The banquet lasted three hours, when the cloth was removed, the table was placed upon the ground--that is, removed from the dais--and their majesties, standing upon it, washed their hands in basins, as did the others. After the dinner was the ball, and that ended, they took their places at the windows of a roam that looked out upon a square, where a platform was raised and a vast crowd was a.s.sembled to see the king"s bears fight with greyhounds. This afforded great amus.e.m.e.nt. Presently a bull, tied to the end of a rope, was fiercely baited by dogs. After this tumblers danced upon a rope and performed feats of agility on horseback.
The constable and his attendants were lighted home by half an hundred halberdiers with torches, and, after the fatigues of the day, supped in private. We are not surprised to read that on Monday, the 30th, the constable awoke with a slight attack of lumbago.
Like Elizabeth, all her subjects were fond of the savage pastime of bear and bull baiting. It cannot be denied that this people had a taste for blood, took delight in brutal encounters, and drew the sword and swung the cudgel with great prompt.i.tude; nor were they fastidious in the matter of public executions. Kiechel says that when the criminal was driven in the cart under the gallows, and left hanging by the neck as the cart moved from under him, his friends and acquaintances pulled at his legs in order that he might be strangled the sooner.
When Shakespeare was managing his theatres and writing his plays London was full of foreigners, settled in the city, who no doubt formed part of his audience, for they thought that English players had attained great perfection. In 1621 there were as many as ten thousand strangers in London, engaged in one hundred and twenty-one different trades. The poet need not go far from Blackfriars to pick up sc.r.a.ps of German and folk-lore, for the Hanse merchants were located in great numbers in the neighborhood of the steel-yard in Lower Thames Street.
Foreigners as well as contemporary chronicles and the printed diatribes against luxury bear witness to the profusion in all ranks of society and the variety and richness in apparel. There was a rage for the display of fine clothes. Elizabeth left hanging in her wardrobe above three thousand dresses when she was called to take that unseemly voyage down the stream, on which the clown"s brogan jostles the queen"s slipper. The plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and of all the dramatists, are a perfect commentary on the fashions of the day, but a knowledge of the fashions is necessary to a perfect enjoyment of the plays. We see the fine lady in a gown of velvet (the foreigners thought it odd that velvet should be worn in the street), or cloth of gold and silver tissue, her hair eccentrically dressed, and perhaps dyed, a great hat with waving feathers, sometimes a painted face, maybe a mask or a m.u.f.fler hiding all the features except the eyes, with a m.u.f.f, silk stockings, high-heeled shoes, imitated from the "chopine" of Venice, perfumed bracelets, necklaces, and gloves--"gloves sweet as damask roses"--a pocket-handkerchief wrought in gold and silver, a small looking-gla.s.s pendant at the girdle, and a love-lock hanging wantonly over the shoulder, artificial flowers at the corsage, and a mincing step. "These fashionable women, when they are disappointed, dissolve into tears, weep with one eye, laugh with the other, or, like children, laugh and cry they can both together, and as much pity is to be taken of a woman weeping as of a goose going barefoot," says old Burton.
The men had even greater fondness for finery. Paul Hentzner, the Brandenburg jurist, in 1598, saw, at the Fair at St. Bartholomew, the lord mayor, attended by twelve gorgeous aldermen, walk in a neighboring field, dressed in a scarlet gown, and about his neck a golden chain, to which hung a Golden Fleece. Men wore the hair long and flowing, with high hats and plumes of feathers, and carried m.u.f.fs like the women; gallants sported gloves on their hats as tokens of ladies" favors, jewels and roses in the ears, a long love-lock under the left ear, and gems in a ribbon round the neck. This tall hat was called a "capatain." Vincentio, in the "Taming of the Shrew," exclaims: "O fine villain! A silken doublet! A velvet hose! A scarlet cloak! And a capatain hat!" There was no limit to the caprice and extravagance. Hose and breeches of silk, velvet, or other rich stuff, and fringed garters wrought of gold or silver, worth five pounds apiece, are some of the items noted. Burton says, ""Tis ordinary for a gallant to put a thousand oaks and an hundred oxen into a suit of apparel, to wear a whole manor on his back." Even serving-men and tailors wore jewels in their shoes.
