Chapter 48

The times of Elizabeth and James were visited by some awful casualties and portents. From December, 1602, to the December following, the plague destroyed 30,518 persons in London; the same disease that in the sixth year of Elizabeth killed 20,500, and in the thirty-sixth year 17,890, besides the lord mayor and three aldermen. In January, 1606, a mighty whale came up the Thames within eight miles of London, whose body, seen divers times above water, was judged to be longer than the largest ship on the river; “but when she tasted the fresh water and scented the Land, she returned into the sea.” Not so fortunate was a vast whale cast upon the Isle of Thanet, in Kent, in 1575, which was “twenty Ells long, and thirteen foot broad from the belly to the backbone, and eleven foot between the eyes. One of his eyes being taken out of his head was more than a cart with six horses could draw; the Oyl being boyled out of his head was Parmacittee.” Nor the monstrous fish cast ashore in Lincolnshire in 1564, which measured six yards between the eyes and had a tail fifteen feet broad; “twelve men stood upright in his mouth to get the Oyl.” In 1612 a comet appeared, which in the opinion of Dr. Bainbridge, the great mathematician of Oxford, was as far above the moon as the moon is above the earth, and the sequel of it was that infinite slaughters and devastations followed it both in Germany and other countries. In 1613, in Standish, in Lancashire, a maiden child was born having four legs, four arms, and one head with two faces--the one before, the other behind, like the picture of Janus. (One thinks of the prodigies that presaged the birth of Glendower.) Also, the same year, in Hampshire, a carpenter, lying in bed with his wife and a young child, “was himself and the childe both burned to death with a sudden lightning, no fire appearing outwardly upon him, and yet lay burning for the space of almost three days till he was quite consumed to ashes.” This year the Globe playhouse, on the Bankside, was burned, and the year following the new playhouse, the Fortune, in Golding Lane, “was by negligence of a candle, clean burned down to the ground.” In this year also, 1614, the town of Stratford-on-Avon was burned. One of the strangest events, however, happened in the first year of Elizabeth (1558), when “dyed Sir Thomas Cheney, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, of whom it is reported for a certain, that his pulse did beat more than three quarters of an hour after he was dead, as strongly as if he had been still alive.” In 1580 a strange apparition happened in Somersetshire--three score personages all clothed in black, a furlong in distance from those that beheld them; “and after their appearing, and a little while tarrying, they vanished away, but immediately another strange company, in like manner, color, and number appeared in the same place, and they encountered one another and so vanished away. And the third time appeared that number again, all in bright armour, and encountered one another, and so vanished away. This was examined before Sir George Norton, and sworn by four honest men that saw it, to be true.” Equally well substantiated, probably, was what happened in Herefordshire in 1571: “A field of three acres, in Blackmore, with the Trees and Fences, moved from its place and passed over another field, traveling in the highway that goeth to Herne, and there stayed.” Herefordshire was a favorite place for this sort of exercise of nature. In 1575 the little town of Kinnaston was visited by an earthquake: “On the seventeenth of February at six o'clock of the evening, the earth began to open and a Hill with a Rock under it (making at first a great bellowing noise, which was heard a great way off) lifted itself up a great height, and began to travel, bearing along with it the Trees that grew upon it, the Sheep-folds, and Flocks of Sheep abiding there at the same time. In the place from whence it was first moved, it left a gaping distance forty foot broad, and fourscore Ells long; the whole Field was about twenty Acres. Passing along, it overthrew a Chappell standing in the way, removed an Ewe-Tree planted in the Churchyard, from the West into the East; with the like force it thrust before it High-wayes, Sheep-folds, Hedges, and Trees, made Tilled ground Pasture, and again turned Pasture into Tillage. Having walked in this sort from Saturday in the evening, till Monday noon, it then stood still.” It seems not improbable that Birnam wood should come to Dunsinane.

It was for an age of faith, for a people whose credulity was fed on such prodigies and whose imagination glowed at such wonderful portents, that Shakespeare wrote, weaving into the realities of sense those awful mysteries of the supernatural which hovered not far away from every Englishman of his time.

