrid.”

Over against such a strange human specimen as is thus pictured in the imagination, we may well set the women of the time, as painted, rouged, highly scented, bejewelled, bewigged, in French hoods, starched Cambric ruffs, close-fitting jerkins, and embroidered velvet gowns, they look down upon us from the walls of many an Elizabethan house, and fill the busy scene in many a contemporary play. Women, Lyly thought—so far had the artifices of the toilet carried them,—were in reality the least part of themselves. Some of their freaks of fashion in particular drew down the ire alike of the playwright and of the more serious satirist. One was the habit of painting the face, so frequently referred to by Shakspere and others. A second was the very common practice of wearing false hair, treated at length, along with nearly all similar extravagances of the period, by the irrepressible Stubbs. Every reader of Shakspere will recall the passage from Bassanio’s moralizings on “outward shows,” in which this fashion is alluded to:—

“Look on beauty, And you shall see ’tis purchased by the weight; Which therein works a miracle in nature, Making them lightest that wear most of it; So are those crisped snaky golden locks Which make such wanton gambols with the wind, Upon supposed fairness, often known To be the dowry of a second head, The skull that bred them in the sepulchre;”

and the parallel lines in the sixty-eighth sonnet, in which the same point is touched on, with striking similarity of phrasing. The “golden” color of the locks, here specially emphasized, it may be noted in passing, was particularly popular, on account of the reddish, or, as her flatterers would insist, the golden, hue of Queen Elizabeth’s head-gear. Finally, a great deal was said about the altogether needless and reprehensible extravagance shown in certain small details of dress. We may take the one item of foot-covering as an example. Herein all the worst taste of the day was illustrated; for shoes were made of the most expensive materials, and were frequently covered with artificial flowers and other kinds of decoration. Thus, Massinger, in “The City Madam,” speaks of rich “pantofles in ostentation shown, and roses worth a family”; while Stubbs, in his “Anatomy of Abuses,” refers to shoes “embroidered with gold and silver all over the foot.”

Yet, upon the whole, truth compels us to admit that, if we are to trust contemporary evidence, masculine fashions exceeded in wildness, absurdity, and monstrous barbarity those of the other sex. “Women are bad, but men are worse,”—such is the distinct judgment of Burton, in his “Anatomy of Melancholy”; and while we know from the speculative Jaques that “the city madam,” would sometimes bear “the cost of princes on unworthy shoulders,” Burton again is our authority for the statement that it was no uncommon thing for a man to put a thousand oxen into a suit of apparel, and to wear a whole manor on his back.

I mentioned incidentally just now that class distinctions were severely marked out by differences in costume. Certain sumptuary enactments promulgated about this time undertook to regulate down to the minutest details what should and what should not be worn by the various classes of the community, wealth and social standing being taken together as the basis on which to settle the problems of the toilet and personal adornment. But within the limits allowed by such regulations, and sometimes even irrespective of them (for grandmotherly legislation here as always stood foredoomed to failure) extravagance in fashion remained throughout one of the salient characteristics of the day. The dress of the citizen and his wife, if less elegant, was equally showy, and sometimes quite as expensive, as that of the man of mode and the woman of the court; and so it was through all grades of society, from the highest to the lowest, or, as Harrison put it in his vivid phrase, from the courtier to the carter.

While we are still concerned with this item of dress it is amusing to notice that three hundred years ago people were to be found worrying their tailors and abusing their dressmakers as it is the custom to do at the present day. We might quote illustrations from more than one comedy; but let us once more fall back upon Harrison. “How many times,” says this quaint old writer, “must a garment be sent back to him that made it? What chafing, what fretting, what reproachful language doth the poor workman bear away.... For we must puff and blow and sweat till we drop, that our clothes may stand well upon us.” As we read such a passage as this in its original strange old spelling (which, for the sake of uniformity, we have not here reproduced), we have surely to acknowledge—though it goes much against the grain to do so—that our manners have at bottom changed less than our orthography.

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And now we must leave the ranks of the citizens and trading folks to deal for a moment or two with the more fashionable world.