We should note also the magnificence in the furnishing of houses, the arras, tapestries, cloth of gold and silver, silk hangings of many colors, the splendid plate on the tables and sideboards. Even in the houses of the middle cla.s.ses the furniture was rich and comfortable, and there was an air of amenity in the chambers and parlors strewn with sweet herbs and daily decked with pretty nosegays and fragrant flowers. Lights were placed on antique candelabra, or, wanting these at suppers, there were living candleholders. "Give me a torch," says Romeo; "I"ll be a candle-holder, and look on." Knowledge of the details of luxury of an English home of the sixteenth century will make exceedingly vivid hosts of allusions in Shakespeare.
Servants were numerous in great households, a large retinue being a mark of gentility, and hospitality was unbounded. During the lord mayor"s term in London he kept open house, and every day any stranger or foreigner could dine at his table, if he could find an empty seat. Dinner, served at eleven in the early years of James, attained a degree of epicureanism rivaling dinners of the present day, although the guests ate with their fingers or their knives, forks not coming in till 1611. There was mighty eating and swigging at the banquets, and carousing was carried to an extravagant height, if we may judge by the account of an orgy at the king"s palace in 1606, for the delectation of the King and Queen of Denmark, when the company and even their majesties abandoned discretion and sobriety, and "the ladies are seen to roll about in intoxication."
The manners of the male population of the period, says Nathan Drake, seem to have been compounded from the characters of the two sovereigns. Like Elizabeth, they are brave, magnanimous, and prudent; and sometimes, like James, they are credulous, curious, and dissipated. The credulity and superst.i.tion of the age, and its belief in the supernatural, and the sumptuousness of masques and pageants at the court and in the city, of which we read so much in the old chronicles, are abundantly reflected in the pages of Jonson, Shakespeare, and other writers.
The town was full of public-houses and pleasure-gardens, but, curiously enough, the favorite place of public parading was the middle aisle of St.
Paul"s Cathedral--"Paul"s Walk," as it was called--which was daily frequented by n.o.bles, gentry, perfumed gallants, and ladies, from ten to twelve and three to six o"clock, to talk on business, politics, or pleasure. Hither came, to acquire the fashions, make a.s.signations, arrange for the night"s gaming, or shun the bailiff, the gallant, the gamester, the ladies whose dresses were better than their manners, the stale knight, the captain out of service. Here Falstaff purchased Bardolph. "I bought him," say"s the knight, "at Paul"s." The tailors went there to get the fashions of dress, as the gallants did to display them, one suit before dinner and another after. What a study was this varied, mixed, flaunting life, this dance of pleasure and license before the very altar of the church, for the writers of satire, comedy, and tragedy!
But it is not alone town life and court life and the society of the fine folk that is reflected in the English drama and literature of the seventeenth century, and here is another wide difference between it and the French literature of the same period; rural England and the popular life of the country had quite as much to do in giving tone and color to the writings of the time. It is necessary to know rural England to enter into the spirit of this literature, and to appreciate how thoroughly it took hold of life in every phase. Shakespeare knew it well. He drew from life the country gentleman, the squire, the parson, the pedantic schoolmaster who was regarded as half conjurer, the yeoman or farmer, the dairy maids, the sweet English girls, the country louts, shepherds, boors, and fools. How he loved a fool! He had talked with all these persons, and knew their speeches and humors. He had taken part in the country festivals-May Day, Plow Monday, the Sheep Shearing, the Morris Dances and Maud Marian, the Harvest Home and Twelfth Night. The rustic merrymakings, the feasts in great halls, the games on the greensward, the love of wonders and of marvelous tales, the regard for portents, the naive superst.i.tions of the time pa.s.s before us in his pages. Drake, in his "Shakespeare and his Times," gives a graphic and indeed charming picture of the rural life of this century, drawn from Harrison and other sources.
