Chapter V: Variorum editions of Shakespeare, 322 323 362 (2)

{113a} A similar conceit is the topic of Shakespeare's Sonnet xxiv. Ronsard's Ode (livre iv. No. xx.) consists of a like dialogue between the heart and the eye. The conceit is traceable to Petrarch, whose Sonnet lv. or lxiii. ('Occhi, piangete, accompagnate il core') is a dialogue between the poet and his eyes, while his Sonnet xcix. or cxvii. is a companion dialogue between the poet and his heart. Cf. Watson's _Tears of Fancie_, xix. xx. (a pair of sonnets on the theme which closely resemble Shakespeare's pair); Drayton's _Idea_, xxxiii.; Barnes's _Parthenophe and Parthenophil_, xx., and Constable's _Diana_, vi. 7.

{113b} The Greek epigram is in _Palatine Anthology_, ix. 627, and is translated into Latin in _Selecta Epigrammata_, Basel, 1529. The Greek lines relate, as in Shakespeare's sonnets, how a nymph who sought to quench love's torch in a fountain only succeeded in heating the water. An added detail Shakespeare borrowed from a very recent adaptation of the epigram in Giles Fletcher's _Licia_, 1593 (Sonnet xxvii.), where the poet's Love bathes in the fountain, with the result not only that 'she touched the water and it burnt with Love,' but also

Now by her means it purchased hath that bliss
Which all diseases quickly can remove.

Similarly Shakespeare in Sonnet cliv. not merely states that the 'cool well' into which Cupid's torch had fallen 'from Love's fire took heat perpetual,' but also that it grew 'a bath and healthful remedy for men diseased.'

{114a} In Greek poetry the topic is treated in Pindar's _Olympic Odes_, xi., and in a fragment by Sappho, No. 16 in Bergk's _Poetae Lyrici Graeci_. In Latin poetry the topic is treated in Ennius as quoted in Cicero, _De Senectute_, c. 207; in Horace's _Odes_, iii. 30; in Virgil's _Georgics_, iii. 9; in Propertius, iii. 1; in Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, xv. 871 seq.; and in Martial, x. 27 seq. Among French sonnetteers Ronsard attacked the theme most boldly. His odes and sonnets promise immortality to the persons to whom they are addressed with an extravagant and a monotonous liberality. The following lines from Ronsard's Ode (livre i. No. vii.) 'Au Seigneur Carnavalet,' illustrate his habitual treatment of the theme:--

C'est un travail de bon-heur
Chanter les hommes louables,
Et leur bastir un honneur
Seul vainqueur des ans muables.
Le marbre ou l'airain vestu
D'un labeur vif par l'enclume
N'animent tant la vertu
Que les Muses par la plume. . .

Les neuf divines pucelles
Gardent ta gloire chez elles;
Et mon luth, qu'ell'ont fait estre
De leurs secrets le grand prestre,
Par cest hymne solennel
Respandra dessus ta race
Je ne scay quoy de sa grace
Qui te doit faire eternel.

(_OEuvres de Ronsard_, ed. Blanchemain, ii. 58, 62.)

I quote two other instances from Ronsard on p. 116, note 1. Desportes was also prone to indulge in the same conceit; cf. his _Cleonice_, sonnet 62, which Daniel appropriated bodily in his _Delia_ Sonnet xxvi.) Desportes warns his mistress that she will live in his verse like the phoenix in fire.

{114b} Ed. Shuckburgh, p. 62.

{114c} Shakespeare Soc. p. 93

{115} Other references to the topic appear in Sonnets xix., liv., lxiii., lxv., lxxxi. and cvii.

{116} See the quotation from Ronsard on p. 114, note 1. This sonnet is also very like Ronsard's Ode (livre v. No. xxxii.) 'A sa Muse,' which opens:

Plus dur que fer j'ay fini mon ouvrage,
Que 'an, dispos a demener les pas,
Que l'eau, le vent ou le brulant orage,
L'injuriant, ne ru'ront point a bas.
Quand ce viendra que le dernier trespas
M'assoupira d'un somme dur, a l'heure,
Sous le tombeau tout Ronsard n'ira pas,
Restant de luy la part meilleure. . .
Sus donque, Muse, emporte au ciel la gloire
Que j'ay gaignee, annoncant la victoire
Dont a bon droit je me voy jouissant. . .

Cf. also Ronsard's Sonnet lxxii. in _Amours_ (livre i.), where he declares that his mistress's name

Victorieux des peuples et des rois
S'en voleroit sus l'aile de ma ryme.

But Shakespeare, like Ronsard, knew Horace's far-famed Ode (bk. iii. 30)

Exegi monumentum aere perennius
Regalique situ pyramidum altius,
Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens
Possit diruere, aut innumerabilis
Annorum series, et fuga temporum.

Nor can there be any doubt that Shakespeare wrote with a direct reference to the concluding nine lines of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ (xv. 871-9):

Jamque opus exegi, quod nec Jovis ira nec ignes,
Nec poterit ferrum, nec edax abolere vetustas.
Cum volet illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis hujus
Jus habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat aevi;
Parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis
Astra ferar nomenque erit indelebile nostrum.

This passage was familiar to Shakespeare in one of his favourite books--Golding's translation of the _Metamorphoses_. Golding's rendering opens:

Now have I brought a worke to end which neither Jove's fierce wrath
Nor sword nor fire nor fretting age, with all the force it hath
Are able to abolish quite, &c.

