act ii. scene 7).

STAGES OF DRUNKENNESS.--All the world’s a pub, And all the men and women merely drinkers; They have their hiccoughs and their staggerings; And one man in a day drinks many glasses, His acts being seven stages. At first the gentleman, Steady and steadfast in his good resolves; And then the wine and bitters, appetiser, And pining, yearning look, leaving like a snail The comfortable bar. And then the arguments, Trying like Hercules with a wrathful frontage To refuse one more two penn’orth. Then the mystified, Full of strange thoughts, unheeding good advice, Careless of honour, sudden, thick, and gutt’ral, Seeking the troubled repetition Even in the bottle’s mouth; and then quite jovial, In fair good humour while the world swims round With eyes quite misty, while his friends him cut, Full of nice oaths and awful bickerings; And so he plays his part. The sixth stage shifts Into the stupid, slipping, drunken man, With ‘blossoms’ on his nose and bleery-eyed, His shrunken face unshaved, from side to side He rolls along; and his unmanly voice, Huskier than ever, fails and flies, And leaves him--staggering round. Last scene of all, That ends this true and painful history, Is stupid childishness, and then oblivion-- Sans watch, sans chain, sans coin, sans everything.

It is impossible to dismiss Shakespeare without some notice of the man himself. But how little is known apart from his works![107] Go to Stratford-on-Avon, visit ‘the birthplace;’ bear those good ladies who show it tell you of the eight villages immortalised by their supposed connection with the poet; hear them repeat the lines ascribed by tradition to Shakespeare himself:--

Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston, Haunted Hillborough, hungry Grafton, Dudging Exhall, Popish Wickford, Beggarly Broom, and drunken Bidford.

Hear them tell the story of Shakespeare’s crab-tree, how that the young poet was one of a party who accepted a challenge for a drinking bout from certain topers at Bidford, how that the hero became so overcome that when he started home he could proceed no further than the crab-tree, and so lay down there and sheltered for the night.[108] Hear, too, of ‘ye Falcon Tavern,’ close to the grammar school where the poet was almost certainly educated. And this is all that the present limit allows.

How died he? We turn to the pages of an inimitable diary, and read thus:

After this act (referring to the making of his will) we surmise the poet’s strength rallied, his friends probably heard of his illness, and crowded around him.... Then came Ben Jonson and Drayton, his chosen ones--they shared his inmost heart. In the city, on the stage, at good men’s feasts.... Their minds had been as one. Shakespeare was sick, and they came to cheer, to sooth, to sympathize with his sufferings. Animated and excited by their long-tried and much-loved society, as the sound of the trumpet rouses the spirit of the dying war-horse, their presence and voices made him forget the weakness that even then was bowing him to the very dust. He left his chamber, and perhaps quitted his bed to join the circle; we think we hear him, with musical voice, exclaim, ‘Sick now! droop now!’ We imagine we behold his pale face flushed with the brilliant animation of happiness, but not of health. We see his eyes flashing with the rays of genius, and sparkling with sentiments of unmingled pleasure. He is himself again, the terrors of death are passed away, the festive banquet is spread, and the warm grasp of friendly hands have driven the thick coming fancies from his lightened heart; he is the life of the party, the spirit of the feasts; but the exertion was far too great for his fragile frame, ‘the choice of death is rare,’ and the destroyer quitted not his splendid victim.[109]

So passed away William Shakespeare, whose influence cannot be better summed up than in the words of a very thoughtful writer:--

In all his works he is a witness ever ready to declare and expose the ruling sin of his day and generation. It is true that he sometimes found a picture gallery among the drunkards, used them in his artistic way, and made them extol the virtues of the thing that lowered them to what they were, the buffoons of his creation; but in his heart of hearts, as he would himself express it, he abhorred the thing, while he could not resist the acknowledgment of its fascination.

The same cannot be said of his friend, Ben Jonson, who, like so many of the dramatists of the period, as Marlowe, Greene, and Nash, was a notoriously free liver. His naturally passionate disposition, so unlike that of his famous friend, was rendered more hasty and vindictive by his addiction to drink. He goes near to condemn himself in his apostrophe ‘To Penshurst’:--

Whose liberal board doth flow With all that hospitality doth know! Where comes no guest but is allowed to eat Without his fear, and of my lord’s own meat; Where the same beer and bread, and self-same wine, That is his lordship’s shall be also mine. And I not fain to sit--as some this day At great men’s tables--and yet dine away. Here no man tells my cups.

