Part V Holidays, Festivals, Fairs, etc
Saint George’s Day
We do not know the precise date of William Shakespeare’s birth. That of his baptism is recorded in the parish register at Stratford as the 26th of April, 1564. It was a common practice then to baptize infants when they were three days old, and it has therefore been assumed that William was born on the 23d of April; but the rule, if rule it can be called, was often varied from, and we have not a particle of evidence that it was followed in this instance. It should, moreover, be understood that the 23d of April, as dates were then reckoned in England, corresponded to our 3d of May.
It would be pleasant to think that the poet made his first appearance on the stage of human life on that particular day, for it was Saint George’s day, a great holiday and time of feasting throughout the kingdom, Saint George being the patron saint of England.
There is a book with which Shakespeare was doubtless familiar when he grew up—a collection of ancient stories made by Richard Johnson—in which Saint George figures as one of the “Seven Champions of Christendom.”
From this book, as Mr. A. H. Wall tells us, we learn “how Saint George was imprisoned by the black King of Morocco, after he had fought so miraculously against the Saracens, and slain a frightful dragon, which had destroyed entire cities by the poison of its breath, and had every day devoured a beautiful virgin. Escaping from prison, he carried off a princess he had rescued from the monster, whom neither sword nor spear could pierce, and brought her to England, where the twain ‘lived happily ever after,’ in Warwickshire, where, sometime in the third century they died. The war-cry of England was ‘Saint George!’ as that of France was ‘Montjoye Saint Denis!’; and to this day ‘by George!’ is an exclamation derived from the ancient custom of swearing by that Saint.
“The ancient ballad of Saint George and the Dragon (printed in the Percy Reliques) tells us that the shire in which he died was that in which he first saw the light; that his mother expired while giving him birth; that a weird lady of the woods stole him when an infant and educated him by magic power to become a great warrior; and that on his person, prophetic of his future career and greatness, were three very mysterious marks—on one shoulder a cross, on the breast a dragon, and round one leg a garter. Their meanings were revealed when he fought so astoundingly as a crusader in the Holy Land, when he killed the magic dragon in Egypt, and rescued the King’s daughter, Silene or Sabra, and, after his death, when Edward III. founded the knightly Order of the Garter, and made Saint George its patron.
“Centuries before that, the soldiers had adopted him as their special patron, as had also not a few of the old trade guilds. In some of the provincial towns and cities regulations for the annual ceremony of ‘Riding the George’ were enforced by penalties more or less severe. An ancestor of Shakespeare’s, John Arden, of Warwickshire, ‘bequethed his white harneis complete to the church of Ashton for a George to were it.’ This was in the reign of the seventh Harry.... There was also an ancient play called ‘The Holy Martyr St. George,’ which, sadly degenerated in modern times, used to be played by rustics as a piece of coarse buffoonery.”
The “Riding of Saint George” was forbidden by Henry VIII., but the custom was nevertheless kept up in out-of-the-way places even after Edward VI. had made more stringent laws against it.
It appears from the ancient records of the Guild that Stratford was one of the very last places in which the celebration was finally suppressed. Shakespeare in his boyhood doubtless saw it carried out with all its antique splendor. Mr. Wall gives the following description of the festival:—
“How great would be the preparations! Old arms and armor from the Guild’s collection would be burnished up to be used by the town watch and the archers. All sorts of choice dishes and rare wines would be in demand for mighty feasting. The suit of white armor, of an antique pattern, which hung above the altar of Saint George, would be taken down and cleaned with reverential care, and from all the surrounding towns and villages, castles and mansions, guests would come flocking in, day after day, filling the numerous inns to overflowing.
“On the day, gravel would be spread along the procession’s route, and barricades erected; house fronts would be adorned with plants and tapestry. Chambers (small cannon) would be fired at daybreak, and great shouts of ‘Saint George!’ would drown the echoes of their explosions. The Master of the Guild, its schoolmaster (a truly learned man), with the monitors and scholars of the Grammar School in their long blue gowns and flat caps, with the priests of the Guild Chapel, would all walk in the procession, with their Guild brothers and sisters, with representatives of the trades practised in the town, and even with the old Almshouse people, smiling and chattering and wagging their ancient heads. Nobody would be forgotten who had a fair claim to be conspicuously remembered then. The ‘Bedals’ would be there of course in all their native dignity, solemn and severe. The town ‘waits’ would ‘discourse most excellent music’ with drums and fifes and other cheek-distending wind-instruments. The bells in the church and chapel tower would be ringing out right jovial peals. Then would come the town trumpeters marching before the High Bailiff, Aldermen, and Chamberlains, with their long furred scarlet robes, their chains of office, and the newly-gilded maces borne before them.
“Then, riding on horseback, his armor and drawn sword flashing back the rays of a fitful sun, would be seen the living representative of Saint George, with his great white plume floating from his white helm, as the soft, sweet, playing wind tossed it to and fro. Behind him, creating as he came such a roar of honest irrepressible laughter as would have done your heart good to hear, would waddle the dragon (oh! such a dragon!) a ‘property’ one, with two boys inside it, led in chains, with the spear of Saint George down its throat. And then the vicar, his curates, and the gentry, in all the grandeur of silk and satin lace and spangles, would do the ‘Riding’ honor, with gold and silver chains about their necks, spurs at their heels, and swords by their sides, the Lord and Lady of the Manor riding before them. And these last-named were indeed dignitaries of great consequence, being, you must know, no lesser personages than Ambrose Dudley, ‘the Good Earl’ and his good lady, patrons of learning and rewarders of virtue, from their great castle at Warwick.
“But there is one feature of the Riding which must not on any account be forgotten. This was the Egyptian Princess, personated by the prettiest girl in Stratford (where pretty girls were always found, and are still not few). She came on a raised wheeled platform with a golden crown upon her head (made of gilded pasteboard), and by her side a pretty pet lamb, garlanded with the earliest flowers of the spring, blushing (she, not the lamb) and smiling, and looking down very charming—as I tenderly imagine.
“And all the time they were passing, the bells would ring out right merrily, and the people shout most lustily; and from every throat, blending thunderously, would come the cry, the cry that England’s foes had trembled at in many a desperate fight: ‘Saint George for England, Saint George for Merry England!’
“It was customary to announce this Riding by sound of trumpet from the Market Cross some time before it took place. And so I can fancy John Shakespeare, the glover, with all his clever work-people, men and women, artists and mechanics, joining the crowd that listens to the town trumpeter’s loud-ringing voice here at the Cross, and opposite the Cage, where once lived Judith Shakespeare. By John, stands—in my fancy—Mary, his wife, with little Willie holding tightly to her hand, in a state of intense excitement; and almost before the crier has spoken his lines this laughing little fellow, who has been looking on with such wide-open wondering brown eyes, is suddenly lifted into the air and from above his father’s head cries, in his childishly treble voice, ‘Saint George for England!’ for his mother had said, ‘’T is his right to lead the shouting here to-day, dear neighbors all, for on Saint George’s day my boy was born.’”
Easter
The festival of Easter would generally come before Saint George’s day. When Shakespeare was a boy the Reformation had somewhat mitigated the ancient rigor and austerity of Lent, but Easter was none the less a joyous and jubilant anniversary.
“Surely,” as Mr. Charles Knight remarks, “there was something exquisitely beautiful in the old custom of going forth into the fields before the sun had risen on Easter-day, to see him mounting over the hills with a tremulous motion, as if it were an animate thing bounding in sympathy with the redeemed of mankind. The young poet [Shakespeare] might have joined his simple neighbors on this cheerful morning, and yet have thought with Sir Thomas Browne, ‘We shall not, I hope, disparage the Resurrection of our Redeemer if we say that the sun doth not dance on Easter-day.’ But one of the most glorious images of one of his early plays [Romeo and Juliet] has given life and movement to the sun:—
" ‘Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund Day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain’s tops.’
Saw he not the sun dance—heard he not the expression of the undoubting belief that the sun danced—as he went forth into Stratford meadows in the early twilight of Easter-day?”
Sir John Suckling, in his Ballad upon a Wedding, alludes prettily to this old superstition in the description of the bride:—
“But O she dances such a way!
No sun upon an Easter day
Is half so fine a sight.”
Perhaps Shakespeare had this bit of folk-lore in mind when he wrote these lines in Coriolanus (v. 4. 52):—
“The trumpets, sackbuts, psalteries and fifes,
Tabors and cymbals and the shouting Romans,
Make the sun dance.”
Easter was a favorite time for games of ball and many of the athletic sports described in the preceding pages.
The Perambulation of the Parish
On the road to Henley-in-Arden, a few hundred yards from John Shakespeare’s house in Henley Street, there stood until about fifty years ago an ancient boundary-tree—an elm to which reference is made in records of the 16th century. From that point the boundary of the borough continued to “the two elms in Evesham highway”; and so on, from point to point, round to the tree first mentioned. Once a year, in Rogation Week (six weeks after Easter), the clergy, the magistrates and public officers, and the inhabitants, including the boys of the Grammar School, assembled under this elm for the perambulation of the boundaries. They marched in procession, with waving banners and poles crowned with garlands, over the entire circuit of the parish limits. Under each “gospel-tree,” as at the first boundary elm, a passage from Scripture was read, a collect recited, and a psalm sung.
These parochial processions were kept up after the Reformation. In 1575 a form of devotion for the “Rogation Days of Procession” was prescribed, “without addition of any superstitious ceremonies heretofore used”; and it was subsequently ordered that the curate on such occasions “shall admonish the people to give thanks to God in the beholding of God’s benefits,” and enforce the scriptural denunciations against those who remove their neighbors’ landmarks. Izaak Walton tells how the pious Hooker encouraged these annual ceremonies: “He would by no means omit the customary time of procession, persuading all, both rich and poor, if they desired the preservation of love and their parish rights and liberties, to accompany him in his perambulation; and most did so: in which perambulation he would usually express more pleasant discourse than at other times, and would then always drop some loving and facetious observations, to be remembered against the next year, especially by the boys and young people; still inclining them, and all his present parishioners, to meekness and mutual kindnesses and love, because love thinks not evil, but covers a multitude of infirmities.”
“And so,” remarks Mr. Knight, after quoting this passage, “listening to the gentle words of some venerable Hooker of his time, would the young Shakespeare walk the bounds of his native parish. One day would not suffice to visit its numerous gospel-trees. Hours would be spent in reconciling differences among the cultivators of the common fields; in largesses to the poor; in merry-making at convenient halting-places. A wide parish is this of Stratford, including eleven villages and hamlets. A district of beautiful and varied scenery is this parish—hill and valley, wood and water.... For nearly three miles from Welcombe Greenhill the boundary lies along a wooded ridge, opening prospects of surpassing beauty. There may the distant spires of Coventry be seen peeping above the intermediate hills, and the nearer towers of Warwick lying cradled in their surrounding woods.... At the northern extremity of the high land, which principally belongs to the estate of Clopton, and which was doubtless a park in early times, we have a panoramic view of the valley in which Stratford lies, with its hamlets of Bishopton, Little Wilmecote, Shottery, and Drayton. As the marvellous boy of the Stratford Grammar School then looked upon that plain, how little could he have foreseen the course of his future life! For twenty years of his manhood he was to have no constant dwelling-place in that his native town; but it was to be the home of his affections. He would be gathering fame and opulence in an almost untrodden path, of which his young ambition could shape no definite image; but in the prime of his life he was to bring his wealth to his own Stratford, and become the proprietor and the contented cultivator of the loved fields that he now saw mapped out at his feet. Then, a little while, and an early tomb under that grey tower—a tomb so to be honored in all ages to come
“‘That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.’”
May-Day and the Morris-Dance
The first of May was in the olden time one of the most delightful of holidays; but its harmless sports were an abomination in the eyes of the Puritans. Philip Stubbes, in his Anatomie of Abuses (1583) says: “Against May, every parish, town, and village assemble themselves together, both men, women, and children, old and young, even all indifferently: and either going all together, or dividing themselves into companies, they go, some to the woods and groves, some to the hills and mountains, some to one place, some to another, where they spend all the night in pastimes; and in the morning they return, bringing with them birch boughs and branches of trees to deck their assemblies withal.... But their chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their May pole, which they bring home with great veneration, as thus:—They have twenty or forty yoke of oxen, every ox having a sweet nosegay of flowers tied on the tip of his horns, and these oxen draw home this May pole, which is covered all over with flowers and herbs, bound round about with strings, from the top to the bottom, and sometime painted with variable colors, with two or three hundred men, women, and children following it, with great devotion. And thus being reared up, with handkerchiefs and flags streaming on the top, they strew the ground about, bind green boughs about it, set up summer halls, bowers, and arbors hard by it. And then fall they to banquet and feast, to leap and dance about it, as the heathen people did at the dedication of their idols, whereof this is a perfect pattern, or rather the thing itself.”
Milton, though a Puritan, writes in a different vein in his Song on May Morning:—
“Now the bright morning-star, day’s harbinger,
Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her
The flowery May, who from her green lap throws
The yellow cowslip and the pale primrose.
Hail, bounteous May, that dost inspire
Mirth and youth and warm desire!
Woods and groves are of thy dressing,
Hill and dale doth boast thy blessing.
Thus we salute thee with our early song,
And welcome thee, and wish thee long.”
Kings and queens did not disdain to join in these rural sports. Henry VIII. and Queen Katherine enjoyed them; and he, in the early part of his reign, rose on May Day very early and went with his courtiers to the wood to “fetch May,” or green boughs. In the Midsummer-Night’s Dream (iv. 1.) Theseus, Hippolyta, and their train are in the wood in “the vaward of the day,” and find the pairs of lovers sleeping under the influence of Puck’s magic; and Theseus says:—
“No doubt they rose up early to observe
The rite of May, and, hearing our intent,
Came here in grace of our solemnity.”
The boys and girls, as the sour Stubbes has told us, were not slack to observe this rite of May. In a manuscript in the British Museum, entitled The State of Eton School, and dated 1560, we read that “on the day of Saint Philip and Saint James [May 1st], if it be fair weather, and the master grants leave, those boys who choose it may rise at four o’clock, to gather May branches, if they can do it without wetting their feet: and that on that day they adorn the windows of the bedchamber with green leaves, and the houses are perfumed with fragrant herbs.”
The May-pole was often kept standing from year to year on the village green or in some public place in town or city, and in such cases was usually painted with various colors. One described by Tollet was “painted yellow and black in spiral lines.” In the Midsummer-Night’s Dream (iii. 2. 296), Hermia sneers at the taller Helena as a “painted May-pole.”
