Chapter 6

There prevailed an insatiable curiosity for seeing strange sights and hearing strange adventures, with an eager desire for visiting foreign countries, which Shakespeare and all the play-writers satirize. Conversation turned upon the wonderful discoveries of travelers, whose voyages to the New World occupied much of the public attention. The exaggeration which from love of importance inflated the narratives, the poets also take note of. There was also a universal taste for hazard in money as well as in travel, for putting it out on risks at exorbitant interest, and the habit of gaming reached prodigious excess. The passion for sudden wealth was fired by the success of the sea-rovers, news of which inflamed the imagination. Samuel Kiechel, a merchant of Ulm, who was in London in 1585, records that, "news arrived of a Spanish ship captured by Drake, in which it was said there were two millions of uncoined gold and silver in ingots, fifty thousand crowns in coined reals, seven thousand hides, four chests of pearls, each containing two bushels, and some sacks of cochineal--the whole valued at twenty-five barrels of gold; it was said to be one year and a half's tribute from Peru."

The passion for travel was at such a height that those who were unable to accomplish distant journeys, but had only crossed over into France and Italy, gave themselves great airs on their return. "Farewell, monsieur traveler," says Shakespeare; "look, you lisp, and wear strange suits; disable all the benefits of your own country; be out of love with your nativity, and almost chide God for making you that countenance you are, or I will scarce think you have swam in a gondola." The Londoners dearly loved gossip, and indulged in exaggeration of speech and high-flown compliment. One gallant says to another: "O, signior, the star that governs my life is contentment; give me leave to interre myself in your arms."--"Not so, sir, it is too unworthy an enclosure to contain such preciousness!"

Dancing was the daily occupation rather than the amusement at court and elsewhere, and the names of dances exceeded the list of the virtues--such as the French brawl, the pavon, the measure, the canary, and many under the general titles of corantees, jigs, galliards, and fancies. At the dinner and ball given by James I. to Juan Fernandez de Velasco, Constable of Castile, in 1604, fifty ladies of honor, very elegantly dressed and extremely beautiful, danced with the noblemen and gentlemen. Prince Henry danced a galliard with a lady, "with much sprightliness and modesty, cutting several capers in the course of the dance"; the Earl of Southampton led out the queen, and with three other couples danced a brando, and so on, the Spanish visitors looking on. When Elizabeth was old and had a wrinkled face and black teeth, she was one day discovered practicing the dance step alone, to the sound of a fiddle, determined to keep up to the last the limberness and agility necessary to impress foreign ambassadors with her grace and youth. There was one custom, however, that may have made dancing a labor of love: it was considered ill manners for the gentleman not to kiss his partner. Indeed, in all households and in all ranks of society the guest was expected to salute thus all the ladies a custom which the grave Erasmus, who was in England in the reign of Henry VIII., found not disagreeable.

Magnificence of display went hand in hand with a taste for cruel and barbarous amusements. At this same dinner to the Constable of Castile, the two buffets of the king and queen in the audience-chamber, where the banquet was held, were loaded with plate of exquisite workmanship, rich vessels of gold, agate, and other precious stones. The constable drank to the king the health of the queen from the lid of a cup of agate of extraordinary beauty and richness, set with diamonds and rubies, praying his majesty would condescend to drink the toast from the cup, which he did accordingly, and then the constable directed that the cup should remain in his majesty's buffet. The constable also drank to the queen the health of the king from a very beautiful dragon-shaped cup of crystal garnished with gold, drinking from the cover, and the queen, standing up, gave the pledge from the cup itself, and then the constable ordered that the cup should remain in the queen's buffet.

The banquet lasted three hours, when the cloth was removed, the table was placed upon the ground--that is, removed from the dais--and their majesties, standing upon it, washed their hands in basins, as did the others. After the dinner was the ball, and that ended, they took their places at the windows of a roam that looked out upon a square, where a platform was raised and a vast crowd was assembled to see the king's bears fight with greyhounds. This afforded great amusement. Presently a bull, tied to the end of a rope, was fiercely baited by dogs. After this tumblers danced upon a rope and performed feats of agility on horseback. The constable and his attendants were lighted home by half an hundred halberdiers with torches, and, after the fatigues of the day, supped in private. We are not surprised to read that on Monday, the 30th, the constable awoke with a slight attack of lumbago.

Like Elizabeth, all her subjects were fond of the savage pastime of bear and bull baiting. It cannot be denied that this people had a taste for blood, took delight in brutal encounters, and drew the sword and swung the cudgel with great promptitude; nor were they fastidious in the matter of public executions. Kiechel says that when the criminal was driven in the cart under the gallows, and left hanging by the neck as the cart moved from under him, his friends and acquaintances pulled at his legs in order that he might be strangled the sooner.