In his s.p.a.cious hall, floored with stones and lighted by large transom windows, hung with coats of mail and helmets, and all military accoutrements, long a prey to rust, the country squire, seated at a raised table at one end, held a baronial state and dispensed prodigal hospitality. The long table was divided into upper and lower messes by a huge salt-cellar; and the consequence of the guests was marked by their seats above or below the salt. The distinction extended to the fare, for wine frequently circulated only above the salt, and below it the food was of coa.r.s.er quality. The literature of the time is full of allusions to this distinction. But the luxury of the table and good cooking were well understood in the time of Elizabeth and James. There was ma.s.sive eating done in those days, when the guests dined at eleven, rose from the banquet to go to evening prayers, and returned to a supper at five or six, which was often as substantial as the dinner. Gervase Markham in his "English Housewife," after treating of the ordering of great feasts, gives directions for "a more humble feast of an ordinary proportion."
This "humble feast," he says, should consist for the first course of "sixteen full dishes, that is, dishes of meat that are of substance, and not empty, or for shew--as thus, for example: first, a shield of brawn with mustard; secondly, a boyl"d capon; thirdly, a boyl"d piece of beef; fourthly, a chine of beef rosted; fifthly, a neat"s tongue rosted; sixthly, a pig rosted; seventhly, chewets bak"d; eighthly, a goose rosted; ninthly, a swan rosted; tenthly, a turkey rosted; the eleventh, a haunch of venison rosted; the twelfth, a pasty of venison; the thirteenth, a kid with a pudding in the belly; the fourteenth, an olive-pye; the fifteenth, a couple of capons; the sixteenth, a custard or dowsets. Now to these full dishes may be added sallets, fricases, "quelque choses," and devised paste; as many dishes more as will make no less than two and thirty dishes, which is as much as can conveniently stand on one table, and in one mess; and after this manner you may proportion both your second and third course, holding fullness on one half the dishes, and shew in the other, which will be both frugal in the splendor, contentment to the guest, and much pleasure and delight to the beholders." After this frugal repast it needed an interval of prayers before supper.
The country squire was a long-lived but not always an intellectual animal. He kept hawks of all kinds, and all sorts of hounds that ran buck, fox, hare, otter, and badger. His great hall was commonly strewn with marrow-bones, and full of hawks" perches, of hounds, spaniels, and terriers. His oyster-table stood at one end of the room, and oysters he ate at dinner and supper. At the upper end of the room stood a small table with a double desk, one side of which held a church Bible, the other Fox"s "Book of Martyrs." He drank a gla.s.s or two of wine at his meals, put syrup of gilly-flower in his sack, and always had a tun-gla.s.s of small beer standing by him, which he often stirred about with rosemary. After dinner, with a gla.s.s of ale by his side he improved his mind by listening to the reading of a choice pa.s.sage out of the "Book of Martyrs."
This is a portrait of one Henry Hastings, of Dorsetshire, in Gilpin"s "Forest Scenery." He lived to be a hundred, and never lost his sight nor used spectacles. He got on horseback without help, and rode to the death of the stag till he was past fourscore.
The plain country fellow, plowman, or clown, is several pegs lower, and described by Bishop Earle as one that manures his ground well, but lets himself lie fallow and unt.i.tled. His hand guides the plow, and the plow his thoughts. His mind is not much disturbed by objects, but he can fix a half-hour"s contemplation on a good fat cow. His habitation is under a poor thatched roof, distinguished from his barn only by loop-holes that let out the smoke. Dinner is serious work, for he sweats at it as much as at his labor, and he is a terrible fastener on a piece of beef. His religion is a part of his copyhold, which he takes from his landlord and refers it wholly to his discretion, but he is a good Christian in his way, that is, he comes to church in his best clothes, where he is capable only of two prayers--for rain and fair weather.