In Henry VIII. (v. 4. 15) when the Porter is angry at the crowds that have made their way into the palace yard, and calls for “a dozen crab-tree staves” to drive them out, a man says to him:—
“Pray, sir, be patient: ’t is as much impossible—
Unless we sweep ’em from the door with cannons—
To scatter ’em, as ’t is to make ’em sleep
On May-day morning; which will never be.”
Of course the day was a holiday in the Stratford school, and we may be sure that William made the most of it.
An important feature in the May-day games in Shakespeare’s time was the Morris-Dance, in which a group of characters associated with the stories of Robin Hood were the chief actors. These were Robin himself; his faithful companion, Little John; Friar Tuck, to whom Drayton alludes as
“Tuck the merry friar which many a sermon made
In praise of Robin Hood, his outlaws and their trade;”
Maid Marian, the mistress of Robin; the Fool, who was like the domestic buffoon of the time, with motley dress, the cap and bells, and additional bells tied to his arms and ankles; the Piper, sometimes called Tom Piper, the musician of the troop; and the Hobby-horse, represented by a man equipped with a pasteboard frame forming the head and hinder parts of a horse, with a long mantle or footcloth reaching nearly to the ground, to hide the man’s legs; and the Dragon, another pasteboard device, much like the one in the Riding of Saint George described above (page 169). In addition to these characters there were a number of common dancers, in fantastic costume, with bells about their feet.
The forms and number of the characters varied much with time and place. Sometimes only one or two of those just mentioned were introduced in the dance, and sometimes others were added.
During the reign of Elizabeth the Puritans, by their sermons and invectives, did much to interfere with this feature of the May-day games. Friar Tuck was deemed a remnant of Popery, and the Hobby-horse an impious superstition. The opposition to them became so bitter that they were generally omitted from the sport. Allusions to the omission of the Hobby-horse are frequent in the plays of the time; as in Love’s Labour’s Lost (iii. 1. 30): “The hobby-horse is forgot;” and Hamlet (iii. 2. 142): “or else he shall suffer not thinking on, with the hobby-horse, whose epitaph is, ‘For, O, for, O, the hobby-horse is forgot.’” This “epitaph” (which is also referred to in Love’s Labour’s Lost) appears to be a quotation from some popular song of the time. So in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Women Pleased (iv. 1.) we find: “Shall the hobby-horse be forgot then?” and in Ben Jonson’s Entertainment at Althorp: “But see, the hobby-horse is forgot.”
Friar Tuck is alluded to by Shakespeare in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (iv. 1. 36), where one of the Outlaws who have seized Valentine exclaims:—
“By the bare scalp of Robin Hood’s fat friar,
This fellow were a king for our wild faction!”
That he kept his place in the morris-dance in the reign of Elizabeth is evident from Warner’s Albion’s England, published in 1586: “Tho’ Robin Hood, little John, friar Tuck, and Marian deftly play”; but he is not heard of afterwards. In Ben Jonson’s Masque of the Gipsies, written about 1620, the Clown notes his absence from the dance: “There is no Maid Marian nor Friar amongst them.”
Maid Marian also officiated as the Queen or Lady of the May, who had figured in the May-day festivities long before Robin Hood was introduced into them. She was probably at first the representative of the goddess Flora in the ancient Roman festival celebrated at the same season of the year.
Maid Marian was sometimes personated by a young woman, but oftener by a boy or young man in feminine dress. Later, when the morris-dance had degenerated into coarse foolery, the part was taken by a clown. In 1 Henry IV. (iii. 3. 129), Falstaff refers contemptuously to “Maid Marian” as a low character, which she had doubtless become by the time (1596 or 1597) when that play was written.
The connection of the morris-dance with May-day is alluded to in All’s Well that Ends Well (ii. 2. 25): “as fit... as a morris for May-day”; but it came to be a feature of many other holidays and festivals, and was often one of the sports introduced to amuse the crowd at fairs and similar gatherings.
Mr. Knight gives us this fancy picture of the May-day games as they probably were in Shakespeare’s boyhood:—
“An impatient group is gathered under the shade of the old elms, for the morning sun casts his slanting beams dazzlingly across the green. There is the distant sound of tabor and bagpipe:—
" ‘Hark, hark! I hear the dancing,
And a nimble morris prancing;
The bagpipe and the morris bells
That they are not far hence us tells.’
From out of the leafy Arden are they bringing in the May-pole. The oxen move slowly with the ponderous wain; they are garlanded, but not for the sacrifice. Around the spoil of the forest are the pipers and the dancers—maidens in blue kirtles, and foresters in green tunics. Amidst the shouts of young and old, childhood leaping and clapping its hands, is the May-pole raised. But there are great personages forthcoming—not so great, however, as in more ancient times. There are Robin Hood and Little John, in their grass-green tunics; but their bows and their sheaves of arrows are more for show than use. Maid Marian is there; but she is a mockery—a smooth-faced youth in a watchet-colored tunic, with flowers and coronets, and a mincing gait, but not the shepherdess who
" ‘with garlands gay
Was made the Lady of the May.’
There is farce amidst the pastoral. The age of unrealities has already in part arrived. Even among country-folk there is burlesque. There is personation, with a laugh at the things that are represented. The Hobby-horse and the Dragon, however, produce their shouts of merriment. But the hearty morris-dancers soon spread a spirit of genial mirth among all the spectators. The clownish Maid Marian will now ‘caper upright like a wild Morisco.’ Friar Tuck sneaks away from his ancient companions to join hands with some undisguised maiden; the Hobby-horse gets rid of pasteboard and his foot-cloth; and the Dragon quietly deposits his neck and tail for another season. Something like the genial chorus of Summer’s Last Will and Testament is rung out:—
" ‘Trip and go, heave and ho,
Up and down, to and fro,
From the town to the grove,
Two and two, let us rove,
A-Maying, a-playing;
Love hath no gainsaying,
So merrily trip and go.’
“The early-rising moon still sees the villagers on that green of Shottery. The Piper leans against the May-pole; the featliest of dancers still swim to the music:—
" ‘So have I seen
Tom Piper stand upon our village-green,
Backed with the May-pole, whilst a jocund crew
In gentle motion circularly threw
Themselves around him.’
The same beautiful writer—one of the last of our golden age of poetry—has described the parting gifts bestowed upon the ‘merry youngsters’ by
" ‘the Lady of the May
Set in an arbor (on a holiday)
Built by the May-pole, where the jocund swains
Dance with the maidens to the bagpipe’s strains,
When envious night commands them to be gone.’ "
These latter quotations are from William Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals (book ii. published in 1616), and the poet goes on to tell how the Lady
“Calls for the merry youngsters one by one,
And, for their well performance, soon disposes
To this a garland interwove with roses;
To that a carved hook or well-wrought scrip;
Gracing another with her cherry lip;
To one her garter; to another then
A handkerchief cast o’er and o’er again:
And none returneth empty that hath spent
His pains to fill their rural merriment.”
Whitsuntide
Whitsuntide, the season of Pentecost, or the week following Whitsunday (the seventh Sunday after Easter), was another period of festivity in old English times.
The morris-dance was commonly one of its features, as of the May-day sports. In Henry V. (ii. 4. 25) the Dauphin alludes to it:—
“‘I say ’t is meet we all go forth
To view the sick and feeble parts of France;
And let us do it with no show of fear,
No, with no more than if we heard that England
Were busied with a Whitsun morris-dance.”
Another custom connected with the festival was the “Whitsun-ale.” Ale was so common a drink in England that it became a part of the name of various festal meetings. A “leet-ale” was a feast at the holding of a court-leet; a “lamb-ale” was a sheep-shearing merry-making; a “bride-ale” was a bridal, as we now call it—always a festive occasion; and a “church-ale” was connected with some ecclesiastical holiday.
John Aubrey, the eminent antiquary, writing in the latter part of the 17th century, says that in his grandfather’s days the church-ale at Whitsuntide furnished all the money needed for the relief of the parish poor. He adds: “In every parish is, or was, a church-house, to which belonged spits, crocks, etc., utensils for dressing provision. Here the housekeepers met and were merry, and gave their charity. The young people were there too, and had dancing, bowling, shooting at butts, without scandal.”
The Puritan Stubbes, in the book before quoted (page 176, above), took a different view of these social gatherings. He says: “In certain towns, where drunken Bacchus bears sway, against Christmas and Easter, Whitsuntide, or some other time, the churchwardens of every parish, with the consent of the whole parish, provide half a score or twenty quarters of malt, whereof some they buy of the church stock, and some is given them of the parishioners themselves, every one conferring somewhat, according to his ability; which malt, being made into very strong ale or beer, is set to sale, either in the church or some other place assigned to that purpose. Then when this is set abroach, well is he that can get the soonest to it, and spend the most at it.”
Old parish records show that considerable money was obtained at these festivals, not only by the sale of ale and food, but from the charges made for certain games, among which “riffeling” (raffling) is included. Neighboring parishes often united in these church picnics, as they might be called. Richard Carew, in his Survey of Cornwall (1602), says: “The neighboring parishes at these times lovingly visit one another, and this way frankly spend their money together.”
Whitsuntide was also a favorite time for theatrical performances. Long before Shakespeare’s day the miracle-plays and moralities had been popular at this season; and these, as we have seen (page 17), were still kept up when he was a boy, together with “pastorals” and other “pageants” such as Perdita alludes to in The Winter’s Tale (iv. 4. 134):—
“Come, take your flowers:
Methinks I play as I have seen them do
In Whitsun pastorals;”
and such as the disguised Julia describes in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (iv. 4. 163):—
“At Pentecost,
When all our pageants of delight were play’d,
Our youth got me to play the woman’s part,
And I was trimm’d in Madam Julia’s gown,
Which served me as fit, by all men’s judgments,
As if the garment had been made for me;
Therefore, I know she is about my height.
And at that time I made her weep a-good,
For I did play a lamentable part.
Madam, ’t was Ariadne, passioning
For Theseus’ perjury and unjust flight,
Which I so lively acted with my tears
That my poor mistress, moved therewithal,
Wept bitterly; and would I might be dead
If I in thought felt not her very sorrow!”
This is in one of the earliest of his plays, and may be a reminiscence of some simple attempt at dramatic representation which he had seen at Stratford.
Midsummer Eve
The Vigil of Saint John the Baptist, or the evening before the day (June 24) dedicated to that Saint, was commonly called Midsummer Eve, and was observed with curious ceremonies in all parts of England. On that evening the people used to go into the woods and break down branches of trees, which they brought home and fixed over their doors with great demonstrations of joy. This was originally done to make good the Scripture prophecy concerning the Baptist, that many should rejoice in his birth.
It was also customary on this occasion for old and young, of both sexes, to make merry about a large bonfire made in the street or some open place. They danced around it, and the young men and boys leaped over it, not to show their agility, but in compliance with an ancient custom. These diversions they kept up till midnight, and sometimes later.
According to some old writers these fires were made because the Saint was said in Holy Writ to be “a shining light.” Others, while not denying this, added that the fires served to drive away the dragons and evil spirits hovering in the air; and one asserts that in some countries bones were burnt in this “bone-fire,” or bonfire, “for the dragons hated nothing more than the stench of burning bones.”
In the Ordinary of the Company of Cooks at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1575, we read among other regulations: “And also that the said Fellowship of Cooks shall yearly of their own cost and charge maintain and keep the bone-fires, according to the ancient custom of the town on the Sand-hill; that is to say, one bone-fire on the Even of the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, commonly called Midsummer Even, and the other on the Even of the Feast of St. Peter the Apostle, if it shall please the mayor and aldermen of the town for the time being to have the same bone-fires.”
In a manuscript record of the expenses of the royal household for the first year of the reign of Henry VIII. (1513), under date of July 1st is the entry: “Item, to the pages of the hall, for making of the King’s bone-fire upon Midsummer Eve, xs.”
There were many popular superstitions connected with Midsummer Eve. It was believed that if any one sat up fasting all night in the church porch, he would see the spirits of those who were to die in the parish during the ensuing twelve months come and knock at the church door, in the order in which they were to die.
It was customary on this evening to gather certain plants which were supposed to have magical properties. Fern-seed, for instance, being on the back of the leaf and in some species hardly discernible, was thought to have the power of rendering the possessor invisible, if it was gathered at this time. In some places it was believed that the seed must be got at midnight by letting it fall into a plate without touching the plant.
We find many allusions to fern-seed in Elizabethan writers. In 1 Henry IV. (ii. 1. 95) Gadshill says: “We steal as in a castle, cock-sure; we have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible”; to which the Chamberlain replies: “Nay, by my faith, I think ye are more beholding to the night than to fern-seed for your walking invisible.” In Ben Jonson’s New Inn (i. 1) one of the characters says:—
“I had
No medicine, sir, to go invisible,
No fern-seed in my pocket.”
In Plaine Percevall, a tract of the time of Elizabeth, we read: “I think the mad slave hath tasted on a fern-stalk, that he walks so invisible.”
Scot, in his Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), directs us, as protection against witches, to “hang boughs (hallowed on Midsummer Day) at the stall door where the cattle stand.”
St. John’s wort, vervain, orpine, and rue were among the plants gathered on Midsummer Eve on account of their supernatural virtue. Each was supposed to have its peculiar use in popular magic. Orpine, for instance, was set in clay upon pieces of slate, and called a “Midsummer man.” According as the stalk was found next morning to incline to the right or the left, the anxious maiden knew whether her lover would prove true to her or not. Young women also sought at this time for what they called pieces of coal, but in reality hard, black, dead roots, often found under the living mugwort; and these they put under their pillows that they might dream of their lovers. Lupton, in his Notable Things (1586), says: “It is certainly and constantly affirmed that on Midsummer Eve there is found, under the root of mugwort, a coal which saves or keeps them safe from the plague, carbuncle, lightning, the quartan ague, and from burning, that bear the same about them.” He also says it is reported that the same remarkable “coal” is found at the same time of the year under the root of plantain; and he adds that he knows this “to be of truth,” for he has found it there himself!
Midsummer Eve was also thought to be a season productive of madness. In Twelfth Night (iii. 4. 61) Olivia says of Malvolio’s eccentric behavior, “Why, this is very midsummer madness.” Steevens, the Shakespearian critic, believed that the Midsummer-Night’s Dream owed its title to this association of mental vagaries with the season. John Heywood, writing in the latter part of the 16th century, alludes to the same belief when he says:—
“As mad as a March hare; when madness compares,
Are not Midsummer hares as mad as March hares?”
It is not improbable, however, that the Midsummer-Night’s Dream was so called because it was to be first represented at Midsummer, or because it was like the plays commonly performed in connection with the festivities of that season. A drama in which fairies were leading characters was in keeping with the time of year when fairies and spirits were supposed to manifest themselves to mortal vision either in vigils or in dreams.