Meres, after his mention of Shakespeare's sonnets in his _Palladis Tamia_ (1598), quotes parts of both passages from Horace and Ovid, and gives a Latin paraphrase of his own, which, he says, would fit the lips of our contemporary poets besides Shakespeare. The introduction of the name Mars into Meres's paraphrase as well as into line 7 of Shakespeare's Sonnet lv. led Mr. Tyler (on what are in any case very trivial grounds) to the assumption that Shakespeare was borrowing from his admiring critic, and was therefore writing after 1598, when Meres's book was published. In Golding's translation reference is made to Mars by name (the Latin here calls the god Gradivus) a few lines above the passage already quoted, and the word caught Shakespeare's eye there. Shakespeare owed nothing to Meres's paraphrase, but Meres probably owed much to passages in Shakespeare's sonnets.

{118a} See Appendix VIII., 'The Will Sonnets,' for the interpretation of Shakespeare's conceit and like efforts of Barnes.

{118b} Wires in the sense of hair was peculiarly distinctive of the sonnetteers' affected vocabulary. Cf. Daniel's _Delia_, 1591, No. xxvi., 'And golden hair may change to silver _wire_;' Lodge's _Phillis_, 1595, 'Made blush the beauties of her curled _wire_;' Barnes's _Parthenophil_, sonnet xlviii., 'Her hairs no grace of golden _wires_ want.' The comparison of lips with coral is not uncommon outside the Elizabethan sonnet, but it was universal there. Cf. 'Coral-coloured lips' (_Zepheria_, 1594, No. xxiii.); 'No coral is her lip' (Lodge's _Phillis_, 1595, No. viii.) 'Ce beau coral' are the opening words of Ronsard's _Amours_, livre i. No. xxiii., where a list is given of stones and metals comparable with women's features.

{119a} Shakespeare adopted this phraseology of Sidney literally in both the play and the sonnet; while Sidney's further conceit that the lady's eyes are in 'this mourning weed' in order 'to honour all their deaths who for her bleed' is reproduced in Shakespeare's Sonnet cxxxii.--one of the two under consideration--where he tells his mistress that her eyes 'have put on black' to become 'loving mourners' of him who is denied her love.

{119b}

O paradox! Black is the badge of hell,
The hue of dungeons and the scowl of night.
(_Love's Labour's Lost_, IV. iii. 254-5).
To look like her are chimney-sweepers black,
And since her time are colliers counted bright,
And Ethiops of their sweet complexion crack.
Dark needs no candle now, for dark is light (_ib._ 266-9).

{121} The parody, which is not in sonnet form, is printed in Harvey's _Letter-book_ (Camden Soc. pp. 101-43).

{122} No. vii. of Jodelle's _Contr' Amours_ runs thus:

Combien de fois mes vers ont-ils dore
Ces cheueux noirs dignes d'vne Meduse?
Combien de fois ce teint noir qui m'amuse,
Ay-ie de lis et roses colore?
Combien ce front de rides laboure
Ay-ie applani? et quel a fait ma Muse
Le gros sourcil, ou folle elle s'abuse,
Ayant sur luy l'arc d'Amour figure?
Quel ay-ie fait son oeil se renfoncant?
Quel ay-ie fait son grand nez rougissant?
Quelle sa bouche et ses noires dents quelles
Quel ay-ie fait le reste de ce corps?
Qui, me sentant endurer mille morts,
Viuoit heureux de mes peines mortelles.

(Jodelle's _OEuvres_, 1597, pp. 91-94.)

With this should be compared Shakespeare's sonnets cxxxvii., cxlviii., and cl. Jodelle's feigned remorse for having lauded the _black_ hair and complexion of his mistress is one of the most singular of several strange coincidences. In No. vi. of his _Contr' Amours_ Jodelle, after reproaching his 'traitres vers' with having untruthfully described his siren as a beauty, concludes:

'Ja si long temps faisant d'un Diable vn Ange
Vous m'ouurez l'oeil en l'iniuste louange,
Et m'aueuglez en l'iniuste tourment.

With this should be compared Shakespeare's Sonnet cxliv., lines 9-10.

And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell.

A conventional sonnet or extravagant vituperation, which Drummond of Hawthornden translated from Marino (_Rime_, 1602, pt. i. p. 76), is introduced with grotesque inappropriateness into Drummond's collection of 'sugared' sonnets (see pt. i. No. xxxv: Drummond's _Poems_, ed. W. C. Ward, i. 69, 217).

{123} The theories that all the sonnets addressed to a woman were addressed to the 'dark lady,' and that the 'dark lady' is identifiable with Mary Fitton, a mistress of the Earl of Pembroke, are baseless conjectures. The extant portraits of Mary Fitton prove her to be fair. The introduction of her name into the discussion is solely due to the mistaken notion that Shakespeare was the _protege_ of Pembroke, that most of the sonnets were addressed to him, and that the poet was probably acquainted with his patron's mistress. See Appendix VII. The expressions in two of the vituperative sonnets to the effect that the disdainful mistress had 'robb'd others' beds' revenues of their rents' (cxlii. 8) and 'in act her bed-vow broke' (clii. 37) have been held to imply that the woman denounced by Shakespeare was married. The first quotation can only mean that she was unfaithful with married men, but both quotations seem to be general phrases of abuse, the meaning of which should not be pressed closely.