The country clergymen, at least those of the lower orders, or readers, were distinguished in Shakespeare"s time by the appellation "Sir," as Sir Hugh, in the "Merry Wives," Sir Topas, in "Twelfth Night," Sir Oliver, in "As You Like It." The distinction is marked between priesthood and knighthood when Vista says, "I am one that would rather go with Sir Priest than Sir Knight." The clergy were not models of conduct in the days of Elizabeth, but their position excites little wonder when we read that they were often paid less than the cook and the minstrel.
There was great fondness in cottage and hall for merry tales of errant knights, lovers, lords, ladies, dwarfs, friars, thieves, witches, goblins, for old stories told by the fireside, with a toast of ale on the hearth, as in Milton"s allusion
"---to the nut-brown ale, With stories told of many a feat"
A designation of winter in "Love"s Labour"s Lost" is
"When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl."
To "turne a crab" is to roast a wild apple in the fire in order to throw it hissing hot into a bowl of nutbrown ale, into which had been put a toast with some spice and sugar. Puck describes one of his wanton pranks:
"And sometimes I lurk in a gossip"s bowl, In very likeness of a roasted crab, And when she drinks against her lips I bob:"
I love no roast, says John Still, in "Gammer Gurton"s Needle,"
"I love no rost, but a nut-browne torte, And a crab layde in the fyre; A lytle bread shall do me stead, Much bread I not desire."
In the bibulous days of Shakespeare, the peg tankard, a species of wa.s.sail or wish-health bowl, was still in use. Introduced to restrain intemperance, it became a cause of it, as every drinker was obliged to drink down to the peg. We get our expression of taking a man "a peg lower," or taking him "down a peg," from this custom.
In these details I am not attempting any complete picture of the rural life at this time, but rather indicating by ill.u.s.trations the sort of study which illuminates its literature. We find, indeed, if we go below the surface of manners, sober, discreet, and sweet domestic life, and an appreciation of the virtues. Of the English housewife, says Gervase Markham, was not only expected sanct.i.ty and holiness of life, but "great modesty and temperance, as well outwardly as inwardly. She must be of chaste thoughts, stout courage, patient, untired, watchful, diligent, witty, pleasant, constant in friendship, full of good neighborhood, wise in discourse, but not frequent therein, sharp and quick of speech, but not bitter or talkative, secret in her affairs, comportable in her counsels, and generally skillful in the worthy knowledges which do belong to her vocation." This was the mistress of the hospitable house of the country knight, whose chief traits were loyalty to church and state, a love of festivity, and an ardent attachment to field sports. His well-educated daughter is charmingly described in an exquisite poem by Drayton:
He had, as antique stories tell,
He had, as antique stories tell, A daughter cleaped Dawsabel, A maiden fair and free; And for she was her father"s heir, Full well she ycond the leir Of mickle courtesy.
"The silk well couth she twist and twine, And make the fine march-pine, And with the needle work: And she couth help the priest to say His matins on a holy day, And sing a psalm in Kirk.
"She wore a frock of frolic green Might well become a maiden queen, Which seemly was to see; A hood to that so neat and fine, In color like the columbine, Ywrought full featously.
"Her features all as fresh above As is the gra.s.s that grows by Dove, And lythe as la.s.s of Kent.
Her skin as soft as Lemster wool, As white as snow on Peakish Hull, Or swan that swims in Trent.
"This maiden in a morn betime Went forth when May was in the prime To get sweet setywall, The honey-suckle, the harlock, The lily, and the lady-smock, To deck her summer hall."
How late such a simple and pretty picture could have been drawn to life is uncertain, but by the middle of the seventeenth century the luxury of the town had penetrated the country, even into Scotland. The dress of a rich farmer"s wife is thus described by Dunbar. She had "a robe of fine scarlet, with a white hood, a gay purse and gingling keys pendant at her side from a silken belt of silver tissue; on each finger she wore two rings, and round her waist was bound a sash of gra.s.s-green silk, richly embroidered with silver."
Shakespeare was the mirror of his time in things small as well as great.