Christmas
Passing by sundry minor festivals of the year, we come to Christmas, which is a day of feasting and merrymaking in England even now, though but a “starveling Christmas” compared with that of the olden time. “Where now,” as Mr. Knight asks, “is the real festive exhilaration of Christmas; the meeting of all ranks as children of a common father; the tenant speaking freely in his landlord’s hall; the laborers and their families sitting at the same great oak table; the Yule Log brought in with shout and song? ‘No night is now with hymn or carol blest.’ There are singers of carols even now at a Stratford Christmas. Warwickshire has retained some of its ancient carols. But the singers are wretched chorus-makers, according to the most unmusical style of all the generations from the time of the Commonwealth.... But in an age of music we may believe that one young dweller in Stratford gladly woke out of his innocent sleep, after the evening bells had rung him to rest, when in the stillness of the night the psaltery was gently touched before his father’s porch, and he heard, one voice under another, these simple and solemn strains:—
" ’As Joseph was a-walking
He heard an angel sing,
This night shall be born
Our heavenly King.
" ‘He neither shall be born
In housen nor in hall,
Nor in the place of Paradise,
But in an ox’s stall.
" ‘He neither shall be clothed
In purple nor in pall,
But all in fair linen,
As were babies all.
" ‘He neither shall be rock’d
In silver nor in gold,
But in a wooden cradle
That rocks on the mould.’
London has perhaps this carol yet, among its halfpenny ballads. A man who had a mind attuned to the love of what was beautiful in the past has preserved it; but it was for another age. It was for the age of William Shakespeare. It was for the age when superstition, as we call it, had its poetical faith....
“Such a night was a preparation for a ‘happy Christmas.’ The Cross of Stratford was garnished with the holly, the ivy, and the bay. Hospitality was in every house; but the hall of the great landlord of the parish was a scene of rare conviviality. The frost or the snow will not deter the principal tenants and friends from the welcome of Clopton. There is the old house, nestled in the woods, looking down upon the little town. Its chimneys are reeking; there is bustle in the offices; the sound of the trumpeters and the pipers is heard through the open door of the great entrance; the steward marshals the guests; the tables are fast filling. Then advance, courteously, the master and the mistress of the feast. The Boar’s head is brought in with due solemnity; the wine-cup goes round; and perhaps the Saxon shout of Waes-hael and Drink-hael may still be shouted. The boy-guest who came with his father, the tenant of Ingon, has slid away from the rout; for the steward, who loves the boy, has a sight to make him merry. The Lord of Misrule and his jovial attendants are rehearsing their speeches; and the mummers from Stratford are at the porch. Very sparing are the cues required for the enactment of this short drama. A speech to the esquire, closed with a merry jest; something about ancestry and good Sir Hugh; the loud laugh; the song and the chorus; and the Lord of Misrule is now master of the feast. The Hall is cleared.... There is dancing till curfew; and then a walk in the moonlight to Stratford, the pale beam shining equally upon the dark resting-place in the lonely aisle of the Clopton who is gone, and upon the festal hall of the Clopton who remains, where some loiterers of the old and young still desire ‘to burn this night with torches.’”
This is a fancy picture, but it is in keeping with the life of the time. Whether the boy Shakespeare spent a Christmas in just this manner or not, we may be sure that he enjoyed the merriment of the season to the full.
There are a few allusions to Christmas in the plays, besides the beautiful one in Hamlet already quoted (page 138) in another connection. In Love’s Labour’s Lost (v. 2. 462) “a Christmas comedy” is alluded to; and in The Taming of the Shrew (ind. 2. 140), when Sly the tinker learns that a comedy is to be played for his entertainment, he asks whether a “comonty” is “like a Christmas gambold or a tumbling-trick.”
Sheep-Shearing
Our English ancestors had other holidays than those associated with the ecclesiastical year, but only one or two of them can be mentioned here.
The time of sheep-shearing was celebrated by a rural feast such as Shakespeare has introduced in The Winter’s Tale. The shearing took place in the spring as soon as the weather became warm enough for the sheep to lay aside their winter clothing without danger. John Dyer, in his poem entitled The Fleece (1757), fixes the proper time thus:—
“If verdant elder spreads
Her silver flowers, if humble daisies yield
To yellow crowfoot and luxuriant grass,
Gay shearing-time approaches.”
Drayton, writing in Shakespeare’s day (page 3 above), describes a shearing-feast in the Vale of Evesham, not far from Stratford:—
“The shepherd-king,
Whose flock hath chanced that year the earliest lamb to bring,
In his gay baldric sits at his low, grassy board,
With flawns, curds, clouted cream, and country dainties stored;
And whilst the bagpipe plays, each lusty jocund swain
Quaffs syllabubs in cans to all upon the plain;
And to their country girls, whose nosegays they do wear,
Some roundelays do sing, the rest the burden bear.”
In The Winter’s Tale, instead of the shepherd-king we have the more poetical shepherdess-queen. Dr. F. J. Furnivall, in his introduction to this play, remarks: “How happily it brings Shakespeare before us, mixing with his Stratford neighbors at their sheep-shearing and country sports, enjoying the vagabond peddler’s gammon and talk, delighting in the sweet Warwickshire maidens, and buying them ‘fairings,’ opening his heart afresh to all the innocent mirth and the beauty of nature around him!” Doubtless he enjoyed these rural festivities in his later years, after he settled down in his own house at Stratford, no less heartily than he did in his boyhood, when his father may have had sheep to shear.
Mr. Knight remarks: “There is a minuteness of circumstance amidst the exquisite poetry of this scene [in The Winter’s Tale] which shows that it must have been founded upon actual observation, and in all likelihood upon the keen and prying observation of a boy occupied and interested with such details. Surely his father’s pastures and his father’s homestead might have supplied all these circumstances. His father’s man might be the messenger to the town, and reckon upon ‘counters’ the cost of the sheep-shearing feast. ‘Three pounds of sugar, five pounds of currants, rice’—and then he asks, ‘What will this sister of mine do with rice?’ In Bohemia the clown might, with dramatic propriety, not know the use of rice at a sheep-shearing; but a Warwickshire swain would have the flavor of cheese-cakes in his mouth at the first mention of rice and currants. Cheese-cakes and warden-pies were the sheep-shearing delicacies.”
Shakespeare evidently knew for what the rice was wanted at the feast; but the clown, who was no cook, might be familiar with the flavor of the cakes without understanding all the ingredients that entered into their composition.
Thomas Tusser, in his Five Hundred Points of Husbandry (1557), describing this festival, makes the shepherd say:—
“Wife, make us a dinner, spare flesh neither corn,
Make wafers and cakes, for our sheep must be shorn;
At sheep-shearing, neighbors none other things crave
But good cheer and welcome like neighbors to have.”
Harvest-Home
The ingathering of the harvest was a season of great rejoicing from the most remote antiquity. “Sowing is hope; reaping, fruition of the expected good.” To the husbandman to whom the fear of wet, blights, and other mischances has been a source of anxiety between seedtime and harvest, the fortunate completion of his long labors cannot fail to be a relief and a delight.
Paul Hentzner, writing in 1598 at Windsor, says: “As we were returning to our inn we happened to meet some country-people celebrating their harvest-home. Their last load of corn they crown with flowers, having besides an image richly dressed, by which perhaps they would signify Ceres. This they keep moving about, while men and women, riding through the streets in the cart, shout as loud as they can till they arrive at the barn.” In the reign of James I., Moresin, another foreigner, saw a figure made of corn drawn home in a cart, with men and women singing to the pipe and the drum.
Matthew Stevenson, in the Twelve Months (1661), under August, alludes to this festival thus: “The furmenty-pot welcomes home the harvest-cart, and the garland of flowers crowns the captain of the reapers; the battle of the field is now stoutly fought. The pipe and the tabor are now busily set a-work; and the lad and the lass will have no lead on their heels. O, ’t is the merry time wherein honest neighbors make good cheer, and God is glorified in his blessings on the earth.”
Robert Herrick, in his Hesperides (1648), refers to the harvest-home as follows:—
“Come, sons of summer, by whose toil
We are the lords of wine and oil,
By whose tough labor and rough hands
We rip up first, then reap our lands,
Crown’d with the ears of corn, now come,
And to the pipe sing harvest-home.
Come forth, my lord, and see the cart,
Drest up with all the country art.
See here a mawkin, there a sheet
As spotless pure as it is sweet:
The horses, mares, and frisking fillies
Clad all in linen, white as lilies;
The harvest swains and wenches bound
For joy to see the hock-cart crown’d.
About the cart hear how the rout
Of rural younglings raise the shout;
Pressing before, some coming after,
Those with a shout, and these with laughter.
Some bless the cart, some kiss the sheaves,
Some prank them up with oaken leaves;
Some cross the fill-horse; some, with great
Devotion, stroke the home-borne wheat.
* * * * *
Well, on, brave boys, to your lord’s hearth,
Glittering with fire; where, for your mirth,
You shall see, first, the large and chief
Foundation of your feast, fat beef;
With upper stories, mutton, veal,
And bacon (which makes full the meal),
With several dishes standing by,
And here a custard, there a pie,
And here all-tempting frumenty.”
The “hock-cart” was the cart that brought home the last load of corn. It was sometimes called the “hockey-cart”; and one of the dainties of the feast was the “hockey-cake.” In an almanac for 1676, under August, we read:—
“Hocky is brought home with hallowing,
Boys with plum-cake the cart following.”
The harvest-home is alluded to in 1 Henry IV. (i. 3. 35), where Hotspur, describing the “popinjay” lord who came to demand his prisoners, says:—
“and his chin new-reap’d
Show’d like a stubble-land at harvest-home.”
In The Merry Wives of Windsor (ii. 2. 287) Falstaff says of Mistress Ford, to whom he intends to make love, “and there’s my harvest-home.”
In the interlude in The Tempest (iv. 1. 134) the dance of the Reapers was apparently a reminiscence of harvest-home sports. Iris says:—
“You sunburnt sicklemen, of August weary,
Come hither from the furrow and be merry.
Make holiday; your rye-straw hats put on,
And these fresh nymphs encounter every one
In country footing.”
The following passage in the 12th Sonnet, though it has nothing of festival joyousness, may have been suggested by the ceremonial bringing home of the last load of grain:—
“When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,” etc.
Markets and Fairs
In a quiet country town like Stratford the weekly market was an occasion of some interest to the boys as to their elders. There is still such a market on Fridays at Stratford, when wares of many sorts are exposed for sale in the streets, and people from the neighboring villages come to buy. In old times there would have been a greater throng of buyers and sellers. “The housewife from her little farm would ride in gallantly between her paniers laden with butter, eggs, chickens, and capons. The farmer would stand by his pitched corn, and, as Harrison complains, if the poor man handled the sample with the intent to purchase his humble bushel, the man of many sacks would declare that it was sold. There, before shops were many and their stocks extensive, would come the dealers from Birmingham and Coventry, with wares for use and wares for show,—horse-gear and women-gear, Sheffield whittles, and rings with posies.”
We find a number of allusions to these markets in Shakespeare’s plays. In Love’s Labour’s Lost (v. 2. 318) Biron, ridiculing Boyet, says of him:—
“He is art’s pedler, and retails his wares
At wakes and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs.”
In the same play (iii. 1. 111) there is an allusion to the old proverb, “Three women and a goose make a market,” where Costard, referring to Moth’s nonsense about “the fox, the ape, and the humble-bee,” followed by the goose that made up four, says, “And he [the goose] ended the market.”
In As You Like It (iii. 2. 104) Touchstone, making fun of Orlando’s verses which Rosalind has just read, says: “I’ll rhyme you so eight years together, dinners and suppers and sleeping-hours excepted: it is the right butter-women’s rank to market”; that is, the metre is just like the jog-trot of countrywomen riding to market one after another, with their butter and eggs.
In Richard III. (i. 1. 160) Gloster, after saying that he means to “marry Warwick’s youngest daughter,” adds:—
“But yet I run before my horse to market:
Clarence still breathes, Edward still lives and reigns;
When they are gone, then must I count my gains.”
He means, in the language of a more familiar proverb, that he is counting his chickens before they are hatched; that is, he is too hasty in reckoning upon the success of his plans.
In 1 Henry VI. (iii. 2) Joan of Arc gets into Rouen with her soldiers in the guise of countrymen bound for market:—
“Enter La Pucelle, disguised, and Soldiers dressed like countrymen, with sacks upon their backs.
Pucelle. These are the city gates, the gates of Rouen,
Through which our policy must make a breach.
Take heed, be wary how you place your words;
Talk like the vulgar sort of market-men,
That come to gather money for their corn.
If we have entrance—as I hope we shall—
And that we find the slothful watch but weak,
I’ll by a sign give notice to our friends
That Charles the Dauphin may encounter them.
1 Soldier. Our sacks shall be a mean to sack the city,
And we be lords and rulers over Rouen;
Therefore we’ll knock. [Knocks.
Guard. [Within.] Qui est la?
Pucelle. Paisans, pauvres gens de France:
Poor market-folks, that come to sell their corn.
Guard. [Opening the gates.] Enter, go in; the market-bell
is rung.
Pucelle. Now, Rouen, I’ll shake thy bulwarks to the
ground.”
The “market-bell” was rung at the hour when the market was to begin.
In the same play (v. 5. 54), when a dower is proposed for Margaret, who is to marry Henry, Suffolk says:—
“A dower, my lords! disgrace not so your king,
That he should be so abject, base, and poor,
To choose for wealth, and not for perfect love.
Henry is able to enrich his queen,
And not to seek a queen to make him rich:
So worthless peasants bargain for their wives,
As market-men for oxen, sheep, or horse.”
In 2 Henry VI. (v. 2. 62), when Cade has said boastingly, “I am able to endure much,” Dick makes the comment, aside: “No question of that; for I have seen him whipped three market-days together.”
There are many other allusions to markets, market-men, market-maids, etc., in the plays, but these will suffice for illustration here.
The semi-annual Fair was a market on a grander scale. The increased crowd of dealers called for certain police regulations, and these were strictly enforced. The town council appointed to each trade a particular station in the streets. Thus, raw hides were to be exposed for sale in the Rother Market. Sellers of butter, cheese, wick-yarn, and fruits were to set up their stalls by the cross at the Guild Chapel. A part of the High Street was assigned to country butchers. Pewterers were ordered to “pitch” their wares in Wood Street, and to pay fourpence a square yard for the ground they occupied. Salt-wagons, whose owners did a large business when salted meats formed the staple supply of food, were permitted to stand about the cross in the Rother Market. At various points victuallers could erect booths. These regulations were necessary to prevent strife concerning locations, and violations were punished by heavy fines.