{127} 'Lover' and 'love' in Elizabethan English were ordinary synonyms for 'friend' and 'friendship.' Brutus opens his address to the citizens of Rome with the words, 'Romans, countrymen, and _lovers_,' and subsequently describes Julius Caesar as 'my best _lover_' (_Julius Caesar_, III. ii. 13-49). Portia, when referring to Antonio, the bosom friend of her husband Bassanio, calls him 'the bosom _lover_ of my lord' (_Merchant of Venice_, III. iv. 17). Ben Jonson in his letters to Donne commonly described himself as his correspondent's 'ever true _lover_;' and Drayton, writing to William Drummond of Hawthornden, informed him that an admirer of his literary work was in love with him. The word 'love' was habitually applied to the sentiment subsisting between an author and his patron. Nash, when dedicating _Jack Wilton_ in 1594 to Southampton, calls him 'a dear _lover_ . . . of the _lovers_ of poets as of the poets themselves.'

{128} There is little doubt that this sonnet was parodied by Sir John Davies in the ninth and last of his 'gulling' sonnets, in which he ridicules the notion that a man of wit should put his wit in vassalage to any one.

To love my lord I do knight's service owe,
And therefore now he hath my wit in ward;
But while it [_i.e._ the poet's wit] is in his tuition so
Methinks he doth intreat [_i.e._ treat] it passing hard . . .
But why should love after minority
(When I have passed the one and twentieth year)
Preclude my wit of his sweet liberty,
And make it still the yoke of wardship bear?
I fear he [_i.e._ my lord] hath another title [_i.e._ right to my
wit] got
And holds my wit now for an idiot.

{129} Mr. Tyler assigns this sonnet to the year 1598 or later, on the fallacious ground that this line was probably imitated from an expression in Marston's _Pigmalion's Image_, published in 1598, where 'stanzas' are said to 'march rich bedight in warlike equipage.' The suggestion of plagiarism is quite gratuitous. The phrase was common in Elizabethan literature long before Marston employed it. Nash, in his preface to Green's _Menaphon_, which was published in 1589, wrote that the works of the poet Watson 'march in equipage of honour with any of your ancient poets.'

{131a} See Appendix IV. for a full account of Southampton's relations with Nash and other men of letters.

{131b} See p. 85, note.

{134a} Cf. _Parthenophil_, Madrigal i. line 12; Sonnet xvii. line 9.

{134b} _Parthenophil_, Sonnet xci.

{135} Much irrelevance has been introduced into the discussion of Chapman's claim to be the rival poet. Prof. Minto in his _Characteristics of English Poets_, p. 291, argued that Chapman was the man mainly because Shakespeare declared his competitor to be taught to write by 'spirits'--'his compeers by night'--as well as by 'an affable familiar ghost' which gulled him with intelligence at night (lxxxvi. 5 seq.) Professor Minto saw in these phrases allusions to some remarks by Chapman in his _Shadows of Night_ (1594), a poem on Night. There Chapman warned authors in one passage that the spirit of literature will often withhold itself from them unless it have 'drops of their blood like a heavenly familiar,' and in another place sportively invited 'nimble and aspiring wits' to join him in consecrating their endeavours to 'sacred night.' There is really no connection between Shakespeare's theory of the supernatural and nocturnal sources of his rival's influence and Chapman's trite allusion to the current faith in the power of 'nightly familiars' over men's minds and lives, or Chapman's invitation to his literary comrades to honour Night with him. It is supererogatory to assume that Shakespeare had Chapman's phrases in his mind when alluding to superstitions which were universally acknowledged. It could be as easily argued on like grounds that Shakespeare was drawing on other authors. Nash in his prose tract called independently _The Terrors of the Night_, which was also printed in 1594, described the nocturnal habits of 'familiars' more explicitly than Chapman. The publisher Thomas Thorpe, in dedicating in 1600 Marlowe's translation of Lucan (bk. i.) to his friend Edward Blount, humorously referred to the same topic when he reminded Blount that 'this spirit [_i.e._ Marlowe], whose ghost or genius is to be seen walk the Churchyard [of St. Paul's] in at the least three or four sheets . . . was sometime a _familiar_ of your own.' On the strength of these quotations, and accepting Professor Minto's line of argument, Nash, Thorpe, or Blount, whose 'familiar' is declared to have been no less a personage than Marlowe, has as good a claim as Chapman to be the rival poet of Shakespeare's sonnets. A second and equally impotent argument in Chapman's favour has been suggested. Chapman in the preface to his translation of the _Iliads_ (1611 ) denounces without mentioning any name 'a certain envious windsucker that hovers up and down, laboriously engrossing all the air with his luxurious ambition, and buzzing into every ear my detraction.' It is suggested that Chapman here retaliated on Shakespeare for his references to him as his rival in the sonnets; but it is out of the question that Chapman, were he the rival, should have termed those high compliments 'detraction.' There is no ground for identifying Chapman's 'windsucker' with Shakespeare (cf. Wyndham, p. 255). The strongest point in favour of the theory of Chapman's identity with the rival poet lies in the fact that each of the two sections of his poem _The Shadow of the Night_ (1594) is styled a 'hymn,' and Shakespeare in Sonnet lxxxv. 6-7 credits his rival with writing 'hymns.' But Drayton, in his _Harmonie of the Church_, 1591, and Barnes, as we have just seen, both wrote 'hymns.' The word was not loosely used in Elizabethan English, as in sixteenth-century French, in the general sense of 'poem.'