Shakespeare was born in 1564, when Elizabeth had been six years on the throne, and he died in 1616, nine years before James I., of the faulty spleen, was carried to the royal chapel in Westminster, “with great solemnity, but with greater lamentation.” Old Baker, who says of himself that he was the unworthiest of the knights made at Theobald's, condescends to mention William Shakespeare at the tail end of the men of note of Elizabeth's time. The ocean is not more boundless, he affirms, than the number of men of note of her time; and after he has finished with the statesmen (“an exquisite statesman for his own ends was Robert Earl of Leicester, and for his Countries good, Sir William Cecill, Lord Burleigh”), the seamen, the great commanders, the learned gentlemen and writers (among them Roger Askam, who had sometime been schoolmaster to Queen Elizabeth, but, taking too great delight in gaming and cock-fighting, lived and died in mean estate), the learned divines and preachers, he concludes: “After such men, it might be thought ridiculous to speak of Stage-players; but seeing excellency in the meanest things deserve remembring, and Roscius the Comedian is recorded in History with such commendation, it may be allowed us to do the like with some of our Nation. Richard Bourbidge and Edward Allen, two such actors as no age must ever look to see the like; and to make their Comedies compleat, Richard Tarleton, who for the Part called the Clowns Part, never had his match, never will have. For Writers of Playes, and such as have been players themselves, William Shakespeare and Benjamin Johnson have especially left their Names recommended to posterity.”

Richard Bourbidge (or Burbadge) was the first of the great English tragic actors, and was the original of the greater number of Shakespeare's heroes--Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Shylock, Macbeth, Richard III., Romeo, Brutus, etc. Dick Tarleton, one of the privileged scapegraces of social life, was regarded by his contemporaries as the most witty of clowns and comedians. The clown was a permitted character in the old theatres, and intruded not only between the acts, but even into the play itself, with his quips and antics. It is probable that he played the part of clown, grave-digger, etc., in Shakespeare's comedies, and no doubt took liberties with his parts. It is thought that part of Hamlet's advice to the players--“and let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them,” etc.--was leveled at Tarleton.

The question is often asked, but I consider it an idle one, whether Shakespeare was appreciated in his own day as he is now. That the age, was unable to separate him from itself, and see his great stature, is probable; that it enjoyed him with a sympathy to which we are strangers there is no doubt. To us he is inexhaustible. The more we study him, the more are we astonished at his multiform genius. In our complex civilization, there is no development of passion, or character, or trait of human nature, no social evolution, that does not find expression somewhere in those marvelous plays; and yet it is impossible for us to enter into a full, sympathetic enjoyment of those plays unless we can in some measure recreate for ourselves the atmosphere in which they were written. To superficial observation great geniuses come into the world at rare intervals in history, in a manner independent of what we call the progress of the race. It may be so; but the form the genius shall take is always determined by the age in which it appears, and its expression is shaped by the environments. Acquaintance with the Bedouin desert life of today, which has changed little for three thousand years, illumines the book of Job like an electric light. Modern research into Hellenic and Asiatic life has given a new meaning to the Iliad and the Odyssey, and greatly enhanced our enjoyment of them. A fair comprehension of the Divina Commedia is impossible without some knowledge of the factions that rent Florence; of the wars of Guelf and Ghibelline; of the spirit that banished Dante, and gave him an humble tomb in Ravenna instead of a sepulchre in the pantheon of Santa Croce. Shakespeare was a child of his age; it had long been preparing for him; its expression culminated in him. It was essentially a dramatic age. He used the accumulated materials of centuries. He was playwright as well as poet. His variety and multiform genius cannot otherwise be accounted for. He called in the coinage of many generations, and reissued it purified and unalloyed, stamped in his own mint. There was a Hamlet probably, there were certainly Romeos and Juliets, on the stage before Shakespeare. In him were received the imaginations, the inventions, the aspirations, the superstitions, the humors, the supernatural intimations; in him met the converging rays of the genius of his age, as in a lens, to be sent onward thenceforth in an ever-broadening stream of light.

It was his fortune to live not only in a dramatic age, but in a transition age, when feudalism was passing away, but while its shows and splendors could still be seriously comprehended. The dignity that doth hedge a king was so far abated that royalty could be put upon the stage as a player's spectacle; but the reality of kings and queens and court pageantry was not so far past that it did not appeal powerfully to the imaginations of the frequenters of the Globe, the Rose, and the Fortune. They had no such feeling as we have in regard to the pasteboard kings and queens who strut their brief hour before us in anachronic absurdity. But, besides that he wrote in the spirit of his age, Shakespeare wrote in the language and the literary methods of his time. This is not more evident in the contemporary poets than in the chroniclers of that day. They all delighted in ingenuities of phrase, in neat turns and conceits; it was a compliment then to be called a “conceited” writer.