Mr. Knight remarks: “At the joyous Fair-season it would seem that the wealth of a world was emptied into Stratford; not only the substantial things, the wine, the wax, the wheat, the wool, the malt, the cheese, the clothes, the napery, such as even great lords sent their stewards to the Fairs to buy, but every possible variety of such trumpery as fills the pedler’s pack,—ribbons, inkles, caddises, coifs, stomachers, pomanders, brooches, tapes, shoe-ties. Great dealings were there on these occasions in beeves and horses, tedious chafferings, stout affirmations, saints profanely invoked to ratify a bargain. A mighty man rides into the Fair who scatters consternation around. It is the Queen’s Purveyor. The best horses are taken up for her Majesty’s use, at her Majesty’s price; and they probably find their way to the Earl of Leicester’s or the Earl of Warwick’s stables at a considerable profit to Master Purveyor. The country buyers and sellers look blank; but there is no remedy. There is solace, however, if there is not redress. The ivy-bush is at many a door, and the sounds of merriment are within, as the ale and the sack are quaffed to friendly greetings. In the streets there are morris-dancers, the juggler with his ape, and the minstrel with his ballads. We may imagine the foremost in a group of boys listening to the ‘small popular musics sung by these cantabanqui upon benches and barrels’ heads,’ or more earnestly to some one of the ‘blind harpers, or such-like tavern minstrels, that give a fit of mirth for a groat; their matters being for the most part stories of old time as The Tale of Sir Topas, Bevis of Southampton, Guy of Warwick, Adam Bell and Clymme of the Clough, and such other old romances or historical rhymes, made purposely for the recreation of the common people.’ A bold fellow, who is full of queer stories and cant phrases, strikes a few notes upon his gittern, and the lads and lasses are around him ready to dance their country measures....
“The Fair is over; the booths are taken down; the woolen statute-caps, which the commonest people refuse to wear because there is a penalty for not wearing them, are packed up again; the prohibited felt hats are all sold; the millinery has found a ready market among the sturdy yeomen, who are careful to propitiate their home-staying wives after the fashion of the Wife of Bath’s husbands.... The juggler has packed up his cup and balls; the last cudgel-play has been fought out:—
“‘Near the dying of the day
There will be a cudgel-play,
Where a coxcomb will be broke
Ere a good word can be spoke:
But the anger ends all here,
Drench’d in ale, or drown’d in beer.’
Morning comes, and Stratford hears only the quiet steps of its native population.”
There are many allusions, literal and figurative, to these fairs in Shakespeare’s plays, a few of which may be cited here as specimens.
In Love’s Labour’s Lost, besides the one quoted above (page 199), we find the following simile in Biron’s eulogy of Rosaline (iv. 3. 235):—
“Of all complexions the cull’d soverignty
Do meet, as at a fair, in her fair cheek.”
In the same play (v. 2. 2), the Princess says to her ladies, referring to the presents they have received:—
“Sweet hearts, we shall be rich ere we depart
If fairings come thus plentifully in.”
It was so common a practice to buy presents at fairs that the word fairing, which originally meant presents thus bought, came to be used in a more general sense, as in this passage and many others that might be quoted.
In The Winters Tale (iv. 3. 109) the Clown says of the merry peddler Autolycus that “he haunts wakes, fairs, and bear-baitings.” Later (iv. 4) we meet the rogue at the sheep-shearing, where he finds a good market for ribbons, gloves, and other “fairings,” which the swains buy for their sweethearts; and when the festival is over he says: “I have sold all my trumpery; not a counterfeit stone, not a ribbon, glass, pomander, brooch, table-book, ballad, knife, tape, glove, shoe-tie, bracelet, horn-ring, to keep my pack from fasting; they throng who should buy first, as if my trinkets had been hallowed and brought a benediction to the buyer.”
In 2 Henry IV. (iii. 2. 43) Shallow asks his cousin Silence, “How a good yoke of bullocks now at Stamford fair?” and Silence replies, “By my troth, I was not there.” Later (v. 1. 26) Davy asks Shallow: “Sir, do you mean to stop any of William’s wages, about the sack he lost the other day at Hinckley fair?”
In Henry VIII. (v. 4. 73) the Chamberlain, seeing the crowd gathered to get a sight of the royal procession, exclaims:—
“Mercy o’ me, what a multitude are here!
They grow still too; from all parts they are coming,
As if we kept a fair here.”
In Lear (iii. 6. 78) Edgar, in his random talk while pretending to be insane, cries: “Come, march to wakes and fairs and market-towns!”
The “wakes,” mentioned so often in connection with fairs, were annual feasts kept to commemorate the dedication of a church; called so, as an old writer tells us, “because the night before they were used to watch till morning in the church.” The next day was given up to feasting and all sorts of rural merriment. In the churchwardens’ accounts of the time we find charges for “wine and sugar,” for “bread, wine, and ale,” and the like, for “certain of the parish,” for “the singing men and singing children,” and others, on these occasions.
At these wakes, as at the fairs and other large gatherings, whether festal or commercial, hawkers and peddlers came to sell their wares and merchants set up their stalls and booths, often in the very churchyard and even on a Sunday. The clergy naturally denounced this profanation of the Sabbath, but it was not entirely suppressed until the reign of Henry VI.
Stubbes, in his Anatomy of Abuses (1583), inveighed against these wakes, as against the May-day sports (page 176 above), especially on account of the money wasted at them, “insomuch as the poor men that bear the charges of these feasts and wakes are the poorer and keep the worser houses a long time after: and no marvel, for many spend more at one of these wakes than in all the whole year besides.”
Herrick, in his Hesperides (page 196 above) took a more cheerful view of such rural holidays:—
“Come, Anthea, let us two
Go to feast, as others do.
Tarts and custards, creams and cakes,
Are the junkets still at wakes;
Unto which the tribes resort,
Where the business is the sport.
Morris-dancers thou shalt see,
Marian too in pageantry;
And a mimic to devise
Many grinning properties.
Players there will be, and those
Base in action as in clothes;
Yet with strutting they will please
The incurious villages.
* * * * *
Happy rustics, best content
With the cheapest merriment;
And possess no other fear
Than to want the wake next year;”
that is, to miss or lack it.
Rural Outings
Much of the recreation, as of the education, of William Shakespeare was in the fields. “He is rarely a descriptive poet, distinctively so called; but images of mead and grove, of dale and upland, of forest depths, of quiet walks by gentle rivers,—reflections of his own native scenery,—spread themselves without an effort over all his writings. All the occupations of a rural life are glanced at or embodied in his characters. He wreathes all the flowers of the field in his delicate chaplets; and even the nicest mysteries of the gardener’s art can be expounded by him. His poetry in this, as in all other great essentials, is like the operations of nature itself; we see not its workings. But we may be assured, from the very circumstance of its appearing so accidental, so spontaneous in its relations to all external nature and to the country life, that it had its foundation in very early and very accurate observation. Stratford was especially fitted to have been the ‘green lap’ in which the boy-poet was ‘laid.’ The whole face of creation here wore an aspect of quiet loveliness.”
The surrounding country was no less beautiful; and William would naturally become familiar with it in his boyish rambles and in his visits to his relatives. The village of Wilmcote, the home of his mother, was within walking distance; and so was Snitterfield, where his father lived before he came to Stratford, and where his uncle Henry still resided. All through the wooded district of Arden the name of Shakespeare was very common, and among those who bore it were probably other families more or less closely related to John Shakespeare’s.
However that may have been, the enterprising glover and wool-merchant must have had large dealings with the neighboring farmers; and William must have seen much of rural life and employments in the company of his father, or when wandering at his own free will in the country about Stratford. In no other way could he have gained the intimate acquaintance with farming and gardening operations of which his works bear evidence. He went to London before his literary career began, and lived there until it closed, with only brief occasional visits to Warwickshire. In the metropolis he could not have added much to his early lessons in the country life and character of which he has given us such graphic and faithful delineations. These are thoroughly fresh and real; they tell of the outdoor life he loved, and never smell of the study-lamp, as Milton’s and Spenser’s allusions to plants, flowers, and other natural objects often do.
Volumes have been written on the plant-lore and garden-craft of Shakespeare; and the authors dwell equally on the poet’s ingrained love of the country and his keen observation of natural phenomena and the agricultural practice of the time.
In Richard II. (iii. 4. 29–66) the Gardener and his Servant draw lessons of political wisdom from the details of their occupation:—
“Gardener. Go, bind thou up yon dangling apricocks,
Which, like unruly children, make their sire
Stoop with oppression of their prodigal weight;
Give some supportance to the bending twigs.
Go thou, and like an executioner
Cut off the heads of too-fast-growing sprays,
That look too lofty in our commonwealth;
All must be even in our government.
You thus employ’d, I will go root away
The noisome weeds, that without profit suck
The soil’s fertility from wholesome flowers.
Servant. Why should we, in the compass of a pale,
Keep law, and form, and due proportion,
Showing, as in a model, our firm estate,
When our sea-walled garden, the whole land,
Is full of weeds; her fairest flowers chok’d up,
Her fruit-trees all unprun’d, her hedges ruin’d,
Her knots disorder’d, and her wholesome herbs
Swarming with caterpillars?
Gardener. Hold thy peace!
He that hath suffer’d this disorder’d spring
Hath now himself met with the fall of leaf.
The weeds that his broad-spreading leaves did shelter,
That seem’d in eating him to hold him up,
Are pluck’d up, root and all, by Bolingbroke;
I mean the Earl of Wiltshire, Bushy, Green.
Servant. What, are they dead?
Gardener. They are; and Bolingbroke
Hath seiz’d the wasteful king.—O, what pity is it,
That he hath not so trimm’d and dress’d his land
As we this garden! We at time of year
Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit-trees,
Lest, being over-proud with sap and blood,
With too much riches it confound itself:
Had he done so to great and growing men,
They might have liv’d to bear, and he to taste
Their fruits of duty. All superfluous branches
We lop away, that bearing boughs may live:
Had he done so, himself had borne the crown,
Which waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down.”
Mr. Ellacombe, commenting upon this dialogue, remarks: “This most interesting passage would almost tempt us to say that Shakespeare was a gardener by profession; certainly no other passages that have been brought to prove his real profession are more minute than this. It proves him to have had practical experience in the work, and I think we may safely say that he was no mere ’prentice hand in the use of the pruning-knife.” But this play was written in London, when he could hardly have known anything more of practical gardening than he had learned in his boyhood and youth at Stratford.
Grafting and the various ways of propagating plants by cuttings, slips, etc., are described or alluded to with equal accuracy; also the mischief done by weeds, blights, frosts, and other enemies of the husbandman and horticulturist. He writes on all these matters as we might expect him to have done in his last years at Stratford, after he had had actual experience in the management of a large garden at New Place and in farming operations on other lands he had bought in the neighborhood; but all these passages, like the one quoted from Richard II., were written long before he had a garden of his own. They were reminiscences of his observation as a boy, not the results of his experience as a country gentleman.
Notes
Abbreviations, except a few of the most familiar, have been avoided in the Notes, as in other parts of the book. The references to act, scene, and line in the quotations from Shakespeare are added for the convenience of the reader or student, who may sometimes wish to refer to the context. The line-numbers are those of the “Globe” edition, which vary from those of my edition only in scenes that are wholly or partly in prose.
The numbers appended to names of authors (as in the note on page 22, for example) are the dates of their birth and death. An interrogation-mark after a date (as in the note on page 114) indicates that it is uncertain. I have not thought it necessary to insert biographical notes concerning well-known authors, like Spenser, Milton, etc.
Notes
Page 3.—Michael Drayton. He was born in Warwickshire in 1563. Of his personal history very little is known. His most famous work, the Poly-Olbion (or Polyolbion, as it is often printed), is a poem of about 30,000 lines, the subject of which, as he himself states it, is “a chorographical description of all the tracts, rivers, mountains, forests, and other parts of this renowned Isle of Great Britain; with intermixture of the most remarkable stories, antiquities, wonders, etc., of the same.” His Ballad of Agincourt (see Tales from English History, p. 39) has been called “the most perfect and patriotic of English ballads.” Drayton was made poet-laureate in 1626. He died in 1631, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Page 4.—Her Bear. The badge of the Earls of Warwick.
Wilmcote. A small village about three miles from Stratford-on-Avon. The name is also written Wilmecote, and Wilnecote; and in old documents, Wilmcott, Wincott, etc. It is probably the Wincot of The Taming of the Shrew (ind. 2. 23) and the Woncot of 2 Henry IV. (v. 1. 42).
Dugdale. Sir William Dugdale (1605–1686), one of the most learned of English antiquaries. His Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656) is said to have been the result of twenty years’ laborious research.
Page 7.—Beauchamp. Pronounced Beech’-am.
The herse of brass hoops. The word herse (the same as hearse) originally meant a harrow; then a temporary framework, often shaped like a harrow, used for supporting candles at a funeral service, and placed over the coffin; then a kind of frame or cage over an effigy on a tomb; and finally a carriage for bearing a corpse to the grave. For the third meaning (which we have here), compare Ben Jonson’s Epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke:—
“Underneath this sable herse
Lies the subject of all verse,” etc.
The garter. Showing that he was a Knight of the Garter.
The noble Impe. The word imp originally meant a scion, shoot, or slip of a tree or plant; then, figuratively, human offspring or progeny, as here and in many passages in writers of the time. Holinshed the chronicler speaks of “Prince Edward, that goodlie impe,” and Churchyard calls Edward VI. “that impe of grace.” Fulwell, addressing Anne Boleyn, refers to Elizabeth as “thy royal impe.” As first applied to a young or small devil, the word had this same meaning of offspring, “an imp of Satan” being a child of Satan. How it came later to mean a mischievous urchin I leave the small folk themselves to guess.
Page 10.—The famous “dun cow.” This, according to the legend, was “a monstrous wild and cruel beast” which ravaged the country about Dunsmore. Guy also slew a wild boar of “passing might and strength,” and a dragon “black as any coal” which was long the terror of Northumberland. Compare the old ballad of Sir Guy:—
“On Dunsmore heath I also slew
A monstrous wild and cruel beast,
Call’d the Dun-cow of Dunsmore heath,
Which many people had opprest.
“Some of her bones in Warwick yet
Still for a monument do lie;
And there exposed to lookers’ view
As wondrous strange they may espy.
“A dragon in Northumberland
I also did in fight destroy,
Which did both man and beast oppress,
And all the country sore annoy.”
Page 13.—Master Robert Laneham. He was an English merchant who became “doorkeeper of the council-chamber” to the Earl of Leicester. He wrote an account, in the form of a letter, of the festivities in honor of this visit of Elizabeth to Kenilworth, which was afterwards printed. He is one of the characters in Scott’s Kenilworth.