When Shakespeare was managing his theatres and writing his plays London was full of foreigners, settled in the city, who no doubt formed part of his audience, for they thought that English players had attained great perfection. In 1621 there were as many as ten thousand strangers in London, engaged in one hundred and twenty-one different trades. The poet need not go far from Blackfriars to pick up scraps of German and folk-lore, for the Hanse merchants were located in great numbers in the neighborhood of the steel-yard in Lower Thames Street.

Foreigners as well as contemporary chronicles and the printed diatribes against luxury bear witness to the profusion in all ranks of society and the variety and richness in apparel. There was a rage for the display of fine clothes. Elizabeth left hanging in her wardrobe above three thousand dresses when she was called to take that unseemly voyage down the stream, on which the clown's brogan jostles the queen's slipper. The plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and of all the dramatists, are a perfect commentary on the fashions of the day, but a knowledge of the fashions is necessary to a perfect enjoyment of the plays. We see the fine lady in a gown of velvet (the foreigners thought it odd that velvet should be worn in the street), or cloth of gold and silver tissue, her hair eccentrically dressed, and perhaps dyed, a great hat with waving feathers, sometimes a painted face, maybe a mask or a muffler hiding all the features except the eyes, with a muff, silk stockings, high-heeled shoes, imitated from the "chopine" of Venice, perfumed bracelets, necklaces, and gloves--"gloves sweet as damask roses"--a pocket-handkerchief wrought in gold and silver, a small looking-glass pendant at the girdle, and a love-lock hanging wantonly over the shoulder, artificial flowers at the corsage, and a mincing step. "These fashionable women, when they are disappointed, dissolve into tears, weep with one eye, laugh with the other, or, like children, laugh and cry they can both together, and as much pity is to be taken of a woman weeping as of a goose going barefoot," says old Burton.

The men had even greater fondness for finery. Paul Hentzner, the Brandenburg jurist, in 1598, saw, at the Fair at St. Bartholomew, the lord mayor, attended by twelve gorgeous aldermen, walk in a neighboring field, dressed in a scarlet gown, and about his neck a golden chain, to which hung a Golden Fleece. Men wore the hair long and flowing, with high hats and plumes of feathers, and carried muffs like the women; gallants sported gloves on their hats as tokens of ladies' favors, jewels and roses in the ears, a long love-lock under the left ear, and gems in a ribbon round the neck. This tall hat was called a "capatain." Vincentio, in the "Taming of the Shrew," exclaims: "O fine villain! A silken doublet! A velvet hose! A scarlet cloak! And a capatain hat!" There was no limit to the caprice and extravagance. Hose and breeches of silk, velvet, or other rich stuff, and fringed garters wrought of gold or silver, worth five pounds apiece, are some of the items noted. Burton says, "'Tis ordinary for a gallant to put a thousand oaks and an hundred oxen into a suit of apparel, to wear a whole manor on his back." Even serving-men and tailors wore jewels in their shoes.

We should note also the magnificence in the furnishing of houses, the arras, tapestries, cloth of gold and silver, silk hangings of many colors, the splendid plate on the tables and sideboards. Even in the houses of the middle classes the furniture was rich and comfortable, and there was an air of amenity in the chambers and parlors strewn with sweet herbs and daily decked with pretty nosegays and fragrant flowers. Lights were placed on antique candelabra, or, wanting these at suppers, there were living candleholders. "Give me a torch," says Romeo; "I'll be a candle-holder, and look on." Knowledge of the details of luxury of an English home of the sixteenth century will make exceedingly vivid hosts of allusions in Shakespeare.

Servants were numerous in great households, a large retinue being a mark of gentility, and hospitality was unbounded. During the lord mayor's term in London he kept open house, and every day any stranger or foreigner could dine at his table, if he could find an empty seat. Dinner, served at eleven in the early years of James, attained a degree of epicureanism rivaling dinners of the present day, although the guests ate with their fingers or their knives, forks not coming in till 1611. There was mighty eating and swigging at the banquets, and carousing was carried to an extravagant height, if we may judge by the account of an orgy at the king's palace in 1606, for the delectation of the King and Queen of Denmark, when the company and even their majesties abandoned discretion and sobriety, and "the ladies are seen to roll about in intoxication."

The manners of the male population of the period, says Nathan Drake, seem to have been compounded from the characters of the two sovereigns. Like Elizabeth, they are brave, magnanimous, and prudent; and sometimes, like James, they are credulous, curious, and dissipated. The credulity and superstition of the age, and its belief in the supernatural, and the sumptuousness of masques and pageants at the court and in the city, of which we read so much in the old chronicles, are abundantly reflected in the pages of Jonson, Shakespeare, and other writers.