To him canary was

The very elixir and spirit of wine.

He could say, though not in the original intention,

Wine is the word that glads the heart of man, And mine’s the house of wine. Sack, says my bush, Be merry and drink sherry, that is my posie.

The following are

_Ben Jonson’s Sociable Rules for the Apollo._

Let none but guests, or clubbers, hither come. Let dunces, fools, sad sordid men keep home. Let learned, civil, merry men, b’invited, And modest too; nor be choice ladies slighted. Let nothing in the treat offend the guests; More for delight than cost prepare the feast. The cook and purvey’r must our palates know; And none contend who shall sit high or low. Our waiters must quick-sighted be, and dumb, And let the drawers quickly hear and come. Let not our wine be mix’d, but brisk and neat, Or else the drinkers may the vintners beat. And let our only emulation be, Not drinking much, but talking wittily. Let it be voted lawful to stir up Each other with a moderate chirping cup; Let not our company be or talk too much; On serious things, or sacred, let’s not touch With sated heads and bellies. Neither may Fiddlers unask’d obtrude themselves to play, With laughing, leaping, dancing, jests, and songs, And whate’er else to grateful mirth belongs, Let’s celebrate our feasts; and let us see That all our jests without reflection be. Insipid poems let no man rehearse, Nor any be compelled to write a verse. All noise of vain disputes must he forborne, And let no lover in a corner mourn, To fight and brawl, like hectors, let none dare, Glasses or windows break, or hangings tear, Whoe’er shall publish what’s here done or said From our society must be banishèd; Let none by drinking do or suffer harm, And, while we stay, let us be always warm.

In one of his plays he absurdly compares the host of the ‘New Inn’ to one of those stone jugs called ‘Long Beards.’

Who’s at the best some round grown thing--_a jug_ _Fac’d with a beard_, that fills out to the guests.

These stone vessels may be recognised as glazed, of a mottled brown colour, with a narrow neck and wide-spreading belly, a rudely executed face with a long flowing beard, and a handle behind. Mr. Chaffers, from whom this description is taken, says that these vessels were in general use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at public-houses, to serve ale to the customers. The largest size held eight pints. Some of them bore coats-of-arms. They were also called _Bellarmines_, after the celebrated cardinal who so opposed the progress of the reformers that he incurred the hatred of the Protestants, who manifested their rancour by satire such as this bottle, which figured a hard-featured son of Adam.

In the _Cynthia’s Revels_ of Ben Jonson, occurs an allusion to that hideous custom, the practice of which he attributes to a representative lover stabbing himself, drinking a health, and writing languishing letters in his blood. In the _Humorous Lieutenant_ of Beaumont and Fletcher, allusion is made to the same practice of gentlemen cutting and stabbing themselves, and mingling their blood with the wine in which they toasted their mistresses. In the _Merchant of Venice_ the Prince of Morocco, with the same meaning, speaks of ‘making an incision for love.’ Jonson occupied the president’s chair in the Apollo room in the _Devil_ Tavern (on the site of which is Child’s bank), surrounded by the ‘eruditi, urbani, hilares, honesti,’ of that age. A contemporary dramatist, Shakerly Marmion, describes him thus:--

The boon Delphic god Drinks _sack_, and keeps his Bacchanalia, And has his incense and his altars smoking, And speaks in sparkling prophecies.

The tavern to which Ben gave such a lasting reputation had for a sign the Devil, and St. Dunstan twigging his nose with a pair of hot tongs. Over the chimney inside were engraved in black marble his _leges conviviales_, and over the door some verses by the same hand, which wind up with a eulogistic encomium upon wine.

Ply it, and you all are mounted, ‘Tis the true Phœbian liquor, Cheers the brains, makes wit the quicker; Pays all debts, cures all diseases, And at once three senses pleases.[110]

Two authors, who would well bear comparison, remain to be mentioned--Barnabie Googe and Thomas Tusser. The latter was a georgical poet of great popularity in the sixteenth century. His poems were faithful pictures of the domestic life of the English farmer of his day. He concerns us now simply for his belief in the strengthening virtues of the hop. Among his ‘Directions for Cultivating a Hop Garden,’ we find:--

The hop for his profit I thus do exalt, It strengtheneth drink, and it favoureth malt; And being well brewed, long kept it will last, And drawing abide--if ye draw not too fast.