{136} See p. 127, note I.

{137} Sir Walter Ralegh was wont to apostrophise his aged sovereign thus:

Oh, hopeful love, my object and invention,
Oh, true desire, the spur of my conceit,
Oh, worthiest spirit, my mind's impulsion,
Oh, eyes transparent, my affection's bait;
Oh, princely form, my fancy's adamant,
Divine conceit, my pain's acceptance,
Oh, all in one! Oh, heaven on earth transparent!
The seat of joy and love's abundance!

(Cf. _Cynthia_, a fragment in _Poems of Raleigh_, ed. Hannah, p. 33.) When Ralegh leaves Elizabeth's presence he tell us his 'forsaken heart' and his 'withered mind' were 'widowed of all the joys' they 'once possessed.' Only some 500 lines (the twenty-first book and a fragment of another book) survive of Ralegh's poem _Cynthia_, the whole of which was designed to prove his loyalty to the Queen, and all the extant lines are in the same vein as those I quote. The complete poem extended to twenty-two books, and the lines exceeded 10,000, or five times as many as in Shakespeare's sonnets. Richard Barnfield in his like-named poem of _Cynthia_, 1595, and Fulke Greville in sonnets addressed to Cynthia, also extravagantly described the Queen's beauty and graces. In 1599 Sir John Davies, poet and lawyer, apostrophised Elizabeth, who was then sixty-six years old, thus:

Fair soul, since to the fairest body knit
You give such lively life, such quickening power,
Such sweet celestial influences to it
As keeps it still in youth's immortal flower . . .
O many, many years may you remain
A happy angel to this happy land (_Nosce Teipsum_, dedication).

Davies published in the same year twenty-six 'Hymnes of Astrea' on Elizabeth's beauty and graces; each poem forms an acrostic on the words 'Elizabetha Regina,' and the language of love is simulated on almost every page.

{138a} _Apologie for Poetrie_ (1595), ed. Shuckburgh, p. 62.

{138b} Adulatory sonnets to patrons are met with in the preliminary or concluding pages of numerous sixteenth and seventeenth century books (_e.g._ the collection of sonnets addressed to James VI of Scotland in his _Essayes of a Prentise_, 1591, and the sonnets to noblemen before Spenser's _Faerie Queene_, at the end of Chapman's _Iliad_, and at the end of John Davies's _Microcosmos_, 1603). Other sonnets to patrons are scattered through collections of occasional poems, such as Ben Jonson's _Forest_ and _Underwoods_ and Donne's _Poems_. Sonnets addressed to men are not only found in the preliminary pages, but are occasionally interpolated in sonnet-sequences of fictitious love. Sonnet xi. in Drayton's sonnet-fiction called 'Idea' (in 1599 edition) seems addressed to a man, in much the same manner as Shakespeare often addressed his hero; and a few others of Drayton's sonnets are ambiguous as to the sex of their subject. John Soothern's eccentric collection of love-sonnets, _Pandora_ (1584), has sonnets dedicatory to the Earl of Oxford; and William Smith in his _Chloris_ (1596) (a sonnet-fiction of the conventional kind) in two prefatory sonnets and in No. xlix. of the substantive collection invokes the affectionate notice of Edmund Spenser. Throughout Europe 'dedicatory' sonnets or poems to women betray identical characteristics to those that were addressed to men. The poetic addresses to the Countess of Bedford and other noble patronesses of Donne, Ben Jonson, and their colleagues are always affectionate, often amorous, in their phraseology, and akin in temper to Shakespeare's sonnets of friendship. Nicholas Breton, in his poem _The Pilgrimage to Paradise coyned with the Countess of Pembroke's Love_, 1592, and another work of his, _The Countess of Pembroke's Passion_ (first printed from manuscript in 1867), pays the Countess, who was merely his literary patroness, a homage which is indistinguishable from the ecstatic utterances of a genuine and overmastering passion. The difference in the sex of the persons addressed by Breton and by Shakespeare seems to place their poems in different categories, but they both really belonged to the same class. They both merely display a _protege's_ loyalty to his patron, couched, according to current convention, in the strongest possible terms of personal affection. In Italy and France exactly the same vocabulary of adoration was applied by authors indifferently to patrons and patronesses. It is known that one series of Michael Angelo's impassioned sonnets was addressed to a young nobleman Tommaso dei Cavalieri, and another series to a noble patroness Vittoria Colonna, but the tone is the same in both, and internal evidence fails to enable the critic to distinguish between the two series. Only one English contemporary of Shakespeare published a long series of sonnets addressed to a man who does not prove on investigation to have been a professional patron. In 1595 Richard Barnfield appended to his poem _Cynthia_ a set of twenty sonnets, in which he feignedly avowed affection for a youth called Ganymede. These poems do not belong to the same category as Shakespeare's, but to the category of sonnet-sequences of love in which it was customary to invoke a fictitious mistress. Barnfield explained that in his sonnets he attempted a variation on the conventional practice by fancifully adapting to the sonnet-form the second of Virgil's _Eclogues_, in which the shepherd Corydon apostrophises the shepherd-boy Alexis.

{140a} Cf. Sonnet lix.