Page 14.—Theatres, etc. The cut facing page 14 shows one of the movable stages referred to by Dugdale; also two of “the three tall spires” mentioned by Tennyson in the poem of Godiva. The nearer church is St. Michael’s, said to be the largest parish church in England, with a steeple 303 feet high. Beyond it is Trinity Church, with a spire 237 feet high.
Page 15.—The most beautiful in the kingdom. There is a familiar story of two Englishmen who laid a wager as to which was the finest walk in England. After the money was put up, one named the walk from Stratford to Coventry, and the other that from Coventry to Stratford. How the umpire decided the case is not recorded.
Page 16.—The Cappers. The makers of caps.
Page 17.—King Herod. Longfellow, in his Golden Legend, introduces a miracle-play, The Nativity, which is supposed to be acted at Strasburg. Herod figures in it after the blustering fashion of the ancient dramas. Young readers will get a good idea of these plays from this imitation of them.
Page 18.—Other allusions to these old plays. See, for instance, Twelfth Night, iv. 2. 134, 2 Henry IV. iii. 2. 343, Richard III. iii. 1. 82, Hamlet, iii. 4. 98, etc., and the notes in my edition.
Page 19.—The legend of Godiva. See Tennyson’s Godiva.
Page 22.—Dr. Forman. Simon Forman (1552–1611), a noted astrologer and quack, who wrote several books, and left a diary, in which he describes at considerable length the plot of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which he saw performed “at the Globe, 1610, the 20th of April, Saturday.” See my edition of Macbeth, p. 9.
Page 23.—The head of Sir Thomas Lucy is from his monument in Charlecote church.
Page 24.—A willow grows aslant a brook. See Hamlet, iv. 7. 165. Some editions of Shakespeare follow the reading of the early quartos, “ascaunt the brook,” which means the same. This willow (the Salix alba) grows on the banks of the Avon, and from the looseness of the soil the trees often partly lose their hold, and bend “aslant” the stream.
Page 26.—The banished Duke in As You Like It, etc. See the play, ii. 1. 1–18.
His maidens ever sing of “blue-veined violets,” etc. The “blue-vein’d violets” are mentioned in Venus and Adonis, 125; the “daisies pied” (variegated), and the “lady-smocks all silver-white,” in Love’s Labour’s Lost, v. 2. 904, 905; and the “pansies” in Hamlet, iv. 5. 176.
Page 27.—A manor of the Bishop of Worcester. Under the feudal system, a manor was a landed estate, with a village or villages upon it the inhabitants of which were generally villeins, or serfs of the owner or lord. These villeins were either regardant or in gross. The former “belonged to the manor as fixtures, passing with it when it was conveyed or inherited, and they could not be sold or transferred as persons separate from the land”; the latter “belonged personally to their lord, who could sell or transfer them at will.” The bordarii, bordars, or cottagers, “seem to have been distinguished from the villeins simply by their smaller holdings.” For the menial services rendered by the villeins, and their condition generally, see the following pages.
Page 32.—A chantry. A church or a chapel (as here) endowed with lands or other revenues for the maintenance of one or more priests to sing or say mass daily for the soul of the donor or the souls of persons named by him. Cf. Henry V. iv. 1. 318:—
“I have built
Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests
Sing still for Richard’s soul.”
Page 40.—Present her at the leet, etc. Complain of her for using common stone jugs instead of the quart-pots duly sealed or stamped as being of legal size.
A substantial ducking-stool, etc. The ducking-stool was kept up as a punishment for scolds in some parts of England until late in the 18th century. An antiquary, writing about 1780, tells of seeing it used at Magdalen bridge in Cambridge. He says: “The chair hung by a pulley fastened to a beam about the middle of the bridge; and the woman having been fastened in the chair, she was let under water three times successively, and then taken out.... The ducking-stool was constantly hanging in its place, and on the back panel of it was an engraving representing devils laying hold of scolds. Some time after, a new chair was erected in the place of the old one, having the same device carved on it, and well painted and ornamented.”
Page 41.—Butts. Places for the practice of archery, the butts being properly the targets.
Page 45.—Pinfold. Shakespeare uses the word in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (i. 1. 114): “I mean the pound—a pinfold”; and in Lear (ii. 2. 9): “in Lipsbury pinfold.” It was so called because stray beasts were pinned or shut up in it.
Page 46.—One wagon tract. That is, track. Tract in this sense is obsolete.
Page 49.—In which William Shakespeare was probably born. We have no positive information on this point; but we know that John Shakespeare resided in Henley Street in 1552, and that he became the owner of this house at some time before 1590. The tradition that this was the poet’s birthplace is ancient and has never been disproved. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, one of the most careful and conservative of critics, says: “There can be no doubt that from the earliest period at which we have, or are likely to have, a record of the fact, it was the tradition of Stratford that the birthplace is correctly so designated”; and he himself accepts the tradition as almost certainly founded upon fact.
The cut facing page 50, like that facing page 56, gives an idea of the interior appearance of these old houses. The room in which tradition says that Shakespeare was born is the front room on the second floor (what English people call the “first floor”), at the left-hand side of the house as seen in the cut on page 49.
In the other cut (the interior of the cottage in which Anne Hathaway, whom Shakespeare married, is said to have lived at Shottery) the very large old-fashioned fire-place is to be noted. Persons could actually sit “in the chimney corner,” like the woman in the picture. The grate is a modern addition.
Page 51.—New Place. Sir Hugh Clopton, for whom this mansion was erected, speaks of it in 1496 as his “great house,” a title by which it was commonly known at Stratford for more than two centuries. Shakespeare bought it in 1597 for £60, a moderate price for so large a property; but in a document of the time of Edward VI. it is described as having been for some time “in great ruin and decay and unrepaired,” and it was probably in a dilapidated condition when it was transferred to Shakespeare. It had been sold by the Clopton family in 1563, and in 1567 came into the possession of William Underhill, whose family continued to hold it until Shakespeare bought it. He left it by his will to his daughter Susanna, who had married Dr. John Hall, and who probably occupied it until her death in 1649, when she had been a widow for fourteen years. The estate descended to her daughter Elizabeth, who was first married to Thomas Nash, and afterwards to Sir Thomas Barnard. In 1675 it was sold again, and was ultimately re-purchased by the Clopton family. Sir John Clopton rebuilt the house early in the next century, and it was subsequently occupied by another Hugh Clopton. He died in 1751, and in 1756 the estate was sold to Rev. Francis Gastrell, who pulled the house down in 1759, on account of a quarrel with the town authorities concerning the taxes levied upon it. The year before (1758) he had cut down Shakespeare’s mulberry-tree, in order, as tradition says, to save himself the trouble of showing it to visitors. The Stratford people were indignant at this act of vandalism. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps says that an old inhabitant of the town told him that his father, when a boy, “assisted in breaking Gastrell’s windows in revenge for the fall of the tree.” It is possible, however, that some injustice has been done the reverend gentleman. Davies, in his Life of Garrick (1780), asserts that Gastrell disliked the tree “because it overshadowed his window, and rendered the house, as he thought, subject to damps and moisture.” There is also some evidence that the trunk of the tree, which was now a hundred and fifty years old and grown to a great size, had begun to decay. That Gastrell was not indifferent to the poetical associations of the tree is evident from the fact that he kept relics of it, his widow having presented one to the Lichfield Museum in 1778. It is described in a catalogue (1786) of the museum as “an horizontal section of the stock of the mulberry-tree planted by Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon.”
Page 52.—William Harrison. An English clergyman, of whose history we know little except that he was born in London, became rector of Radwinter, Essex, and canon of Windsor, wrote a Description of Britaine and England and other historical books, and probably died in 1592. His detailed account of the state of England and the manners and customs of the people in the 16th century is particularly valuable.
Page 54.—Strewn with rushes. There are many allusions to this in Shakespeare. In The Taming of the Shrew (iv. 1. 48), when Petruchio is coming home, Grumio asks: “Is supper ready, the house trimmed, rushes strewed, cobwebs swept?” Compare Romeo and Juliet, i. 4. 36: “Tickle the senseless rushes with their heels” (that is, in dancing); Cymbeline, ii. 2. 13:—
“Our Tarquin thus
Did softly press the rushes,” etc.
Page 55.—Thomas Coryat, born in 1577 and educated at Oxford, was celebrated for his pedestrian journeys on the Continent of Europe. In 1608 he travelled through France, Germany, and Italy, “walking 1975 miles, more than half of which were accomplished in one pair of shoes, which were only once mended, and on his return were hung up in the Church of Odcombe.” Of this tour he wrote an account entitled “Coryat’s Crudities hastily gobled up in five months’ Travels in France,” etc. He died at Surat in 1617, after explorations in Greece, Egypt, and India.
Page 56.—Bullein. William Bullein, or Bulleyn, born about 1500, was a learned physician and botanist. His Government of Health was very popular in its day. He wrote several other books of medicine. He died in 1576.
Page 57.—His Anatomy of Melancholy. Of this famous work, written by Robert Burton (1577–1640), Dr. Johnson said that it was “the only book that ever took me out of bed two hours sooner than I wished to rise.”
Page 60.—Francis Seager. Of his personal history, as of that of Hugh Rhodes, nothing of importance is known.
Page 61.—He is then to make low curtsy. This form of obeisance was used by both sexes in Shakespeare’s day. Cf. 2 Henry IV. ii. 1. 135: “if a man will make courtesy and say nothing, he is virtuous”; and the epilogue to the same play: “First my fear, then my courtesy, last my speech.” Curtsy is a modern spelling of the word in this sense.
Page 62.—Caraways. The word occurs once in Shakespeare (2 Henry IV. v. 3. 3: “a dish of caraways”), where it probably has the same meaning as here; but some have thought that the reference is to a variety of apple.
Page 63.—Treatably. Tractably, smoothly. Cf. Marston, What You Will, ii. 1: “Not too fast; say [recite] treatably.”
Much forder. We find d and th used interchangeably in many words in old writers; as fadom and fathom, murder and murther, etc.
Page 64.—To charge thee with than. We find than for then in Shakespeare, Lucrece, 1440:—
“To Simois’ reedy banks the red blood ran,
Whose waves to imitate the battle sought
With swelling ridges; and their ranks began
To break upon the galled shore, and than
Retire again,” etc.
Here, it will be seen, the word rhymes with ran and began. On the other hand, than in the early eds. of Shakespeare and other writers of the time is generally then.
Page 65.—Utterly detest. That is, detested. The omission of -ed in the participles of verbs ending in d and t (or te) was formerly not uncommon in prose as well as poetry. Cf. Bacon, Essay 16: “Their means are less exhaust”; and Essay 38: “They have degenerate.” See also Richard III., iii. 7. 179: “For first was he contract to Lady Lucy,” etc.
Page 66.—To enter children. To begin their training. The word is now obsolete in this sense of introducing to, or initiating into, anything. Cf. Ben Jonson, Epicœne, iii. 1: “I am bold to enter these gentlemen in your acquaintance”; Walton, Complete Angler: “to enter you into the art of fishing,” etc.
Thorow. Thorough and through were originally the same word, and we find them and their derivatives used interchangeably in Shakespeare and other old writers. Cf. A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, ii. 1. 3:—
“Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire.”
So we find thoroughly and throughly (Hamlet, iv. 5. 36, etc.), thoroughfares and throughfares (Merchant of Venice, ii. 7. 42, etc.).
Page 67.—The Ship of Fools. A translation (with original modifications) of the Narrenschiff of Sebastian Brandt (or Brant), a German satire (1494) upon the follies of different classes of men. It was made in 1508 by Alexander Barclay, who died at an advanced age in 1552. He was educated at Oxford, became a priest, and was vicar of several parishes in England before he was promoted to that of All Saints, Lombard Street, London, a few weeks previous to his death. The Ship of Fools was the first English book in which any mention is made of the New World.
Strutt. Joseph Strutt (1742–1802) was an eminent English antiquarian, who wrote several valuable works in that line of literature and others. The first edition of his Sports and Pastimes of the People of England appeared in 1801.
Page 69.—Taylor the Water Poet. John Taylor (1580–1654), a waterman who afterwards became a collector of wine duties in London. He wrote much in prose and verse, and was very popular in his day.
Page 70.—Dr. John Jones. A physician, who practised at Bath and Buxton, England, and wrote a number of medical works between 1556 and 1579.
Page 71.—No other clear allusion to the game, etc. Some critics have thought there may be a punning allusion to the stale-mate of chess in The Taming of the Shrew, i. 1. 58: “To make a stale of me among these mates”; but this is doubtful.
Page 73.—She was pinch’d. The she is used in a demonstrative sense, referring to one of the company (this maid), as he (that man) is in the next line. The Friar is the Friar Rush of the fairy mythology, whom Milton seems here to identify with Jack-o’-the-Lantern, or Will-o’-the-Wisp, the luminous appearance sometimes seen in marshy places; but Friar Rush, according to Keightley, “haunted houses, not fields, and was never the same with Jack-o’-the-Lantern.”
Page 74.—The drudging goblin. Robin Goodfellow, the Puck of Shakespeare. Cf. A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, ii, 1. 40:—
“They that Hobgoblin call you and sweet Puck,
You do their work, and they shall have good luck.”
To bed they creep. Somewhat reluctantly and timidly after the stories of fairies and goblins.
Charles Knight. An English publisher and author (1791–1873), one of the leading editors and biographers of Shakespeare.
Page 75.—William Painter. He was born in England about 1537, and died about 1594. He studied at Cambridge in 1554, and in 1561 was made clerk of the ordnance in the Tower of London. In 1566 he published the first volume of The Palace of Pleasure, containing sixty tales from Latin, French, and Italian authors. The second volume (1567) contained thirty-four tales. In later editions six more were added, making a hundred in all. The collection is the source from which Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists drew many of their plots.
Page 76.—Giletta of Narbonne. The story dramatized by Shakespeare in All’s Well that Ends Well.
Page 77.—The “Gesta Romanorum.” A popular collection of stories in Latin, compiled late in the 13th or early in the 14th century, and often reprinted and translated. The two stories (of the caskets and of the bond) combined in the Merchant of Venice are found in it; and also the story of Theodosius and his daughters, which is like that of Lear, though Shakespeare did not take the plot of that tragedy directly from it.
Page 78.—The trumpet to the morn. The trumpeter that announces the coming of day. Trumpet in this sense occurs several times in Shakespeare; as in Henry V. iv. 2. 61: “I will the banner from a trumpet take,” etc.
Extravagant and erring. Both words are used in their etymological sense of wandering. Extravagant is, literally, wandering beyond (its proper confine, or limit).