His entire poem, after considerable expansion, appeared under the title of _Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandrie_.

Googe wrote upon the same subject.[111] We can glean from him some useful information upon the culture of the vine in England. He says:--

We might have a reasonable good wine growing in many places of this realme; as undoubtedly wee had immediately after the Conquest; tyll partly by slouthfulnesse, not liking anything long that is painefull, partly by civil discord long-continuying, it was left, and so with tyme lost, as appeareth by a number of places in this realme that keepe still the name of vineyardes; and uppon many cliffes and hilles are yet to be seene the rootes and olde remaynes of vines. There is besides Nottingham an auncient house, called Chilwell, in which house remayneth yet, as an auncient monument, in a great wyndowe of glasse, the whole order of planting, pruyning, stamping, and pressing of vines. Beside there is yet also growing an old vine, that yields a grape sufficient to make a right good wine, as was lately proved. There hath, moreover, good experience of late yeears been made, by two noble and honorable barons of this realme, the lorde Cobham and the lorde Willyams of Tame, who had both growyng about their houses as good wines as are in many parts of Fraunce.

FOOTNOTES:

[87] Cf. the Act of 1536 which speaks of ‘sakkes and other sweete wines.’

[88] ‘Now, many kinds of _sacks_ are known and used.’ Howell. _Londinopolis_, p. 103. The palm-sack, which Ben Jonson speaks of, is from Palma Island, one of the Canary group.

[89] Bancroft, _Two Bookes of Epigrammes and Epitaphs_, 1639.

[90] Another variety of this second version is ‘Turkeys, carps, hops, piccarel, and beer.’ Anderson. _Hist. of Commerce_, vol. i., p. 354.

[91] See _Losely Manuscripts_, and other Rare Documents minutely illustrating English History, Biography, and Manners from Henry VIII. to James I., preserved in the Muniment Room at Losely House, edited with Notes by A. J. Kempe.

[92] Camden Society reprint of the _Rutland Papers_.

[93] _Tusser Redivivus_ (1744), p. 81.

[94] _Christen State of Matrimony_ (1543).

[95] _The Anatomie of Abuses_ (1583).

[96] This song is given in Washington’s Irving’s _Sketch Book_, in its original orthography.

[97] _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, act 2, scene i. Cf. Knight, _Pict. Hist._, vol. ii. _Gent. Magazine_, May 1784.

[98] Herrick: _Poems_.

[99] Scott, _Lay of the Last Minstrel_. Cf. also _Christmas with the Poets_; and the ‘Old and Young Courtier’ in the _Percy Reliques_.

[100] In the time of Henry IV. there was a club called ‘La Court de bone Compagnie,’ of which Occleve was a member, and perhaps Chaucer. The word _club_ is connected with _cleave_, which has the twofold meaning of _split and adhere_; reminding one of the equivalent words _partner_ and _associe_, the former pointing to the _division_ of profits, the latter to the _community_ of interests. Cf. Timbs, _Club Life_.

[101] Camden’s assertion will be found criticised towards the end of this book.

[102] By Richard Carew, 1602.

[103] _Anatomie of Abuses_, 1583.

[104] Naogeorgus, _The Popish Kingdome_, Englyshed by Barnabe Googe. London, 1570.

[105] Gascoigne: _The Steele Glas: A Satyre_, 1576.

[106] Since writing the present sketch, the attitude of Shakespeare to temperance has been carefully considered and dealt with in a work entitled _Shakespeare on Temperance_, by Frederick Sherlock.

[107] All that can possibly be verified has been investigated by the indefatigable energy and industry, extending over nearly half a century, of J. O. Halliwell Phillipps Esq., F.R.S., of Hollingbury Copse, Brighton.

[108] Cf. Knight, _Old England_, vol. ii.; and C. F. Green, _Shakespeare’s Crab Tree_.

[109] Diary of the Rev. John Ward (arranged by Charles Severn, 1839).

[110] George Daniel, _Merrie England in the Olden Time_.

[111] _Foure Bookes of Husbandry, 1578._