Show me your image in some antique book . . .
Oh sure I am the wits of former days
To subjects worse have given admiring praise.

{140b} Campion's _Poems_, ed. Bullen, pp. 148 seq. Cf. Shakespeare's sonnets:

O how I faint when I of you do write.--(lxxx. 1.)
Finding thy worth a limit past my praise.--(lxxxii. 6.)

{141} Donne's _Poems_ (in Muses' Library), ii. 34. See also Donne's sonnets and verse-letters to Mr. Rowland Woodward and Mr. I. W.

{142} See p. 386 note 1.

{143a} Three years was the conventional period which sonnetteers allotted to the development of their passion. Cf. Ronsard, _Sonnets pour Helene_ (No. xiv.), beginning: 'Trois ans sont ja passez que ton oeil me tient pris.'

{143b} Octavius Caesar at thirty-two is described by Mark Antony after the battle of Actium as the 'boy Caesar' who 'wears the rose of youth' (_Antony and Cleopatra_, III. ii. 17 seq.) Spenser in his _Astrophel_ apostrophises Sir Philip Sidney on his death near the close of his thirty-second year as 'oh wretched boy' (l. 133) and 'luckless boy' (l. 142). Conversely it was a recognised convention among sonnetteers to exaggerate their own age. See p. 86, note.

{144} Two portraits, representing the Earl in early manhood, are at Welbeck Abbey, and are described above. Of the remaining seven paintings, two are assigned to Van Somer, and represent the Earl in early middle age; one, a half-length, a very charming picture, now belongs to James Knowles, Esq., of Queen Anne's Lodge; the other, a full-length in drab doublet and hose, is in the Shakespeare Memorial Gallery at Stratford-on-Avon. Mireveldt twice painted the Earl at a later period of his career; one of the pictures is now at Woburn Abbey, the property of the Duke of Bedford, the other is at the National Portrait Gallery. A fifth picture, assigned to Mytens, belongs to Viscount Powerscourt; a sixth, by an unknown artist, belongs to Mr. Wingfield Digby, and the seventh (in armour) is in the Master's Lodge at St. John's College, Cambridge, where Southampton was educated. The miniature by Isaac Oliver, which also represents Southampton in late life, was formerly in Dr. Lumsden Propert's collection. It now belongs to a collector at Hamburg. The two miniatures assigned to Peter Oliver belong respectively to Mr. Jeffery Whitehead and Sir Francis Cook, Bart. (Cf. Catalogue of Exhibition of Portrait Miniatures at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, London, 1889, pp. 32, 71, 100.) In all the best preserved of these portraits the eyes are blue and the hair a dark shade of auburn. Among the middle-life portraits Southampton appears to best advantage in the one by Van Somer belonging to Mr. James Knowles.

{145} I describe these pictures from a personal inspection of them which the Duke kindly permitted me to make.

{146a} Cf. Shakespeare's Sonnet iii.:

Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime.

{146b} Southampton's singularly long hair procured him at times unwelcome attentions. When, in January 1598, he struck Ambrose Willoughby, an esquire of the body, for asking him to break off owing to the lateness of the hour, a game of primero that he was playing in the royal chamber at Whitehall, the esquire Willoughby is stated to have retaliated by 'pulling off some of the Earl's locks.' On the incident being reported to the Queen, she 'gave Willoughby, in the presence, thanks for what he did' (_Sydney Papers_, ii. 83).

{148a} These quotations are from _Sorrowes Joy_, a collection of elegies on Queen Elizabeth by Cambridge writers (Cambridge, 1603), and from Chettle's _England's Mourning Garment_, London, 1603).

{148b} Gervase Markham's _Honour in her Perfection_, 1624.

{149a} Manningham's _Diary_, Camden Soc., p. 148.

{149b} _Court and Times of James I_, I. i. 7.

{149c} See Appendix IV.

{152} The fine exordium of Sonnet cxix.:

What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,
Distill'd from limbecks foul as hell within,

adopts expressions in Barnes's vituperative sonnet (No xlix.), where, after denouncing his mistress as a 'siren,' the poet incoherently ejaculates:

From my love's limbeck [_sc._ have I] still [di]stilled tears!

Almost every note in the scale of sadness or self-reproach is sounded from time to time in Petrarch's sonnets. Tasso in _Scelta delle Rime_, 1582, p. ii. p. 26, has a sonnet (beginning 'Vinca fortuna homai, se sotto il peso') which adumbrates Shakespeare's Sonnets xxix. ('When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes') and lxvi. ('Tired with all these, for restful death I cry'). Drummond of Hawthornden translated Tasso's sonnet in his sonnet (part i. No. xxxiii.); while Drummond's Sonnets xxv. ('What cruel star into this world was brought') and xxxii. ('If crost with all mishaps be my poor life') are pitched in the identical key.

{153a} Sidney's _Certain Sonnets_ (No. xiii.) appended to _Astrophel and Stella_ in the edition of 1598. In _Emaricdulfe_: _Sonnets written by E. C._, 1595, Sonnet xxxvii. beginning 'O lust, of sacred love the foul corrupter,' even more closely resembles Shakespeare's sonnet in both phraseology and sentiment. E. C.'s rare volume is reprinted in the _Lamport Garland_ (Roxburghe Club), 1881.

{153b} Even this sonnet is adapted from Drayton. See Sonnet xxii. in 1599 edition:

An evil spirit your beauty haunts me still . . .
Thus am I still provoked to every evil
By this good-wicked spirit, sweet Angel-Devil.