Arden. There was a Forest of Arden in Warwickshire as well as on the Continent in the northeastern part of France. Drayton, in his Matilda (1594), speaks of “Sweet Arden’s nightingales,” etc.
The ringlets of their dance. The “fairy rings,” so called, which were supposed to be made by their dancing on the grass. In The Tempest (v. 1. 37) Prospero refers to them thus, in his apostrophe to the various classes of spirits over whom he has control:—
“You demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make
Whereof the ewe not bites.”
Dr. Grey, in his Notes on Shakespeare, says that they are “higher, sourer, and of a deeper green than the grass which grows round them.” They were long a mystery even to scientific men, but are now known to be due to the spreading of a kind of agaricum, or fungus, which enriches the ground by its decay.
Who tasted the honey-bag of the bee, etc. All these allusions to the fairies are suggested by passages in A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. The cankers are canker-worms, as often in Shakespeare.
Page 79.—A laund. An open space in a forest. See 3 Henry VI. iii. 1. 2: “For through this laund anon the deer will come,” etc. Lawn is a corruption of laund.
Page 80.—Who had command over the spirits, etc. Like Prospero in The Tempest.
Vervain and dill. These were among the plants supposed to be used by witches in their charms; but many such plants were also believed to be efficacious as counter-charms, or means of protection against witchcraft. Vervain was called “the enchanter’s plant,” on account of its magic potency; but Aubrey says that it “hinders witches from their wills,” and Drayton refers to it as “’gainst witchcraft much availing.”
Page 81.—The ancient font represented in the cut was in use in the Stratford Church until about the middle of the 17th century. Shakespeare was doubtless baptized at it.
Page 82.—John Stow. A noted English antiquarian and historian (1525–1604). His Survey of London (1598) is the standard authority on old London.
Page 83.—The calendars of their nativity. Referring to the twin Dromios, who were born at the same time with the twin children of the Abbess, who is really Emilia, the long-lost wife of Egeus. By a similar figure Antipholus of Syracuse (i. 2. 41) says of Dromio, “Here comes the almanac of my true date.”
Caraways. See on page 62 above. Marmalet is an obsolete form of marmalade. Marchpane was a kind of almond-cake, much esteemed in the time of Shakespeare. Compare Romeo and Juliet, i. 5. 9: “Good thou, save me a piece of marchpane.” Sweet-suckers are dried sweetmeats or sugar-plums, also called suckets, succades, etc.
Page 85.—Wote. Know; more commonly written wot. It is the first and third persons singular, indicative present, of the obsolete verb wit. Unweeting (unwitting), unknowing or unconscious, is from the same verb.
Page 86.—Thomas Lupton. He wrote several books besides his Thousand Notable Things, which was a collection of medical recipes, stories, etc. Little is known of his personal history.
Robert Heron. He was a Scotchman (1764–1807), who wrote books of travel, geography, history, etc.
Warlocks. Persons supposed to be in league with the devil; sorcerers or wizards.
Page 87.—Beshrew. Originally a mild imprecation of evil, but often used playfully, as here. Compare the similar modern use of confound, which originally meant ruin or destroy; as in the Merchant of Venice, iii. 2. 271: “So keen and greedy to confound a man,” etc.
Page 88.—Astrologaster. The full title was “The Astrologaster, or the Figurecaster: Rather the Arraignment of Artless Astrologers and Fortune Tellers.”
Page 89.—In the following form. There were other forms, but this was regarded as one of the most potent. It will be seen that the word, as here arranged, can be read in various ways; as, for instance, following each line to the end and then up the right-hand side of the triangle, etc. An old writer, after giving directions to write the word in this triangular form, adds: “Fold the paper so as to conceal the writing, and stitch it into the form of a cross with white thread. This amulet wear in the bosom, suspended by a linen ribbon, for nine days. Then go in dead silence, before sunrise, to the bank of a stream that flows eastward, take the amulet from off the neck, and fling it backwards into the water. If you open or read it, the charm is destroyed.” It was thought to be efficacious for the cure of fevers, “especially quartan and semi-tertian agues.”
Thomas Lodge. He was born about 1556, and died in 1625, and wrote plays, novels, songs, translations, etc. His Rosalynde (1590) furnished Shakespeare with the plot of As You Like It.
Page 90.—Robert Greene (1560–1592) was a popular dramatist, novelist, and poet in his day. In his Groatsworth of Wit (published in 1592, after his death) he attacked the rising Shakespeare as “an upstart crow,” who was “in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.” Shakespeare afterwards took the story of The Winter’s Tale from Greene’s Pandosto, or Dorastus and Fawnia, as it was subsequently entitled.
Webster’s White Devil. John Webster, who wrote in the early part of the 17th century, was a dramatist noted for his tragedies, among which The White Devil (1612) is reckoned one of the best. Of his biography nothing worth mentioning is known.
Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy. See on page 57 above.
Reginald Scot, who died in 1599, is chiefly known by his Discoverie of Witchcraft, the main facts concerning which are given here.
Page 91.—Wierus. The Latin form of the name of Weier, a German physician, who in 1563 published a book (De Præstigiis Demonum) in which the general belief in magic and witchcraft was attacked.
We infer that Shakespeare had read Scot’s book. However this may be, we are sure that he had read a book by Dr. Samuel Harsnet (1561–1631) entitled Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, etc., under the pretence of casting out devils (1603), from which he took the names of some of the devils in Lear (iii. 4).
Page 96.—Henry Peacham. “A travelling tutor, musician, painter, and author,” who wrote on drawing and painting, etiquette, education, etc. His father, whose name was the same, was also an author, and it is doubtful whether certain books were written by him or by his son.
Roger Ascham (1515–1568) was a noted classical scholar and author. He was tutor to Elizabeth (1548–1550), and Latin Secretary to Mary and Elizabeth (1553–1568). His chief works were the Toxophilus (1545) and the Scholemaster (see page 115 below).
Page 97.—Took on him as a conjurer. Pretended to be a conjurer. Compare 2 Henry IV. iv. 1. 60: “I take not on me here as a physician.”
Page 98.—Who could speak Latin, etc. Latin, the language of the church, was used in exorcising spirits. Compare Hamlet (i. 1. 42), where, on the appearance of the Ghost, Marcellus says: “Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.” So in Much Ado About Nothing (ii. 1. 264), Benedick, after comparing Beatrice to “the infernal Ate,” adds: “I would to God some scholar would conjure her!” See also Beaumont and Fletcher, The Night-Walker, ii. 1:—
“Let’s call the butler up, for he speaks Latin,
And that will daunt the devil.”
Page 99.—Transparent horn. Used to protect the paper, as explained in the quotation from Shenstone on page 101. The horn-book was really “of stature small,” the figure on page 100 being of the exact size of the specimen described. One delineated by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps is of about the same size. See Chambers’s Book of Days, vol. i. p. 46.
Page 101.—Shenstone. William Shenstone (1714–1763) was educated at Pembroke College, Oxford. His best-known work is The Schoolmistress.
Page 102.—The modern plastered ceiling, etc. This has been removed within the past few years. Its appearance before the restoration is shown in the cut (from Knight’s Biography of Shakspere).
Page 103.—Sententiæ Pueriles. Literally, Boyish Sentences, or Sentences for Boys.
Sir Hugh Evans. The title of Sir (equivalent to the Latin dominus) was given to priests. The “hedge-priest” in As You Like It (iii. 3) is called “Sir Oliver Martext.” In Twelfth Night (iii. 4. 298) Viola says: “I had rather go with sir priest than sir knight.”
‘Od’s nouns. Probably a corruption of “God’s wounds,” which is also contracted into Swounds and Zounds. So we find “od’s heartlings,” “od’s pity,” etc. Dame Quickly confounds ‘od and odd.
Page 104.—Articles. Sir Hugh uses the word in the sense of “demonstratives.” This shows that the Accidence mentioned above as the book from which Shakespeare got his first lessons in Latin (as Halliwell-Phillipps and other authorities state) gave some of the elementary facts in precisely the same form in which they appear in the Latin Grammar written in English and published in 1574 with the title, “A Short Introduction of Grammar, generally to be used: compiled and set forth for the bringing up of all those that intend to attaine to the knowledge of the Latine Tongue.” I transcribe this from the edition published at Oxford in 1651 (a copy in the Harvard University library, which appears to be the one studied by President Ezra Stiles when he was a boy). In this book (page 3), under the head of “Articles,” we read:—
“Articles are borrowed of the Pronoune, and be thus declined:
| Singulariter. | Pluraliter. |
| Nomin. hic, hæc, hoc. | Nomin. hi, hæ, hæc. |
| Genetivo hujus. | Gen. horum, harum, horum. |
| Dativo huic. | Dativo his. |
| Acc. hunc, hanc, hoc. | Accus. hos, has, hæc. |
| Vocativo caret. | Vocativo caret. |
| Ablativo hoc, hac, hec. | Ablativo his.” |
It will be noticed that the names of the cases are in Latin, as in Shakespeare. He may have used this very grammar.
Hang-hog is Latin for Bacon. Suggested by the hanging up of the pork during the process of curing. There is an old story of Sir Nicholas Bacon (father of the philosopher), who was a judge. A criminal whom he was about to sentence begged mercy on account of kinship. “Prithee, said my lord, how came that in? Why, if it please you, my lord, your name is Bacon and mine is Hog, and in all ages Hog and Bacon are so near kindred that they are not to be separated. Ay, but, replied the judge, you and I cannot be of kindred unless you be hanged; for Hog is not Bacon till it be well hanged.”
Leave your prabbles. That is, your brabbles. The word literally means quarrels or broils; as in Twelfth Night, v. 1. 68: “In private brabble did we apprehend him.” Sir Hugh uses it loosely with reference to the Dame’s interruptions and criticisms.
O!—vocativo, O! The boy hesitates, trying to recall the vocative, but Sir Hugh reminds him that it is wanting—caret in Latin, which suggests carrot to the Dame. The O is suggested by its use before the vocative case of nouns in the paradigms in the Accidence, which probably here also agrees with the Short Introduction, where in the first declension we find: “Vocativo ô musa”; in the second: “Vocativo ô magister,” etc.
William Lilly (or Lily), the author of the Latin Grammar mentioned on page 105, was born about 1468 and died in 1523. He was an eminent scholar and the first master of St. Paul’s School, London. His Grammar (written in Latin) was entitled “Brevissima Institutio, seu, Ratio Grammatices cognoscendæ, ad omnium puerorum utilitatem præscripta.” Of this book more than three hundred editions were printed, the latest mentioned by Allibone (who, by the way, gives the title of the Grammar in an imperfect and ungrammatical form) having been issued in 1817. A copy of the 1651 edition is bound with the Short Introduction of the same date in the Harvard Library. Lilly was the author of both.
You must be preeches. That is, you must be breeched, or flogged. Compare The Taming of the Shrew (iii. 1. 18), where Bianca says to her teachers: “I am no breeching scholar in the schools.”
Sprag. That is, sprack, which meant quick, ready. The word is Scotch, as well as Provincial English, and Scott uses it in Waverley (chap, xliii.): “all this fine sprack [lively] festivity and jocularity.”
Page 105.—A passage from Terence. In the play, as in the Grammar, it reads: “Redime te captum quam queas minimo.” The original Latin is: “Quid agas, nisi ut te redimas captum,” etc.
Page 106.—Richard Mulcaster. The poet Spenser was one of his pupils at Merchant-Taylors School in 1568 see (Church’s Spenser in “English Men of Letters” series). In 1596 Mulcaster became master of St. Paul’s School. He died in 1611. The title of the book quoted here was The First Part of the Elementarie... of the Right Writing of our English Tung. The author’s theory was better than his practice, as the specimen of his “right writing” given here will suffice to show. It is to be hoped that his oral style was less clumsy and involved.
Correctors for the print. Whether this refers to persons correcting manuscript for the press or to proof-readers is doubtful, but probably the former. Some have denied that there was any proof-reading in the Elizabethan age; but variations in copies of the same edition of a book (the First Folio of Shakespeare, published in 1623, for instance) prove that corrections in the text were sometimes made even after the printing had begun. The author also sometimes did some proof-reading. At the end of Beeton’s Will of Wit (1599) we find this note: “What faults are escaped in the printing, finde by discretion, and excuse the author, by other worke that let [hindered] him from attendance to the presse.”
Rip up. That is, analyze.
Page 107.—The natural English. That is, natives of England.
Will not yield flat to theirs. Will not conform exactly to theirs.
Page 108.—Bewrayeth. Shows, makes known. Cf. Proverbs, xxvii. 16; Matthew, xxvi. 73.
Enfranchisement. This evidently refers to the “naturalization” of foreign words taken into the language, or making their orthography conform to English usage.
Prerogative, etc. This paragraph is somewhat obscure at first reading; but it appears to mean that common use, or established usage, settles certain questions concerning which there might otherwise be some doubt.
Likes the pen. Suits the pen. Compare Hamlet ii. 2. 80: “it likes us well”; Henry V. iii. prol. 32: “The offer likes not,” etc.
Particularities. Peculiarities.
Which either cannot understand, etc. The relative is equivalent to who, and refers to the preceding many. This use of which was common in Shakespeare’s day. Compare The Tempest, iii. 1. 6: “The mistress which I serve,” etc.
Or cannot entend to understand, etc. That is, cannot intend (of which entend is an obsolete form), but the word is here used in a sense which is not recognized in the dictionaries. The meaning seems to be that these “plain people” cannot understand a rule either at sight or after some effort to comprehend it, having neither the time nor the conceit (intellect) to master it. Conceit in this sense is common in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Compare 2 Henry IV. ii. 4. 263: “He a good wit?... there’s no more conceit in him than is in a mallet.”
Page 109.—John Brinsley became master of the grammar school at Ashby-de-la-Zouche in 1601, where he remained for sixteen years. The full title of his book is Ludus Literarius, or the Grammar Schoole (1612). He writes much better English than Mulcaster, and young people will find no difficulty in understanding the passage quoted from him.
Proceed in learning. That is, pursue their studies after leaving the grammar school.
Page 110.—Present correction. Immediate correction, or punishment. For this old sense of present, compare 2 Henry IV. iv. 3. 80:—
“Send Colevile with his confederates
To York, to present execution.”
Countervail. Counterbalance, make up for.
Page 112.—Willis. All that is known of this “R. Willis” is from his autobiography, the title of which is, “Mount Tabor, or Private Exercises of a Penitent Sinner, published in the yeare of his age 75, anno Dom. 1639.” He is the same person who is quoted on page 161 below.
Page 113.—His references to schoolboys, etc. Perhaps we ought not to lay much stress on these. The description of “the whining schoolboy” is from the “Seven Ages” of the cynical Jaques, who describes all these stages of human life in sneering and disparaging terms; and the other passages simply refer to the proverbial dislike of boys to go to school.