How far he drew his characters from personal acquaintances has often been discussed. The clowns, tinkers, shepherds, tapsters, and such folk, he probably knew by name. In the Duke of Manchester"s "Court and Society from Elizabeth to Anne" is a curious suggestion about Hamlet. Reading some letters from Robert, Earl of Ess.e.x, to Lady Rich, his sister, the handsome, fascinating, and disreputable Penelope Devereaux, he notes, in their humorous melancholy and discontent with mankind, something in tone and even language which suggests the weak and fantastic side of Hamlet"s mind, and asks if the poet may not have conceived his character of Hamlet from Ess.e.x, and of Horatio from Southampton, his friend and patron. And he goes on to note some singular coincidences. Ess.e.x was supposed by many to have a good t.i.tle to the throne. In person he had his father"s beauty and was all that Shakespeare has described the Prince of Denmark. His mother had been tempted from her duty while her n.o.ble and generous husband was alive, and this husband was supposed to have been poisoned by her and her paramour. After the father"s murder the seducer had married the guilty mother. The father had not perished without expressing suspicion of foul play against himself, yet sending his forgiveness to his faithless wife. There are many other agreements in the facts of the case and the incidents of the play. The relation of Claudius to Hamlet is the same as that of Leicester to Ess.e.x: under pretense of fatherly friendship he was suspicious of his motives, jealous of his actions; kept him much in the country and at college; let him see little of his mother, and clouded his prospects in the world by an appearance of benignant favor. Gertrude"s relations with her son Hamlet were much like those of Lettice with Robert Devereaux. Again, it is suggested, in his moodiness, in his college learning, in his love for the theatre and the players, in his desire for the fiery action for which his nature was most unfit, there are many kinds of hints calling up an image of the Danish Prince.
This suggestion is interesting in the view that we find in the characters of the Elizabethan drama not types and qualities, but individuals strongly projected, with all their idiosyncrasies and contradictions.
These dramas touch our sympathies at all points, and are representative of human life today, because they reflected the human life of their time.
This is supremely true of Shakespeare, and almost equally true of Jonson and many of the other stars of that marvelous epoch. In England as well as in France, as we have said, it was the period of the cla.s.sic revival; but in England the energetic reality of the time was strong enough to break the cla.s.sic fetters, and to use cla.s.sic learning for modern purposes. The English dramatists, like the French, used cla.s.sic histories and characters. But two things are to be noted in their use of them.
First, that the characters and the play of mind and pa.s.sion in them are thoroughly English and of the modern time. And second, and this seems at first a paradox, they are truer to the cla.s.sic spirit than the characters in the contemporary French drama. This results from the fact that they are truer to the substance of things, to universal human nature, while the French seem to be in great part an imitation, having root neither in the soil of France nor Attica. M. Guizot confesses that France, in order to adopt the ancient models, was compelled to limit its field in some sort to one corner of human existence. He goes on to say that the present "demands of the drama pleasures and emotions that can no longer be supplied by the inanimate representation of a world that has ceased to exist. The cla.s.sic system had its origin in the life of the time; that time has pa.s.sed away; its image subsists in brilliant colors in its works, but can no more be reproduced." Our own literary monuments must rest on other ground. "This ground is not the ground of Corneille or Racine, nor is it that of Shakespeare; it is our own; but Shakespeare"s system, as it appears to me, may furnish the plans according to which genius ought now to work. This system alone includes all those social conditions and those general and diverse feelings, the simultaneous conjuncture and activity of which const.i.tute for us at the present day the spectacle of human things."
That is certainly all that any one can claim for Shakespeare and his fellow-dramatists. They cannot be models in form any more than Sophocles and Euripides; but they are to be followed in making the drama, or any literature, expressive of its own time, while it is faithful to the emotions and feeling of universal human nature. And herein, it seems to me, lies the broad distinction between most of the English and French literature of the latter part of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. Perhaps I may be indulged in another observation on this topic, touching a later time. Notwithstanding the prevalent notion that the French poets are the sympathetic heirs of cla.s.sic culture, it appears to me that they are not so imbued with the true cla.s.sic spirit, art, and mythology as some of our English poets, notably Keats and Sh.e.l.ley.