But Shakespeare entirely alters the point of the lines by contrasting the influence exerted on him by the woman with that exerted on him by a man.

{155} The work was reprinted by Dr. Grosart in his _Occasional Issues_, 1880, and extracts from it appear in the New Shakspere Society's 'Allusion Books,' i. 169 seq.

{157} W. S. are common initials, and at least two authors bearing them made some reputation in Shakespeare's day. There was a dramatist named Wentworth Smith (see p. 180 _infra_), and there was a William Smith who published a volume of lovelorn sonnets called _Chloris_ in 1595. A specious argument might possibly be devised in favour of the latter's identity with Willobie's counsellor. But Shakespeare, of the two, has the better claim.

{161} No edition appeared before 1600, and then two were published.

{162} _Oberon's Vision_, by the Rev. W. J. Halpin (Shakespeare Society), 1843. Two accounts of the Kenilworth _fetes_, by George Gascoigne and Robert Laneham respectively, were published in 1576.

{163} Reprinted by the Shakespeare Society in 1844.

{164} All these details are of Shakespeare's invention, and do not figure in the old play. But in the crude induction in the old play the nondescript drunkard is named without prefix 'Slie.' That surname, although it was very common at Stratford and in the neighbourhood, was borne by residents in many other parts of the country, and its appearance in the old play is not in itself, as has been suggested, sufficient to prove that the old play was written by a Warwickshire man. There are no other names or references in the old play that can be associated with Warwickshire.

{165} Mr. Richard Savage, the secretary and librarian of the Birthplace Trustees at Stratford, has generously placed at my disposal this interesting fact, which he lately discovered.

{167} It was licensed for publication in 1594, and published in 1598.

{168a} The quarto of 1600 reads Woncote: all the folios read Woncot. Yet Malone in the Variorum of 1803 introduced the new and unwarranted reading of Wincot, which has been unwisely adopted by succeeding editors.

{168b} These references are convincingly explained by Mr. Justice Madden in his _Diary of Master Silence_, pp. 87 seq., 372-4. Cf. Blunt's _Dursley and its Neighbourhood_, Huntley's _Glossary of the Cotswold Dialect_, and Marshall's _Rural Economy of Cotswold_ (1796).

{170} First adopted by Theobald in 1733; cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 257.

{172a} _Remarks_, p. 295.

{172b} Cf. Shakespeare Society's reprint, 1842, ed. Halliwell.

{172c} This collection of stories is said by both Malone and Steevens to have been published in 1603, although no edition earlier than 1620 is now known. The 1620 edition of _Westward for Smelts_, _written by Kinde Kit of Kingston_, was reprinted by the Percy Society in 1848. Cf. _Shakespeare's Library_, ed. Hazlitt, I. ii. 1-80.

{174} _Diary_, p. 61; see p. 167.

{175} Nichols, _Progresses of Elizabeth_, iii. 552.

{176a} Cf. Domestic MSS. (Elizabeth) in Public Record Office, vol. cclxxviii. Nos. 78 and 85; and Calendar of Domestic State Papers, 1598-1601, pp. 575-8.

{176b} Cf. Gilchrist, _Examination of the charges_ . . . _of Jonson's Enmity towards Shakspeare_, 1808.

{177} Latten is a mixed metal resembling brass. Pistol in _Merry Wives of Windsor_ (I. i. 165) likens Slender to a 'latten bilbo,' that is, a sword made of the mixed metal. Cf. _Anecdotes and Traditions_, edited from L'Estrange's MSS. by W. J. Thoms for the Camden Society, p. 2.

{179} This, or some synonym, is the conventional epithet applied at the date to Shakespeare and his work. Weever credited such characters of Shakespeare as Tarquin, Romeo, and Richard III with 'sugred tongues' in his _Epigrams_ of 1595. In the _Return from Parnassus_ (1601?) Shakespeare is apostrophised as 'sweet Master Shakespeare.' Milton did homage to the tradition by writing of 'sweetest Shakespeare' in _L'Allegro_.

{180} A hack-writer, Wentworth Smith, took a hand in producing thirteen plays, none of which are extant, for the theatrical manager, Philip Henslowe, between 1601 and 1603. _The Hector of Germanie_, an extant play 'made by W. Smith' and published 'with new additions' in 1615, was doubtless by Wentworth Smith, and is the only dramatic work by him that has survived. Neither internal nor external evidence confirms the theory that the above-mentioned six plays, which have been wrongly claimed for Shakespeare, were really by Wentworth Smith. The use of the initials 'W.S.' was not due to the publishers' belief that Wentworth Smith was the author, but to their endeavour to delude their customers into a belief that the plays were by Shakespeare.

{181} Cf. p. 258 infra.

{182} There were twenty pieces in all. The five by Shakespeare are placed in the order i. ii. iii. v. xvi. Of the remainder, two--'If music and sweet poetry agree' (No. viii.) and 'As it fell upon a day' (No. xx.)--were borrowed from Barnfield's _Poems in divers Humours_ (1598). 'Venus with Adonis sitting by her' (No. xi.) is from Bartholomew Griffin's _Fidessa_ (1596); 'My flocks feed not' (No. xvii.) is adapted from Thomas Weelkes's _Madrigals_ (1597); 'Live with me and be my love' is by Marlowe; and the appended stanza, entitled 'Love's Answer,' by Sir Walter Ralegh (No. xix.); 'Crabbed age and youth cannot live together' (No. xii.) is a popular song often quoted by the Elizabethan dramatists. Nothing has been ascertained of the origin and history of the remaining nine poems (iv. vi. vii. ix. x. xiii. xiv. xviii.)