Of all the guides to Shakespeare's time, there is none more profitable or entertaining than William Harrison, who wrote for Holinshed's chronicle “The Description of England,” as it fell under his eyes from 1577 to 1587. Harrison's England is an unfailing mine of information for all the historians of the sixteenth century; and in the edition published by the New Shakespeare Society, and edited, with a wealth of notes and contemporary references, by Mr. Frederick J. Furnivall, it is a new revelation of Shakespeare's England to the general reader.

Harrison himself is an interesting character, and trustworthy above the general race of chroniclers. He was born in 1534, or, to use his exactness of statement, “upon the 18th of April, hora ii, minut 4, Secunde 56, at London, in Cordwainer streete, otherwise called bowe-lane.” This year was also remarkable as that in which “King Henry 8 polleth his head; after whom his household and nobility, with the rest of his subjects do the like.” It was the year before Anne Boleyn, haled away to the Tower, accused, condemned, and executed in the space of fourteen days, “with sigheing teares” said to the rough Duke of Norfolk, “Hither I came once my lord, to fetch a crown imperial; but now to receive, I hope, a crown immortal.” In 1544, the boy was at St. Paul's school; the litany in the English tongue, by the king's command, was that year sung openly in St. Paul's, and we have a glimpse of Harrison with the other children, enforced to buy those books, walking in general procession, as was appointed, before the king went to Boulogne. Harrison was a student at both Oxford and Cambridge, taking the degree of bachelor of divinity at the latter in 1569, when he had been an Oxford M.A. of seven years' standing. Before this he was household chaplain to Sir William Brooke, Lord Cobham, who gave him, in 1588-89, the rectory of Radwinter, in Essex, which he held till his death, in 1593. In 1586 he was installed canon of Windsor. Between 1559 and 1571 he married Marion Isebrande,--of whom he said in his will, referring to the sometime supposed unlawfulness of priests' marriages, “by the laws of God I take and repute in all respects for my true and lawful wife.” At Radwinter, the old parson, working in his garden, collected Roman coins, wrote his chronicles, and expressed his mind about the rascally lawyers of Essex, to whom flowed all the wealth of the land. The lawyers in those days stirred up contentions, and then reaped the profits. “Of all that ever I knew in Essex,” says Harrison, “Denis and Mainford excelled, till John of Ludlow, alias Mason, came in place, unto whom in comparison these two were but children.” This last did so harry a client for four years that the latter, still called upon for new fees, “went to bed, and within four days made an end of his woeful life, even with care and pensiveness.” And after his death the lawyer so handled his son “that there was never sheep shorn in May, so near clipped of his fleece present, as he was of many to come.” The Welsh were the most litigious people. A Welshman would walk up to London bare-legged, carrying his hose on his neck, to save wear and because he had no change, importune his countrymen till he got half a dozen writs, with which he would return to molest his neighbors, though no one of his quarrels was worth the money he paid for a single writ.

The humblest mechanic of England today has comforts and conveniences which the richest nobles lacked in Harrison's day, but it was nevertheless an age of great luxury and extravagance; of brave apparel, costly and showy beyond that of any Continental people, though wanting in refined taste; and of mighty banquets, with service of massive plate, troops of attendants, and a surfeit of rich food and strong drink.

In this luxury the clergy of Harrison's rank did not share. Harrison was poor on forty pounds a year. He complains that the clergy were taxed more than ever, the church having become “an ass whereon every man is to ride to market and cast his wallet.” They paid tenths and first-fruits and subsidies, so that out of twenty pounds of a benefice the incumbent did not reserve more than L 13 6s. 8d. for himself and his family. They had to pay for both prince and laity, and both grumbled at and slandered them. Harrison gives a good account of the higher clergy; he says the bishops were loved for their painful diligence in their calling, and that the clergy of England were reputed on the Continent as learned divines, skillful in Greek and Hebrew and in the Latin tongue.

There was, however, a scarcity of preachers and ministers in Elizabeth's time, and their character was not generally high. What could be expected when covetous patrons canceled their debts to their servants by bestowing advowsons of benefices upon their bakers, butlers, cooks, grooms, pages, and lackeys--when even in the universities there was cheating at elections for scholarships and fellowships, and gifts were for sale! The morals of the clergy were, however, improved by frequent conferences, at which the good were praised and the bad reproved; and these conferences were “a notable spur unto all the ministers, whereby to apply their books, which otherwise (as in times past) would give themselves to hawking, hunting, tables, cards, dice, tipling at the ale house, shooting, and other like vanities.” The clergy held a social rank with tradespeople; their sons learned trades, and their daughters might go out to service. Jewell says many of them were the “basest sort of people” unlearned, fiddlers, pipers, and what not. “Not a few,” says Harrison, “find fault with our threadbare gowns, as if not our patrons but our wives were the causes of our woe.” He thinks the ministers will be better when the patrons are better, and he defends the right of the clergy to marry and to leave their goods, if they have any, to their widows and children instead of to the church, or to some school or almshouse. What if their wives are fond, after the decease of their husbands, to bestow themselves not so advisedly as their calling requireth; do not duchesses, countesses, and knights' wives offend in the like fully so often as they? And Eve, remarks the old philosopher of Radwinter--“Eve will be Eve, though Adam would say nay.”