Ben Jonson was a man of extensive and exact cla.s.sical erudition; he was a solid scholar in the Greek and Roman literatures, in the works of the philosophers, poets, and historians. He was also a man of uncommon attainments in all the literary knowledge of his time. In some of his tragedies his cla.s.sic learning was thought to be ostentatiously displayed, but this was not true of his comedy, and on the whole he was too strong to be swamped in pseudo-cla.s.sicism. For his experience of men and of life was deep and varied. Before he became a public actor and dramatist, and served the court and fashionable society with his entertaining, if pedantic, masques, he had been student, tradesman, and soldier; he had traveled in Flanders and seen Paris, and wandered on foot through the length of England. London he knew as well as a man knows his own house and club, the comforts of its taverns, the revels of lords and ladies, the sports of Bartholomew Fair, and the humors of suburban villages; all the phases, language, crafts, professions of high and low city life were familiar to him. And in his comedies, as Mr. A. W. Ward pertinently says, his marvelously vivid reproduction of manners is unsurpa.s.sed by any of his contemporaries. "The age lives in his men and women, his country gulls and town gulls, his imposters and skeldering captains, his court ladies and would-be court ladies, his puling poetasters and whining Puritans, and, above all, in the whole ragam.u.f.fin rout of his Bartholomew Fair. Its pastimes, fashionable and unfashionable, its games and vapors and jeering, its high-polite courtships and its pulpit-shows, its degrading superst.i.tions and confounding hallucinations, its clubs of naughty ladies and its offices of lying news, its taverns and its tobacco shops, its giddy heights and its meanest depths--all are brought before us by our author."
No, he was not swamped by cla.s.sicism, but he was affected by it, and just here, and in that self-consciousness which Shakespeare was free from, and which may have been more or less the result of his cla.s.sic erudition, he fails of being one of the universal poets of mankind. The genius of Shakespeare lay in his power to so use the real and individual facts of life as to raise in the minds of his readers a broader and n.o.bler conception of human life than they had conceived before. This is creative genius; this is the idealist dealing faithfully with realistic material; this is, as we should say in our day, the work of the artist as distinguished from the work of the photographer. It may be an admirable but it is not the highest work of the sculptor, the painter, or the writer, that does not reveal to the mind--that comes into relation with it something before out of his experience and beyond the facts either brought before him or with which he is acquainted.
What influence Shakespeare had upon the culture and taste of his own time and upon his immediate audience would be a most interesting inquiry. We know what his audiences were. He wrote for the people, and the theatre in his day was a popular amus.e.m.e.nt for the mult.i.tude, probably more than it was a recreation for those who enjoyed the culture of letters. A taste for letters was prevalent among the upper cla.s.s, and indeed was fashionable among both ladies and gentlemen of rank. In this the court of Elizabeth set the fashion. The daughter of the d.u.c.h.ess was taught not only to distill strong waters, but to construe Greek. When the queen was translating Socrates or Seneca, the maids of honor found it convenient to affect at least a taste for the cla.s.sics. For the n.o.bleman and the courtier an intimacy with Greek, Latin, and Italian was essential to "good form." But the taste for erudition was mainly confined to the metropolis or the families who frequented it, and to persons of rank, and did not pervade the country or the middle cla.s.ses. A few of the country gentry had some pretension to learning, but the majority cared little except for hawks and hounds, gaming and drinking; and if they read it was some old chronicle, or story of knightly adventure, "Amadis de Gaul," or a stray playbook, or something like the "History of Long Meg of Westminster," or perhaps a sheet of news. To read and write were still rare accomplishments in the country, and Dogberry expressed a common notion when he said reading and writing come by nature. Sheets of news had become common in the town in James"s time, the first newspaper being the English Mercury, which appeared in April, 1588, and furnished food for Jonson"s satire in his "Staple of News." His accusation has a familiar sound when he says that people had a "hunger and thirst after published pamphlets of news, set out every Sat.u.r.day, but made all at home, and no syllable of truth in them."