The town was full of public-houses and pleasure-gardens, but, curiously enough, the favorite place of public parading was the middle aisle of St. Paul's Cathedral--"Paul's Walk," as it was called--which was daily frequented by nobles, gentry, perfumed gallants, and ladies, from ten to twelve and three to six o'clock, to talk on business, politics, or pleasure. Hither came, to acquire the fashions, make assignations, arrange for the night's gaming, or shun the bailiff, the gallant, the gamester, the ladies whose dresses were better than their manners, the stale knight, the captain out of service. Here Falstaff purchased Bardolph. "I bought him," say's the knight, "at Paul's." The tailors went there to get the fashions of dress, as the gallants did to display them, one suit before dinner and another after. What a study was this varied, mixed, flaunting life, this dance of pleasure and license before the very altar of the church, for the writers of satire, comedy, and tragedy!

But it is not alone town life and court life and the society of the fine folk that is reflected in the English drama and literature of the seventeenth century, and here is another wide difference between it and the French literature of the same period; rural England and the popular life of the country had quite as much to do in giving tone and color to the writings of the time. It is necessary to know rural England to enter into the spirit of this literature, and to appreciate how thoroughly it took hold of life in every phase. Shakespeare knew it well. He drew from life the country gentleman, the squire, the parson, the pedantic schoolmaster who was regarded as half conjurer, the yeoman or farmer, the dairy maids, the sweet English girls, the country louts, shepherds, boors, and fools. How he loved a fool! He had talked with all these persons, and knew their speeches and humors. He had taken part in the country festivals-May Day, Plow Monday, the Sheep Shearing, the Morris Dances and Maud Marian, the Harvest Home and Twelfth Night. The rustic merrymakings, the feasts in great halls, the games on the greensward, the love of wonders and of marvelous tales, the regard for portents, the naive superstitions of the time pass before us in his pages. Drake, in his "Shakespeare and his Times," gives a graphic and indeed charming picture of the rural life of this century, drawn from Harrison and other sources.

In his spacious hall, floored with stones and lighted by large transom windows, hung with coats of mail and helmets, and all military accoutrements, long a prey to rust, the country squire, seated at a raised table at one end, held a baronial state and dispensed prodigal hospitality. The long table was divided into upper and lower messes by a huge salt-cellar; and the consequence of the guests was marked by their seats above or below the salt. The distinction extended to the fare, for wine frequently circulated only above the salt, and below it the food was of coarser quality. The literature of the time is full of allusions to this distinction. But the luxury of the table and good cooking were well understood in the time of Elizabeth and James. There was massive eating done in those days, when the guests dined at eleven, rose from the banquet to go to evening prayers, and returned to a supper at five or six, which was often as substantial as the dinner. Gervase Markham in his "English Housewife," after treating of the ordering of great feasts, gives directions for "a more humble feast of an ordinary proportion." This "humble feast," he says, should consist for the first course of "sixteen full dishes, that is, dishes of meat that are of substance, and not empty, or for shew--as thus, for example: first, a shield of brawn with mustard; secondly, a boyl'd capon; thirdly, a boyl'd piece of beef; fourthly, a chine of beef rosted; fifthly, a neat's tongue rosted; sixthly, a pig rosted; seventhly, chewets bak'd; eighthly, a goose rosted; ninthly, a swan rosted; tenthly, a turkey rosted; the eleventh, a haunch of venison rosted; the twelfth, a pasty of venison; the thirteenth, a kid with a pudding in the belly; the fourteenth, an olive-pye; the fifteenth, a couple of capons; the sixteenth, a custard or dowsets. Now to these full dishes may be added sallets, fricases, 'quelque choses,' and devised paste; as many dishes more as will make no less than two and thirty dishes, which is as much as can conveniently stand on one table, and in one mess; and after this manner you may proportion both your second and third course, holding fullness on one half the dishes, and shew in the other, which will be both frugal in the splendor, contentment to the guest, and much pleasure and delight to the beholders." After this frugal repast it needed an interval of prayers before supper.

The country squire was a long-lived but not always an intellectual animal. He kept hawks of all kinds, and all sorts of hounds that ran buck, fox, hare, otter, and badger. His great hall was commonly strewn with marrow-bones, and full of hawks' perches, of hounds, spaniels, and terriers. His oyster-table stood at one end of the room, and oysters he ate at dinner and supper. At the upper end of the room stood a small table with a double desk, one side of which held a church Bible, the other Fox's "Book of Martyrs." He drank a glass or two of wine at his meals, put syrup of gilly-flower in his sack, and always had a tun-glass of small beer standing by him, which he often stirred about with rosemary. After dinner, with a glass of ale by his side he improved his mind by listening to the reading of a choice passage out of the "Book of Martyrs."