The society of the time, to employ the word which in modern parlance has assumed a highly specialized meaning, was artificial to an absurd and almost inconceivable extent. Affectations, indeed, made up the larger part of life; and yet beneath them all were a core of sound reality and a healthy element of spontaneity. Euphuism and Italianism had for the time being taken full possession of the whole aristocratic world. Yet Euphuism and Italianism were but external crazes; and it was one mission of the age to show that men could be heroes in the foolishest dress, and do great deeds with the most ridiculous of phrases upon their lips. We could not here enter upon the task of analyzing the life and aims of the men and women who surrounded the Queen at her court; but as an offset to the steady-going middle classes of whom we have had much to say, we must try to present, if only in rapidly sketched outline, the typical Elizabethan gallant, or fashionable young man about town, as we find him portrayed for us in the plays and pamphlets of the time.

The accomplishments of the young man of this description were numerous and varied enough; but they were all in keeping with the character of the perfect gentleman as set forth by Castiglione in his “Cortegiano,” a work which had been translated by Thomas Hoby in 1561, and had forthwith become a kind of text-book or Bible for the youthful fashionable world. He could dance, sing, and play the viol de gamba; fence, ride, and hunt; write verses, turn pretty compliments, and take his part in the exchange of witty repartees, stocking his memory with scraps of plays and stories, lest his own mother-sense should fail him. He could read the three languages of Portia’s summary of requirements in which Falconbridge was lacking—Latin, French, and Italian,—and was perfectly at home in what Jonson calls the “perfumed terms of the day”; he had some acquaintance with the poets in vogue; played cards, tennis, and other fashionable games, as a matter of course; and, last but not least, was learned in all matters connected with the drama, etiquette, and dress.

These were not great qualifications; but such a young man had little need of great qualifications, since he had no great aims or ideals. Let us read over his every day’s experiences and doings as we find them given in Dekker’s “Gull’s Horn Book” and other similar productions, and this statement will call for no further commentary.

He was not an early riser—for, wearied with his overnight exertions, he scarcely ever left his couch till the plebeian Londoner was already thinking seriously about his midday meal. Then began the first important task of the day—the toilet, which was so elaborate a matter that Lyly, in his “Midas,” speaks of its being almost “a whole day’s work to dress.” But when at length he stood erect in his scented doublet and gold-laced cloak, with the roses in his shoes, the bunch of toothpicks in his hat, the watch hung about his neck, his earrings, and his sword, he was ready to partake of a breakfast of meat and ale with such appetite as he could muster for the occasion, and then, jumping on his horse, with his page and horse-boy behind him, to sally forth upon the regular adventures of the day.

Curiously enough, as it may well seem to us, his first place of resort would very probably be St. Paul’s Cathedral. One may well ask what object could possibly take him thither. The answer lies in the fact that St. Paul’s Church in those days was the great place of rendezvous for all the gay and fashionable world. “Thus,” says Dekker, “doth my middle aisle show like the Mediterranean Sea, in which as well the merchant hoists sails to purchase wealth honestly as the rover to light upon prize unjustly. Thus am I like a common mart, where all the commodities (both the good and the bad) are to be bought and sold. Thus, while devotion kneels at her prayers, doth profanation walk under her nose, in contempt of religion.” Francis Osborne, writing as late as 1658, says that it was a fashion of the times for the principal gentry, lords, commons, and professions, to meet in St. Paul’s Church by eleven, and walk in the middle aisle till twelve, and after dinner from three till six, “during which time some discourse of business, others of news.” Many bustling scenes in the old comedies are laid in this same middle aisle, where, amid bills posted as advertisements, and crowds of servants looking out for places, of sharpers, like Jonson’s Shift, with a keen eye for prey, and of loafers, with nothing else to do, all sorts of people strolled about, with their hats on, chatting, laughing, and discussing finance or politics or scandal, till the whole place was alive with the hum of voices, the rustle of raiment, and the jingle of spurs. “I walked in St. Paul’s to see the fashions,” remarks a character in one of Middleton’s plays. There Face threatened to advertise Subtle’s misdeeds; and it is a matter of common history that Falstaff picked Bardolph up in the same spot. It was thus its reputation as a place of general convenience, and one in which to see and to be seen, that gave St. Paul’s the importance it undoubtedly possessed in the social life of the time.