Though Elizabeth and James were warm patrons of the theatre, the court had no such influence over the plays and players as had the court in Paris at the same period. The theatres were built for the people, and the audiences included all cla.s.ses. There was a distinction between what were called public and private theatres, but the public frequented both. The Shakespeare theatres, at which his plays were exclusively performed, were the Globe, called public, on the Bankside, and the Blackfriars, called private, on the City side, the one for summer, the other for winter performances. The Blackfriars was smaller than the Globe, was roofed over, and needed to be lighted with candles, and was frequented more by the better cla.s.s than the more popular Globe. There is no evidence that Elizabeth ever attended the public theatres, but the companies were often summoned to play before her in Whitehall, where the appointments and scenery were much better than in the popular houses.
The price of general admission to the Globe and Blackfriars was sixpence, at the Fashion Theatre twopence, and at some of the inferior theatres one penny. The boxes at the Globe were a shilling, at the Blackfriars one-and-six. The usual net receipts of a performance were from nine to ten pounds, and this was about the sum that Elizabeth paid to companies for a performance at Whitehall, which was always in the evening and did not interfere with regular hours. The theatres opened as early as one o"clock and not later than three in the afternoon. The crowds that filled the pit and galleries early, to secure places, amused themselves variously before the performance began: they drank ale, smoked, fought for apples, cracked nuts, chaffed the boxes, and a few read the cheap publications of the day that were hawked in the theatre. It was a rough and unsavory audience in pit and gallery, but it was a responsive one, and it enjoyed the acting with little help to illusion in the way of scenery. In fact, scenery did not exist, as we understand it. A board inscribed with the name of the country or city indicated the scene of action. Occasionally movable painted scenes were introduced. The interior roof of the stage was painted sky-blue, or hung with drapery of that tint, to represent the heavens. But when the idea of a dark, starless night was to be imposed, or tragedy was to be acted, these heavens were hung with black stuffs, a custom ill.u.s.trated in many allusions in Shakespeare, like that in the line,
"Hung be the heavens in black, yield day to night"
To hang the stage with black was to prepare it for tragedy. The costumes of the players were sometimes less n.i.g.g.ardly than the furnishing of the stage, for it was an age of rich and picturesque apparel, and it was not difficult to procure the cast-off clothes of fine gentlemen for stage use. But there was no lavishing of expense. I am recalling these details to show that the amus.e.m.e.nt was popular and cheap. The ordinary actors, including the boys and men who took women"s parts (for women did not appear on the stage till after the Restoration) received only about five or six shillings a week (for Sundays and all), and the first-cla.s.s actor, who had a share in the net receipts, would not make more than ninety pounds a year. The ordinary price paid for a new play was less than seven pounds; Oldys, on what authority is not known, says that Shakespeare received only five pounds for "Hamlet."
The influence of the theatre upon politics, contemporary questions that interested the public, and morals, was early recognized in the restraints put upon representations by the censorship, and in the floods of attacks upon its licentious and demoralizing character. The plays of Shakespeare did not escape the most bitter animadversions of the moral reformers. We have seen how Shakespeare mirrored his age, but we have less means of ascertaining what effect he produced upon the life of his time. Until after his death his influence was mainly direct, upon the play-goers, and confined to his auditors. He had been dead seven years before his plays were collected. However the people of his day regarded him, it is safe to say that they could not have had any conception of the importance of the work he was doing. They were doubtless satisfied with him. It was a great age for romances and story-telling, and he told stories, old in new dresses, but he was also careful to use contemporary life, which his hearers understood.
It is not to his own age, but to those following, and especially to our own time, that we are to look for the shaping and enormous influence upon human life of the genius of this poet. And it is measured not by the libraries of comments that his works have called forth, but by the prevalence of the language and thought of his poetry in all subsequent literature, and by its entrance into the current of common thought and speech. It may be safely said that the English-speaking world and almost every individual of it are different from what they would have been if Shakespeare had never lived. Of all the forces that have survived out of his creative time, he is one of the chief.