This is a portrait of one Henry Hastings, of Dorsetshire, in Gilpin's "Forest Scenery." He lived to be a hundred, and never lost his sight nor used spectacles. He got on horseback without help, and rode to the death of the stag till he was past fourscore.

The plain country fellow, plowman, or clown, is several pegs lower, and described by Bishop Earle as one that manures his ground well, but lets himself lie fallow and untitled. His hand guides the plow, and the plow his thoughts. His mind is not much disturbed by objects, but he can fix a half-hour's contemplation on a good fat cow. His habitation is under a poor thatched roof, distinguished from his barn only by loop-holes that let out the smoke. Dinner is serious work, for he sweats at it as much as at his labor, and he is a terrible fastener on a piece of beef. His religion is a part of his copyhold, which he takes from his landlord and refers it wholly to his discretion, but he is a good Christian in his way, that is, he comes to church in his best clothes, where he is capable only of two prayers--for rain and fair weather.

The country clergymen, at least those of the lower orders, or readers, were distinguished in Shakespeare's time by the appellation "Sir," as Sir Hugh, in the "Merry Wives," Sir Topas, in "Twelfth Night," Sir Oliver, in "As You Like It." The distinction is marked between priesthood and knighthood when Vista says, "I am one that would rather go with Sir Priest than Sir Knight." The clergy were not models of conduct in the days of Elizabeth, but their position excites little wonder when we read that they were often paid less than the cook and the minstrel.

There was great fondness in cottage and hall for merry tales of errant knights, lovers, lords, ladies, dwarfs, friars, thieves, witches, goblins, for old stories told by the fireside, with a toast of ale on the hearth, as in Milton's allusion

"---to the nut-brown ale, With stories told of many a feat"

A designation of winter in "Love's Labour's Lost" is

"When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl."

To "turne a crab" is to roast a wild apple in the fire in order to throw it hissing hot into a bowl of nutbrown ale, into which had been put a toast with some spice and sugar. Puck describes one of his wanton pranks:

"And sometimes I lurk in a gossip's bowl, In very likeness of a roasted crab, And when she drinks against her lips I bob:"

I love no roast, says John Still, in "Gammer Gurton's Needle,"

"I love no rost, but a nut-browne torte, And a crab layde in the fyre; A lytle bread shall do me stead, Much bread I not desire."

In the bibulous days of Shakespeare, the peg tankard, a species of wassail or wish-health bowl, was still in use. Introduced to restrain intemperance, it became a cause of it, as every drinker was obliged to drink down to the peg. We get our expression of taking a man "a peg lower," or taking him "down a peg," from this custom.

In these details I am not attempting any complete picture of the rural life at this time, but rather indicating by illustrations the sort of study which illuminates its literature. We find, indeed, if we go below the surface of manners, sober, discreet, and sweet domestic life, and an appreciation of the virtues. Of the English housewife, says Gervase Markham, was not only expected sanctity and holiness of life, but "great modesty and temperance, as well outwardly as inwardly. She must be of chaste thoughts, stout courage, patient, untired, watchful, diligent, witty, pleasant, constant in friendship, full of good neighborhood, wise in discourse, but not frequent therein, sharp and quick of speech, but not bitter or talkative, secret in her affairs, comportable in her counsels, and generally skillful in the worthy knowledges which do belong to her vocation." This was the mistress of the hospitable house of the country knight, whose chief traits were loyalty to church and state, a love of festivity, and an ardent attachment to field sports. His well-educated daughter is charmingly described in an exquisite poem by Drayton:

He had, as antique stories tell,

He had, as antique stories tell, A daughter cleaped Dawsabel, A maiden fair and free; And for she was her father's heir, Full well she ycond the leir Of mickle courtesy.

"The silk well couth she twist and twine, And make the fine march-pine, And with the needle work: And she couth help the priest to say His matins on a holy day, And sing a psalm in Kirk.

"She wore a frock of frolic green Might well become a maiden queen, Which seemly was to see; A hood to that so neat and fine, In color like the columbine, Ywrought full featously.

"Her features all as fresh above As is the grass that grows by Dove, And lythe as lass of Kent. Her skin as soft as Lemster wool, As white as snow on Peakish Hull, Or swan that swims in Trent.

"This maiden in a morn betime Went forth when May was in the prime To get sweet setywall, The honey-suckle, the harlock, The lily, and the lady-smock, To deck her summer hall."

How late such a simple and pretty picture could have been drawn to life is uncertain, but by the middle of the seventeenth century the luxury of the town had penetrated the country, even into Scotland. The dress of a rich farmer's wife is thus described by Dunbar. She had "a robe of fine scarlet, with a white hood, a gay purse and gingling keys pendant at her side from a silken belt of silver tissue; on each finger she wore two rings, and round her waist was bound a sash of grass-green silk, richly embroidered with silver."