Page 114.—Thomas Tusser (1527?-1580?) was a poet and writer on agriculture. Besides his One Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1557), he wrote Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, United to as Many of Good Wiferie (1570), etc. He was educated at Oxford, spent ten years at court, and then settled on a farm, where the rest of his life was passed.
Page 115.—In few of Shakespeare’s references to school life, etc. See on You must be preeches, page 227 above; and compare Much Ado About Nothing, ii. 1. 228:—
“Don Pedro. To be whipped? What’s his fault?
Benedick. The flat transgression of a schoolboy,” etc.
Page 118.—A sanctuary against fear. The allusion is to those sacred places in which criminals could take refuge and be exempt from arrest. There was such a sanctuary within the precincts of Westminster Abbey, which retained its privileges until the dissolution of the monastery, and for debtors until 1602. Compare Richard III. (ii. 4. 66), where Queen Elizabeth says: “Come, come, my boy; we will to sanctuary.”
Page 122.—Hoodman-blind. In All’s Well that Ends Well (iv. 3. 136), when Parolles is brought in blindfolded to his companions in arms, whom he supposes to be enemies that have captured him, one of them says aside, “Hoodman comes.”
Loggats. When I was at Amherst College, forty or more years ago, we had this same exercise under the name of “loggerheads”; but I have not seen it or heard of it anywhere else.
Page 125.—The spirited description of the horse. Compare page 147 below, where it is quoted at length.
Page 126.—Alexander Barclay. See on page 67 above.
Edmund Waller (1605–1687) was an English poet, who was a leader in the Long Parliament, afterwards exiled for being concerned in Royalist plots, returned to England under Cromwell, and was a favorite at court after the Reformation.
Page 127.—The caitch. Catch was another name for tennis. Palle-malle, or pall-mall (pronounced pel-mel´), was a game in which a wooden ball was struck with a mallet, to drive it through a raised iron ring at the end of an alley. It was formerly played in St. James’s Park, London, and gave its name to the street known as Pall Mall.
Bishop Butler. Joseph Butler (1692–1752), bishop of Bristol and afterwards of Durham, and author of the famous Analogy of Religion, etc. (1736).
Gifford. William Gifford (1757–1826), an English critic and satirical poet, editor of the Quarterly Review from 1809 to 1824.
Page 130.—Mulcaster. See on page 106 above.
Page 132.—At Kenilworth in 1575. See page 12 above.
Page 134.—A certain place in Cheshire. The story is told of Congleton in that county, but it is denied by the modern inhabitants. The other place referred to is Ecclesfield in Yorkshire, and I do not know that the statement concerning the pawning of the Bible has been disputed.
Page 135.—Paris-garden. It is mentioned in Henry VIII. (v. 4. 2), where the Porter of the Palace Yard says to the crowd: “You’ll leave your noise anon, ye rascals! do you take the court for Parish-garden?” This was a vulgar pronunciation of Paris-garden. The place was noted for its noise and disorder.
Page 136.—Dean Colet. John Colet (1456–1519), dean of St. Paul’s in 1505. The school was founded in 1512.
Page 138.—Sir Thomas More. The well-known English author and statesman, born in 1473, and executed on Tower Hill in 1535.
No planets strike. That is, exert a baleful influence; an allusion to astrology.
No fairy takes. Blasts, or bewitches. Compare The Merry Wives of Windsor, iv. 4. 32: “blasts the tree and takes the cattle,” etc.
Page 140.—It irks me. It is irksome to me, troubles me.
Fool was sometimes used as a term of endearment or pity. Compare The Winter’s Tale (ii. 1. 18), where Hermione says to her women who are grieved at the unjust charge against her, “Do not weep, poor fools!”
The forked heads are heads of arrows. Ascham refers to such in his Toxophilus.
Page 141.—A poor sequester’d stag. Separated from his companions.
Page 145.—Professor Baynes. Thomas Spencer Baynes (1823–1887), professor of English Literature at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and editor of the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
Page 146.—The vaward of the day. The vanguard, or early part of the day. Compare Coriolanus, i. 6. 53: “Their bands i’ the vaward,” etc.
Such gallant chiding. The verb chide often meant “to make an incessant noise.” Compare As You Like It, ii. 1. 7: “And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind”; Henry VIII. iii. 2. 197: “As doth a rock against the chiding flood,” etc.
So flew’d, so sanded. Having the same large hanging chaps and the same sandy color.
Like bells. That is, like a chime of bells.
Tender well. Take good care of.
Emboss’d was a hunter’s term for foaming at the mouth in consequence of hard running.
Brach. The word properly meant a female hound, but came to be applied to a particular kind of scenting-dog.
Page 147.—In the coldest fault. When the scent was coldest (or faintest), and the hounds most at fault. Compare the quotation from Venus and Adonis, page 150 below: “the cold fault.”
He cried upon it at the merest loss. He gave the cry when the scent seemed utterly lost. See the passage just referred to. Mere was formerly used in the sense of absolute or complete. Compare Othello, ii. 2. 3: “the mere perdition of the Turkish fleet” (its entire destruction); Henry VIII. iii. 2. 329: “the mere undoing of the kingdom” (its utter ruin), etc.
A youthful Work of Shakespeare’s. It was first published in 1593, when he was twenty-nine years of age; and some critics believe that it was written several years earlier, perhaps before he went to London.
Page 148.—Glisters. Glistens. Both Shakespeare and Milton use glister several times, glisten not at all.
Told the steps. Counted them. Compare The Winter’s Tale, iv. 4. 185: “He sings several tunes faster than you’ll tell money.” The teller in a bank is so called because he does this.
Page 149.—The hairs, who wave, etc. Who was often used where we should use which, and which (see on page 108 above) where we should use who.
It yearn’d my heart. That is, grieved it. Compare Henry V. iv. 3. 26: “It yearns me not when men my garments wear,” etc.
Page 150.—Jauncing. Riding hard.
Musits. Holes (in fence or hedge) for creeping through. The word, also spelled muset, is a diminutive of the obsolete muse, which means the same. Amaze here means bewilder.
Wat. A familiar name for a hare, as Reynard for a fox, etc.
Page 151.—Mr. John R. Wise. Compare page 26 above.
Page 155.—The cut is a fac-simile of one in The Booke of Falconrie (1575), by George Turbervile, or Turberville (1520?-1595?), an English poet, translator, and writer on hunting, hawking, etc.
Page 156.—Cotgrave. Randle Cotgrave, an English lexicographer, who died about 1634. His French-English Dictionary (first published in 1611) is still valuable in the study of French and English philology.
Page 159.—John Skelton. An English scholar and poet, a protégé of Henry VII. and the tutor of Henry VIII. He was born about 1460, and probably died in 1529. “His rough wit and eccentric character made him the hero of a book of ‘merry tales.’”
Page 160.—Some in their horse. That is, their horses, the word here being plural. Plurals and possessives of nouns ending in s-sounds were often written without the additional syllable in the time of Shakespeare. Cf. King John, ii. 1. 289: “Sits on his horse back at mine hostess’ door”; Merchant of Venice, iv. 1. 255: “Are there balance here to weigh the flesh?” etc.
Page 163.—William Kemp dancing the Morris. Kemp was a favorite comic actor in the latter years of the reign of Elizabeth. He acted in some of Shakespeare’s plays and in some of Ben Jonson’s, when they were first put upon the stage. In 1599 he journeyed from London to Norwich, dancing the Morris all the way. The next year he published an account of the exploit, entitled The Nine daies wonder. The cut here is a fac-simile of one on the title-page of this pamphlet. It represents Kemp, with his attendant, Tom the Piper, playing on the pipe and tabor. They spent four weeks on the journey, nine days of which were occupied in the dancing. At Chelmsford the crowd assembled to receive them was so great that they were an hour in making their way through it to their lodgings. At this town “a maid not passing fourteen years of age” challenged Kemp to dance the Morris with her “in a great large room,” and held out a whole hour, at the end of which he was “ready to lie down” from exhaustion. On another occasion a “lusty country lass” wanted to try her skill with him, and “footed it merrily to Melford, being a long mile.” Between Bury and Thetford he performed the ten miles in three hours. On portions of the journey the roads were very bad, and his dancing was frequently interrupted by the hospitality or importunity of the people along the route. At Norwich he was received as an honored guest by the mayor of the city.
Page 168.—Corresponded to our 3d of May. The difference between Old and New Style in reckoning dates, and the fact that the Gregorian Calendar (or New Style) was not adopted in England until 1752, or nearly two hundred years after it was accepted by Catholic nations on the Continent, have often led historians, biographers, and other writers into mistakes concerning dates in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. For instance, it has been often asserted that Shakespeare and the Spanish dramatist Cervantes died on the same day, April 23, 1616; but Shakespeare actually died ten days later than his great contemporary, New Style having been adopted in Spain in 1582. If we were certain that Shakespeare was born on the 23d of April, 1564, we ought now to celebrate the anniversary of his birth on the 3d of May. As we do not know the precise date of his birth, and the 23d of April has come to be generally recognized as the anniversary, there is no particular reason for changing it.
Richard Johnson. He was born in 1573 and died about 1659. He is chiefly noted as the author of this Famous History of the Seven Champions of Christendom. These, according to him, were St. George of England, St. Denis of France, St. James of Spain, St. Antony of Italy, St. Andrew of Scotland, St. Patrick of Ireland, and St. David of Wales.
Mr. A. H. Wall, of Stratford-on-Avon, was for several years the librarian of the Shakespeare Memorial Library there, and is the author of many scholarly articles in English periodicals on subjects connected with Shakespeare and Warwickshire.
The Percy Reliques. A collection of old ballads, entitled Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), made by Thomas Percy (1729–1811), a clergyman (in 1782 made Bishop of Dromore in Ireland) and poet.
Page 170.—Chambers. These are mentioned in more than one account of the burning of the Globe Theatre in London, on the 29th of June, 1613, when, as the critics generally agree, Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. was the play being performed. A letter written by John Chamberlain to Sir Ralph Winwood, describing the fire, says that it “fell out by a peale of chambers,” and a letter from Thomas Lorkin to Sir Thomas Puckering, dated “this last of June, 1613,” says: “No longer since than yesterday, while Bourbege6 his companie were acting at ye Globe the play of Hen=8, and there shooting of certayne chambers in way of triumph, the fire catch’d.” Another account states that these cannon were fired on King Henry’s arrival at Cardinal Wolsey’s house; and the original stage-direction in Henry VIII. (iv. 1.) orders “chambers discharged” at the entrance of the king to the “mask at the cardinal’s house.”
Page 171.—Ambrose Dudley. He was born about 1530, made Earl of Warwick when Elizabeth came to the throne, and died in 1589.
Page 172.—The Cage. This house, on the corner of Fore Bridge Street (see map on page 42), was occupied by Thomas Quiney after he married Judith Shakespeare. “The house has long been modernized, the only existing portions of the ancient building being a few massive beams supporting the floor over the cellar” (Halliwell-Phillipps).
Page 173.—Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) was an eminent physician and author. Among his books were the Religio Medici (1643), Vulgar Errors (1646), etc.
Sir John Suckling (baptized Feb. 10, 1609, and supposed to have died by suicide at Paris about 1642) was a Royalist poet in the Court of Charles I. He wrote some plays, but is best known by his minor poems, one of the most noted of which is the Ballad upon a Wedding.
Page 174.—Izaak Walton (1593–1683) is famous as the author of The Complete Angler (1653), one of the classics of our literature. He also wrote Lives of Donne, Hooker, Herbert, and other English divines.
Richard Hooker (1553?-1600) was a celebrated theologian, author of Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, four books of which appeared in 1592, a fifth in 1597, and the remaining three after his death.
Page 180.—Warner’s Albion’s England. William Warner (1558?-1609) was the author of Albion’s England (1586), a rhymed history of the country, and the translator of the Menæchmi of the Latin dramatist Plautus (1595), on which Shakespeare founded the plot of the Comedy of Errors.
Page 182.—Watchet-colored. Light blue. Compare Spenser, F. Q. iii. 4. 40: “Their watchet mantles frindgd with silver rownd.”
Like a wild Morisco. That is, a morris-dancer. The quotation is from 2 Henry VI. iii. 1. 365:—
“I have seen
Him caper upright like a wild Morisco,
Shaking the bloody darts as he his bells.”
Page 183.—The featliest of dancers. The most dexterous. Compare The Winter’s Tale, iv. 4. 176: “She dances featly”; and The Tempest, i. 2. 380: “Foot it featly,” etc.
William Browne (1591–1643?) published book i. of Britannia’s Pastorals in 1613. He also wrote The Shepherd’s Pipe (1614) and other poems.
Page 184.—A carved hook, that is, a shepherd’s crook (called a “sheep-hook” in The Winter’s Tale, iv. 4. 431), as the scrip is his pouch or wallet. Compare As You Like It (iii. 2. 171), where Touchstone says to Corin: “Come, shepherd, let us make an honourable retreat; though not with bag and baggage, yet with scrip and scrippage.”
John Aubrey (1626–1697), besides assisting Anthony Wood in his Antiquities of Oxford (1674), wrote Miscellanies, a collection of short stories and other tales of the supernatural.
Page 185.—The Puritan Stubbes. Concerning this Philip Stubbes little appears to be known except that he was educated at Oxford and Cambridge, but became a rigid Puritan, and wrote several books besides the famous Anatomie of Abuses.
Richard Carew (1555–1620) was a poet and antiquarian, and for a time high sheriff of Cornwall.
Page 186.—Pageants. The word in Shakespeare’s day was generally applied to theatrical entertainments.
Play the woman’s part. Female parts were played by boys or young men until after the middle of the 17th century. Samuel Pepys, in his Diary, under date of January 3, 1660, writes: “To the Theatre, where was acted ‘Beggar’s Brush,’ it being very well done; and here the first time that ever I saw women come upon the stage.” Again, under February 12, 1660, he records a performance of The Scornful Lady, adding: “now done by a woman, which makes the play appear much better than ever it did to me.”
Made her weep a-good. That is, heartily.
Passioning. Grieving, lamenting. Compare Venus and Adonis, 1059: “Dumbly she passions,” etc.
Page 190.—Steevens. George Steevens (1736–1800) was an eccentric but accomplished editor and critic. “He was often wantonly mischievous, and delighted to stumble for the mere gratification of dragging unsuspicious innocents into the mire with him. He was, in short, the very Puck of commentators.”
