Master Skylark: A Story of Shakspere's Time

The table had been cleared of trenchers and napkins, the crumbs brushed away, and a clean platter set before each guest with pared cheese, fresh cherries, biscuit, caraways, and...

But on the morning of the fourth day, which chanced to be the 1st of May, as he was standing in the door of a printer’s stall in St. Paul’s Churchyard, watching the gaily dresse...

Christmas morning came and went as if on swallow-wings, in a gale of royal merriment. Four hundred sat to dinner that day in Greenwich halls, and all the palace streamed with ba...

“What will I have o’ the lad?” said Master Carew, mimicking the blacksmith in a most comical way, with a wink at the crowd, as if he had never been angry at all, so quickly coul...

How long he lay there in a stupor of despair Nick Attwood never knew. It might have been days or weeks, for all that he took heed; for he was thinking of his mother, and there w...

At Kensington watering-place, five miles from London town, Nick held the pail for the horses of the Oxford man. “Hello, my buck!” quoth he, and stared at Nick; “where under the...

Master Carew having gotten into his high-topped riding-boots with a great puffing and tugging, they washed their faces at the inn-yard pump by the smoky light of the hostler’s l...

Thomas Pope, the player, and Peter Hemynge, the manager, were there with them at the table under the little window. The play was a comedy of a wicked money-lender named Shylock;...

In a garden near the old bear-yard, among tall rose-trees which would soon be in bloom, a merry company of men were sitting around a table which stood in the angle of a quick-se...

Master Will Shakspere was in town! The thought ran through Nick Attwood’s head like a half-remembered tune. Once or twice he had all but sung it instead of the words of his part...

In September the Lord Admiral’s company made a tour of the Midlands during the great English fairing-time; but Carew did not go with them. For, though still by name master-playe...

Tap-room and hall were crowded with guests, and in the cobbled court horses innumerable stamped and whinnied. The players, with knitted brows, stalked about the quieter nooks, g...

The burgesses of the town council had ordered him to build a chimney upon his house, or pay ten shillings fine; and shillings were none too plenty with Simon Attwood, the tanner...

Nick awoke from a heavy, burning sleep, aching from head to foot. The master-player, up and dressed, stood by the window, scowling grimly out into the ashy dawn. Nick made haste...

Master Nathaniel Gyles, Precentor of St. Paul’s, had pipe-stem legs, and a face like an old parchment put in a box to keep. His sandy hair was thin and straggling, and his fine...

There was an unwonted buzzing in the east end of Stratford on that next to the last day of April, 1596. It was as if some one had thrust a stick into a hive of bees and they had...

The roofs of London were white with frost and rosy with the dawn. In the shadow of the walls the air lay in still pools of smoky blue; and in the east the horizon stretched like...

Little John Summer had a new horn-book that cost a silver penny. The handle was carven and the horn was clear as honey. The other little boys stood round about in speechless env...

But over London came a gale that made the chimneys rock; and after it came ice and snow, sharp, stinging sleet, and thumping hail, with sickening winds from the gray west, sour...

It was past high noon, and they had long since left Warwick castle far behind. “Nicholas,” said the master-player, in the middle of a stream of amazing stories of life in London...

The play-house was an eight-sided, three-storied, tower-like building of oak and plastered lath, upon a low foundation of yellow brick. Two outside stairways ran around the wall...

“Sir Fly hangs dead on the window-pane; The frost doth wind his shroud; Through the halls of his little summer house The north wind cries aloud. We will bury his bones in the mo...

Next morning Carew donned his plum-colored cloak, and with Nick’s hand held tightly in his own went out of the door and down the steps into a drifting fog which filled the stree...

It was a cold, raw day. All morning long the sun had shone through the choking fog as the candle-flame through the dingy yellow horn of an old stable-lantern. But at noon a wind...

So they marched back out of the palace gates, down to the landing-place, the last red sunlight gleaming on the basinets of the tall halberdiers who marched on either side.

An old gray rat came out of its hole, ran swiftly across the floor, and, sitting up, crouched there, peering at Nick. He thought its bare, scaly tail was not a pleasant thing to...

Nick and Cicely were sitting on a bench in the sun beside the tap-room door, munching a savory mutton-pie which Tommy Webster had bought for them. Beside them over the window-si...

He had trim, straight legs, this stranger, and a slender, lithe body in a tawny silken jerkin. Square-shouldered, too, was he, and over one shoulder hung a plum-colored cloak bo...

The ancient city of Coventry stands upon a little hill, with old St. Michael’s steeple and the spire of Holy Trinity church rising above it against the sky; and as the master-pl...

There in the Great House garden under the mulberry-trees stood Master Will Shakspere, with Masters Jonson, Burbage, Hemynge, Condell, and a goodly number more, who had just come...

Nick landed upon a pile of soft earth. It broke away under his feet and threw him forward upon his hands and knees. He got up, a little shaken but unhurt, and stood close to the...

It was different in every way from the simple, pinching round in Stratford, and full of all the comforts of richness and plenty that make life happy—excepting home and mother.

The land was full of morning sounds as the lads trudged along the Warwick road together. An ax rang somewhere deep in the woods of Arden; cart-wheels ruttled on the stony road;...

Night came down on Stratford town that last sweet April day, and the pastured kine came lowing home. Supper-time passed, and the cool stars came twinkling out; but still Nick At...

“After him!—stop him!—catch the rogue!” cried Carew, running out on the cobbles with his ale-can in his hand. “A shilling to the man that brings him back unharmed! No blows, nor...

There was music everywhere,—of pipers and fiddlers, drums, tabrets, flutes, and horns,—and there were dancing bears upon the corners, with minstrels, jugglers, chapmen crying th...

That Master Will Shakspere should be so great seemed passing strange to Nick, he felt so soon at home with him. It seemed as if the master-maker of plays had a magic way of goin...

Down the path and under the gate the rains had washed a shallow rut in the earth. Two pebbles, loosened by the closing of the gate, rolled down the rut and out upon the little s...

At the Bridge street crossing Nick paused irresolute. Around the public pump a chattering throng of housewives were washing out their towels and hanging them upon the market-cro...