The apparel of the clergy, at any rate, was more comely and decent than it ever was in the popish church, when the priests “went either in divers colors like players, or in garments of light hue, as yellow, red, green, etc.; with their shoes piked, their hair crisped, their girdles armed with silver; their shoes, spurs, bridles, etc., buckled with like metal; their apparel (for the most part) of silk, and richly furred; their caps laced and buttoned with gold; so that to meet a priest, in those days, was to behold a peacock that spreadeth his tail when he danceth before the hen.”

Hospitality among the clergy was never better used, and it was increased by their marriage; for the meat and drink were prepared more orderly and frugally, the household was better looked to, and the poor oftener fed. There was perhaps less feasting of the rich in bishops' houses, and “it is thought much peradventure, that some bishops in our time do come short of the ancient gluttony and prodigality of their predecessors;” but this is owing to the curtailing of their livings, and the excessive prices whereunto things are grown.

Harrison spoke his mind about dignitaries. He makes a passing reference to Thomas a Becket as “the old Cocke of Canturburie,” who did crow in behalf of the see of Rome, and the “young cockerels of other sees did imitate his demeanour.” He is glad that images, shrines, and tabernacles are removed out of churches. The stories in glass windows remain only because of the cost of replacing them with white panes. He would like to stop the wakes, guilds, paternities, church-ales, and brides-ales, with all their rioting, and he thinks they could get on very well without the feasts of apostles, evangelists, martyrs, the holy-days after Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide, and those of the Virgin Mary, with the rest. “It is a world to see,” he wrote of 1552, “how ready the Catholicks are to cast the communion tables out of their churches, which in derision they call Oysterboards, and to set up altars whereon to say mass.” And he tells with sinful gravity this tale of a sacrilegious sow: “Upon the 23rd of August, the high altar of Christ Church in Oxford was trimly decked up after the popish manner and about the middest of evensong, a sow cometh into the quire, and pulled all to the ground; for which heinous fact, it is said she was afterwards beheaded; but to that I am not privy.” Think of the condition of Oxford when pigs went to mass! Four years after this there was a sickness in England, of which a third part of the people did taste, and many clergymen, who had prayed not to live after the death of Queen Mary, had their desire, the Lord hearing their prayer, says Harrison, “and intending thereby to give his church a breathing time.”

There were four classes in England--gentlemen, citizens, yeomen, and artificers or laborers. Besides the nobles, any one can call himself a gentleman who can live without work and buy a coat of arms--though some of them “bear a bigger sail than his boat is able to sustain.” The complaint of sending abroad youth to be educated is an old one; Harrison says the sons of gentlemen went into Italy, and brought nothing home but mere atheism, infidelity, vicious conversation, and ambitious, proud behavior, and retained neither religion nor patriotism. Among citizens were the merchants, of whom Harrison thought there were too many; for, like the lawyers, they were no furtherance to the commonwealth, but raised the price of all commodities. In former, free-trade times, sugar was sixpence a pound, now it is two shillings sixpence; raisins were one penny, and now sixpence. Not content with the old European trade, they have sought out the East and West Indies, and likewise Cathay and Tartary, whence they pretend, from their now and then suspicious voyages, they bring home great commodities. But Harrison cannot see that prices are one whit abated by this enormity, and certainly they carry out of England the best of its wares.

The yeomen are the stable, free men, who for the most part stay in one place, working the farms of gentlemen, are diligent, sometimes buy the land of unthrifty gentlemen, educate their sons to the schools and the law courts, and leave them money to live without labor. These are the men that made France afraid. Below these are the laborers and men who work at trades, who have no voice in the commonwealth, and crowds of young serving-men who become old beggars, highway-robbers, idle fellows, and spreaders of all vices. There was a complaint then, as now, that in many trades men scamped their work, but, on the whole, husbandmen and artificers had never been so good; only there were too many of them, too many handicrafts of which the country had no need. It appears to be a fault all along in history that there are too many of almost every sort of people.