{184} A unique copy of Chester's _Love's Martyr_ is in Mr. Christie-Miller's library at Britwell. Of a reissue of the original edition in 1611 with a new title, _The Annals of Great Brittaine_, a copy (also unique) is in the British Museum. A reprint of the original edition was prepared for private circulation by Dr. Grosart in 1878, in his series of 'Occasional Issues.' It was also printed in the same year as one of the publications of the New Shakspere Society. Matthew Roydon in his elegy on Sir Philip Sidney, appended to Spenser's _Colin Clouts Come Home Againe_, 1595, describes the part figuratively played in Sidney's obsequies by the turtle-dove, swan, phoenix, and eagle, in verses that very closely resemble Shakespeare's account of the funereal functions fulfilled by the same four birds in his contribution to Chester's volume. This resemblance suggests that Shakespeare's poem may be a fanciful adaptation of Roydon's elegiac conceits without ulterior significance. Shakespeare's concluding 'Threnos' is imitated in metre and phraseology by Fletcher in his _Mad Lover_ in the song 'The Lover's Legacy to his Cruel Mistress.'

{187} Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 186.

{188a} There is an admirable discussion of the question involved in the poet's heraldry in _Herald and Genealogist_, i. 510. Facsimiles of all the documents preserved in the College of Arms are given in _Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica_, 2nd ser. 1886, i. 109. Halliwell-Phillipps prints imperfectly one of the 1596 draft-grants, and that of 1599 (_Outlines_, ii. 56, 60), but does not distinguish the character of the negotiation of the earlier year from that of the negotiation of the later year.

{188b} It is still customary at the College of Arms to inform an applicant for a coat-of-arms who has a father alive that the application should be made in the father's name, and the transaction conducted as if the father were the principal. It was doubtless on advice of this kind that Shakespeare was acting in the negotiations that are described below.

{189} In a manuscript in the British Museum (_Harl. MS._ 6140, f. 45) is a copy of the tricking of the arms of William 'Shakspere,' which is described 'as a pattent per Will'm Dethike Garter, principale King of Armes;' this is figured in French's _Shakespeareana Genealogica_, p. 524.

{190} These memoranda, which were as follows, were first written without the words here enclosed in brackets; those words were afterwards interlineated in the manuscript in a hand similar to that of the original sentences:

'[This John shoeth] A patierne therof under Clarent Cookes hand in
paper. xx. years past. [The Q. officer and cheffe of the towne]

[A Justice of peace] And was a Baylife of Stratford uppo Avon xv. or
xvj. years past.

That he hathe lands and tenements of good wealth and substance [500
li.]

That he mar[ried a daughter and heyre of Arden, a gent. of worship.]'

{191} 'An exemplification' was invariably secured more easily than a new grant of arms. The heralds might, if they chose, tacitly accept, without examination, the applicant's statement that his family had borne arms long ago, and they thereby regarded themselves as relieved of the obligation of close inquiry into his present status.

{192a} On the gravestone of John Hall, Shakespeare's elder son-in-law, the Shakespeare arms are similarly impaled with those of Hall.

{192b} French, _Genealogica Shakespeareana_, p. 413.

{193} The details of Brooke's accusation are not extant, and are only to be deduced from the answer of Garter and Clarenceux to Brooke's complaint, two copies of which are accessible: one is in the vol. W-Z at the Heralds' College, f. 276; and the other, slightly differing, is in Ashmole MS. 846, ix. f. 50. Both are printed in the _Herald and Genealogist_, i. 514.

{194a} _Notes and Queries_, 8th ser. v. 478.

{194b} The tradition that Shakespeare planted the mulberry tree was not put on record till it was cut down in 1758. In 1760 mention is made of it in a letter of thanks in the corporation's archives from the Steward of the Court of Record to the corporation of Stratford for presenting him with a standish made from the wood. But, according to the testimony of old inhabitants confided to Malone (cf. his _Life of Shakespeare_, 1790, p. 118), the legend had been orally current in Stratford since Shakespeare's lifetime. The tree was perhaps planted in 1609, when a Frenchman named Veron distributed a number of young mulberry trees through the midland counties by order of James I, who desired to encourage the culture of silkworms (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 134, 411-16).

{197a} I do not think we shall over-estimate the present value of Shakespeare's income if we multiply each of its items by eight, but it is difficult to state authoritatively the ratio between the value of money in Shakespeare's time and in our own. The money value of corn then and now is nearly identical; but other necessaries of life--meat, milk, eggs, wool, building materials, and the like--were by comparison ludicrously cheap in Shakespeare's day. If we strike the average between the low price of these commodities and the comparatively high price of corn, the average price of necessaries will be found to be in Shakespeare's day about an eighth of what it is now. The cost of luxuries is also now about eight times the price that it was in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Sixpence was the usual price of a new quarto or octavo book such as would now be sold at prices ranging between three shillings and sixpence and six shillings. Half a crown was charged for the best-placed seats in the best theatres. The purchasing power of one Elizabethan pound might be generally defined in regard to both necessaries and luxuries as equivalent to that of eight pounds of the present currency.