John Heywood (1500?-1580) was a dramatist and epigrammatist. His interludes “prepared the way for English comedy,” the characters having some individuality instead of being mere walking virtues and vices. Of these plays The Four P’s (printed between 1543 and 1547) is the best known. The characters that give it the name are a Palmer, a Pardoner, a Potecary (apothecary) and a Pedlar. A palmer was a pilgrim to the Holy Land, so called from the palm-branch he brought back in token of having performed the journey. A pardoner was a person licensed to sell papal indulgences, or pardons.
No night is now, etc. The quotation is from A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, ii. 1. 102.
Page 191.—Housen. An obsolete plural of house, formed like oxen, etc.
Page 192.—The offices. The rooms in an old English mansion where provisions are kept; that is, the pantry, kitchen, etc.
Waes-hael. Anglo-Saxon for “Be hale (whole, or well),” equivalent to “Here’s to your health.” Wassail is a corruption of this salutation, which from this meaning was transferred to festive gatherings where it was used, and then to the liquor served on such occasions—generally, spiced ale.
The tenant of Ingon. When Knight wrote this, fifty or more years ago, he supposed that a certain John Shakespeare who in 1570 held a farm known as Ingon or Ington, in the parish of Hampton Lucy near Stratford, was the poet’s father; but that he was one of the many other Shakespeares in Warwickshire (see page 207 below) appears from an entry in the parish register at Hampton Lucy, showing that he was buried on the 25th of September, 1589. The poet’s father lived until September, 1601, his funeral being registered as having taken place on the 8th of that month. There was another John Shakespeare, a shoemaker, who was a resident of Stratford from about 1584 to about 1594. In the town records he is generally called the “shumaker,” or “corvizer” (an obsolete word of the same meaning), or “cordionarius” (the Latin equivalent); but occasionally he appears simply as “John Shakspere,” and some of these entries were formerly supposed to refer to the father of the dramatist.
The Lord of Misrule. The person chosen to direct the Christmas sports and revels. His sovereignty lasted during the twelve days of the holiday season. Stow, in his Survey of London (see on page 82 above), says: “In the feast of Christmas, there was in the king’s house, wheresoever he lodged, a Lord of Misrule, or Master of Merry Disports, and the like had ye in the house of every nobleman of honour or good worship, were he spiritual or temporal.” Stubbes (see on page 185 above) inveighed against the practice in his usual bitter way: “First, all the wild heads of the parish, conventing together, choose them a grand captain (of mischief) whom they innoble with the title of my Lord of Misrule, and him they crown with great solemnity, and adopt for their king. This king anointed chooseth forth twenty, forty, three score, or a hundred lusty guts like to himself, to wait upon his lordly majesty, and to guard his noble person. Then every one of these his men he investeth with his liveries, of green, yellow, or some other light wanton color.... And they have their hobby-horses, dragons, and other antics, together with their bawdy pipers and thundering drummers, to strike up the devil’s dance withal;... and in this sort they go to the church (though the minister be at prayer or preaching) dancing and swinging their handkerchiefs over their heads in the church, like devils incarnate, with such a confused noise that no man can hear his own voice.... Then after this, about the church they go again and again, and so forth into the churchyard, where they have commonly their summer halls, their bowers, arbors, and banqueting houses set up, wherein they feast, banquet, and dance all that day, and (peradventure) all that night too. And thus these terrestrial furies spend their Sabbath day.” He goes on to tell how the people give money, food, and drink for these festivities, and adds: “but if they knew that, as often as they bring any to the maintenance of these execrable pastimes, they offer sacrifice to the Devil and Sathanas [Satan], they would repent, and withdraw their hands, which God grant they may.” The Lords of Misrule in colleges were preached against at Cambridge by the Puritans in the reign of James I. as inconsistent with a place of religious education, and as a relic of Pagan worship. In Scotland, the “Abbot of Unreason” (as the Lord of Misrule was called there), with other festive characters, was suppressed by legislation as early as 1555. Thomas Fuller (1608–1681), in his Good Thoughts in Worse Times (1647), says: “Some sixty years since, in the University of Cambridge, it was solemnly debated betwixt the heads [of the colleges] to debar young scholars of that liberty allowed them in Christmas, as inconsistent with the discipline of students. But some grave governors mentioned the good use thereof, because thereby, in twelve days, they more discover the dispositions of scholars than in twelve months before.”
Page 193.—The Clopton who is gone. William Clopton, whose tomb is in the north aisle of Stratford Church. He was the father of the William Clopton of Shakespeare’s boyhood, who resided at Clopton House, an ancient mansion less than two miles from Stratford on the brow of the Welcombe Hills. It is still standing, though long ago modernized. It is said to have been originally surrounded with a moat, like the “moated grange” of Measure for Measure (iii. 1. 277).
To burn this night with torches. That is, to prolong the festivities. The quotation is from Antony and Cleopatra, iv. 2. 41.
John Dyer (1700–1758) was an English poet, author of Grongar Hill (1727), The Ruins of Rome (1740), etc.
Page 194.—Flawns. A kind of custard-pie. Compare Ben Jonson, Sad Shepherdess, i. 2:—
“Fall to your cheese-cakes, curds, and clouted cream,
Your fools, your flawns,” etc.
The fools were also a kind of custard, or fruit with whipped cream, etc. Gooseberry-fool is still an English dish.
Page 195.—The cost of the sheep-shearing feast. Mr. Knight makes a little slip here. The Clown, on his way to buy materials for the feast, tries to reckon up mentally what the wool from the shearing will bring. “Let me see,” he says; “every ’leven wether tods [that is, yields a tod, or 28 pounds of wool]; every tod yields pound and odd shilling; fifteen hundred shorn,—what comes the wool to?” Then, after vainly attempting to make out what the amount will be, he adds: “I cannot do ’t without counters” (round pieces of metal used in reckoning), and, giving up the problem, turns to considering what he is to buy for his sister: “Let me see; what am I to buy for our sheep-shearing feast? Three pound of sugar, five pound of currants, rice,—what will this sister of mine do with rice? But my father hath made her mistress of the feast, and she lays it on. She hath made me four-and-twenty nosegays for the shearers,—three-man songmen all, and very good ones; but they are most of them means and bases; but one Puritan amongst them, and he sings psalms to hornpipes. I must have saffron to colour the warden pies; mace, dates—none; that’s out of my note: nutmegs, seven; a race or two of ginger,—but that I may beg; four pound of prunes, and as many of raisins o’ the sun.” Three-man songmen are singers of catches in three parts. Means are tenors. Warden pies are pies made of wardens, a kind of large pears, which were usually baked or roasted. A race of ginger is a root of it; and raisins o’ the sun are raisins dried in the sun.
Page 196.—Paul Hentzner. He was a native of Silesia (1558–1623) who wrote a Journey through Germany, France, Italy, etc.
Matthew Stevenson wrote several other books in prose and verse, published between 1654 and 1673.
The furmenty-pot. The word furmenty is a corruption of frumenty (see page 197), which is derived from the Latin frumentum, meaning wheat. The hulled wheat, boiled in milk and seasoned, was a popular dish in England, as it still is in the rural districts.
Robert Herrick (1591–1674) was an English lyric poet. The Hesperides was his most important work. A complete edition of his poems, edited by Mr. Grosart, was published in 1876.
Page 197.—A mawkin. A kitchen-wench, or other menial servant. The word is only a phonetic spelling of malkin, which Shakespeare has in Coriolanus, ii. 1. 224: “the kitchen malkin.” Compare Tennyson, The Princess, v. 25:—
“If this be he,—or a draggled mawkin, thou,
That tends her bristled grunters in the sludge;”
that is, a female swineherd.
Prank them up. Adorn themselves.
The fill-horse. The word fill, for the thills or shafts of a vehicle, used by Shakespeare and other writers of that day, is now obsolete in England, though still current in New England. Cross means to make the sign of the cross upon or over the animal.
Page 199.—Sheffield whittles. Knives made at Sheffield. Chaucer, in the Canterbury Tales (3931) refers to a “Shefeld thwitel,” or whittle. Compare Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, v. 1. 173: “There’s not a whittle in the unruly camp,” etc.
Rings with posies. Rings with mottoes inscribed inside them. Posy is the same word as poesy, which we also find used in this sense. Compare Hamlet, iii. 2. 162: “Is this a prologue, or the poesy of a ring?” The fashion of putting such posies on rings prevailed from the middle of the 16th century to the close of the 17th. In 1624 a little book was published with the title, Love’s Garland, or Posies for Rings, Handkerchiefs, and Gloves; and such pretty tokens, that lovers send their loves. Compare page 53 above.
Page 201.—Qui est la? Who is there? (French). The reply is, “Peasants, poor French people.”
Whipped three market-days. For some petty offence he had committed.
Page 202.—Wick-yarn. For making wicks for the oil-lamps then in common use. It was a familiar article in this country fifty years ago, when whale-oil was used for household illumination.
Napery. Linen for domestic use, especially table-linen.
Inkles, caddises, coifs, stomachers, pomanders, etc. All these things are found in the peddler’s pack of Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale (iv. 4). Compare page 204 below. Caddises are worsted ribbons, or galloons. Inkles are a kind of tape. Pomanders were little balls made of perfumes, and worn in the pocket or about the neck, for the sake of the fragrance or as a mere ornament, and sometimes to prevent infection in times of plague.
The ivy-bush. A bush or tuft of ivy was in olden time the sign of a vintner. Compare the cut of the Morris-Dance, opposite page 178. The old proverb, “Good wine needs no bush” (As You Like It, v. epil.), means that a place where good wine is kept needs no sign to attract customers. Gascoigne, in his Glass of Government (1575), says: “Now a days the good wyne needeth none ivye garland.”
Page 203.—The juggler with his ape. The ape being used to perform tricks, as monkeys are nowadays by organ-grinders to amuse their street audiences. In The Winter’s Tale (iv. 3. 101) the Clown says of Autolycus: “I know this man well: he hath been since an ape-bearer”; that is, he carried round a trained ape as a show.
Cantabanqui. Strolling ballad-singers; literally, persons who sing upon a bench (from the Italian catambanco, formerly cantinbanco). Compare Sir Henry Taylor, Philip van Artevelde, i. 3. 2:—
“He was no tavern cantabank that made it,
But a squire minstrel of your Highness’ court.”
The Tale of Sir Topas. One of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, The Rime of Sir Topas, a burlesque upon the metrical romances of the time. It is written in ballad form.
Bevis of Southampton. A fabulous hero of the time of William the Conqueror. He is mentioned in Henry VIII. i. 1. 38:—
“that former fabulous story,
Being now seen possible enough, got credit,
That Bevis was believed;”
that is, so that the old romantic legend became credible. In 2 Henry VI., after the words (ii. 3. 89), “have at thee with a downright blow,” some editors add from the old play on which this is founded: “as Bevis of Southampton fell upon Ascapart,” a giant whom he was said to have conquered. Figures of Bevis and Ascapart formerly adorned the Bar-gate at Southampton, as shown in the cut on the next page; but when the gate was repaired some years ago they were removed to the museum.
Adam Bell and Clymme of the Clough (that is, of the Cliff) figure in a popular old ballad, which may be found in Percy’s Reliques.
The woolen statute-caps. Caps which, by Act of Parliament in 1571, the citizens were required to wear on Sundays and holidays. The nobility were exempt from the requirement, which, as Strype informs us, was “in behalf of the trade of cappers”—one of sundry such “protection” measures in the time of Elizabeth. Compare Love’s Labour’s Lost, v. 2. 282: “Well, better wits have worn plain statute-caps.” As Knight intimates here, the law was a very unpopular one.
The Wife of Bath’s husbands. Alluding to the Wife of Bath, one of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims. In the prologue to her tale, she says of her husbands (of whom she had five in succession):—
“I governed hem so wel after my lawe,
That eche of hem ful blisful was and fawe [fain, or glad]
To bringen me gay things fro the feyre.”
That is, as she goes on to explain, they were glad to bring her presents from the fair to keep her in good humor, as otherwise she was apt to treat them “spitously,” or spitefully.
Where a coxcomb will be broke. That is, a head will be broken; but it should be understood that this does not mean a fractured skull, but merely a bruise sufficient to break the skin and make the blood flow. Shakespearian critics have sometimes misapprehended this and similar expressions. In Romeo and Juliet (i. 2. 52), where the hero says, “Your plantain-leaf is excellent for that” (referring to a “broken shin”), Ulrici, the eminent German commentator, thinks that he must be speaking ironically, as plantain “was used to stop the blood, but not for a fracture of a bone.” Compare Twelfth Night, v. 1. 178, where Sir Andrew says: “He has broke my head across and has given Sir Toby a bloody coxcomb too.”
Page 206.—Junkets. The word here means sweetmeats or delicacies.
Properties. In the theatrical sense of stage requisites, such as costumes and other equipments and appointments.
Incurious. Not curious, in the original sense of careful; not fastidious, and therefore pleased with these inferior actors.
And possess. The subject of possess is omitted, after the loose fashion of the time, being obviously implied in rustics. Compare Hamlet, iii. 1. 8:—
“Nor do we find him forward to be sounded,
But with a crafty madness keeps aloof”;
that is, he keeps aloof.
Page 207.—We see not its workings. We see the results, but not the processes by which they have been brought about.
The “green lap” in which the boy poet was “laid.” The quotations are from the passage referring to Shakespeare in The Progress of Poesy by Thomas Gray (1716–1771):—
“Far from the sun and summer gale,
In thy green lap was Nature’s darling laid,
What time, where lucid Avon stray’d,
To him the mighty mother did unveil
Her awful face; the dauntless child
Stretch’d forth his little arms and smil’d.
‘This pencil take,’ she said, ‘whose colors clear
Richly paint the vernal year:
Thine too these golden keys, immortal boy!
This can unlock the gates of joy;
Of horror that, and thrilling fears,
Or ope the sacred fount of sympathetic tears.’”
The name of Shakespeare was very common. See note on The tenant of Ingon, page 192, above.
Page 208.—Volumes have been written on the plant-lore, etc. The best of these is Rev. H. N. Ellacombe’s Plant-Lore and Garden-craft of Shakespeare, which is quoted on the next page.
Apricocks. An old form of apricots.
Page 209.—In the compass of a pale. Within the limits of an enclosure, or walled garden.
Knots. Interlacing beds. Compare Milton, P. L. iv. 242: “In beds and curious knots”; and Love’s Labour’s Lost, i. 1. 249: “thy curious-knotted garden.”
He that hath suffer’d, etc. King Richard.
At time of year. That is, at the proper season.
Confound itself. Ruin or destroy itself. Compare The Merchant of Venice, iii. 2. 278:—
“Never did I know
A creature that did bear the shape of man
So keen and greedy to confound a man.”
Page 210.—To prove his real profession. Books and essays have been written to prove Shakespeare’s intimate knowledge of various professions and occupations—law, medicine, military science, seamanship, etc.