{197b} Cf. Henslowe's _Diary_, ed. Collier, pp. xxviii seq. After the Restoration the receipts at the third performance were given for the author's 'benefit.'

{199a} _Return from Parnassus_, V. i. 10-16.

{199b} Cf. H[enry] P[arrot]'s _Laquei Ridiculosi or Springes for Woodcocks_, 1613, Epigram No. 131, headed 'Theatrum Licencia:'

Cotta's become a player most men know,
And will no longer take such toyling paines;
For here's the spring (saith he) whence pleasures flow
And brings them damnable excessive gaines:
That now are cedars growne from shrubs and sprigs,
Since Greene's _Tu Quoque_ and those Garlicke Jigs.

Greens _Tu Quoque_ was a popular comedy that had once been performed at Court by the Queen's players, and 'Garlicke Jigs' alluded derisively to drolling entertainments, interspersed with dances, which won much esteem from patrons of the smaller playhouses.

{200} The documents which are now in the Public Record Office among the papers relating to the Lord Chamberlain's Office, were printed in full by Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 312-19.

{202} In 1613 Robert Daborne, a playwright of insignificant reputation, charged for a drama as much as 25 pounds. _Alleyn Papers_, ed. Collier, p. 65.

{203} Ten pounds was the ordinary fee paid to actors for a performance at the Court of James I. Shakespeare's company appeared annually twenty times and more at Whitehall during the early years of James I's reign, and Shakespeare, as being both author and actor, doubtless received a larger share of the receipts than his colleagues.

{204a} Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 312-19; Fleay, _Stage_, pp. 324-8

{204b} Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 17-19.

{206a} See p. 195.

{206b} Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 77-80.

{208} _Accounts of the Revels_, ed. Peter Cunningham (Shakespeare Society), p. 177; _Variorum Shakespeare_, 1821, iii. 406.

{210a} It was reproduced by the Hakluyt Society to accompany _The Voyages and Workes of John Davis the Navigator_, ed. Captain A. H. Markham, 1880. Cf. Mr. Coote's note on the _New Map_, lxxxv-xcv. A paper on the subject by Mr. Coote also appears in _New Shakspere Society's Transactions_, 1877-9, pt. i. 88-100.

{210b} _Diary_, Camden Soc. p. 18; the Elizabethan Stage Society repeated the play on the same stage on February 10, 11 and 12, 1897.

{210c} Bandello's _Novelle_, ii. 36.

{211a} First published in 1579; 2nd edit. 1595.

{211b} _Hamlet_, III. ii. 109-10.

{213a} On December 31, 1601, the Lords of the Council sent letters to the Lord Mayor of London and to the magistrates of Surrey and Middlesex expressing their surprise that no steps had yet been taken to limit the number of playhouses in accordance with 'our order set down and prescribed about a year and a half since.' But nothing followed, and no more was heard officially of the Council's order until 1619, when the Corporation of London remarked on its practical abrogation at the same time as they directed the suppression (which was not carried out) of the Blackfriars Theatre. All the documents on this subject are printed from the Privy Council Register by Halliwell-Phillipps, 307-9.

{213b} The passage, act ii. sc. ii. 348-394, which deals in ample detail with the subject, only appears in the folio version of 1623. In the First Quarto a very curt reference is made to the misfortunes of the 'tragedians of the city:'

'Y' faith, my lord, noveltie carries it away,
For the principal publike audience that
Came to them are turned to private playes
And to the humours of children.'

'Private playes' were plays acted by amateurs, with whom the 'Children' might well be classed.

{214a} All recent commentators follow Steevens in interpreting the 'late innovation' as the Order of the Privy Council of June 1600, restricting the number of the London playhouses to two; but that order, which was never put in force, in no way affected the actors' fortunes. The First Quarto's reference to the perils attaching to the 'noveltie' of the boys' performances indicates the true meaning.

{214b} _Hamlet_, II. ii. 349-64.

{215} At the moment offensive personalities seemed to have infected all the London theatres. On May 10, 1601, the Privy Council called the attention of the Middlesex magistrates to the abuse covertly levelled by the actors of the 'Curtain' at gentlemen 'of good desert and quality,' and directed the magistrates to examine all plays before they were produced (_Privy Council Register_). Jonson subsequently issued an 'apologetical dialogue' (appended to printed copies of the _Poetaster_), in which he somewhat truculently qualified his hostility to the players:

'Now for the players 'tis true I tax'd them
And yet but some, and those so sparingly
As all the rest might have sat still unquestioned,
Had they but had the wit or conscience
To think well of themselves. But impotent they
Thought each man's vice belonged to their whole tribe;
And much good do it them. What they have done against me
I am not moved with, if it gave them meat
Or got them clothes, 'tis well; that was their end,
Only amongst them I am sorry for
Some better natures by the rest so drawn
To run in that vile line.'

{217} See p. 229, note I, _ad fin_.

{218} The proposed identification of Virgil in the 'Poetaster' with Chapman has little to recommend it. Chapman's literary work did not justify the commendations which were bestowed on Virgil in the play.

{220} The most scornful criticism that Jonson is known to have passed on any composition by Shakespeare was aimed at a passage in _Julius Caesar_, and as Jonson's attack is barely justifiable on literary grounds, it is fair to assume that the play was distasteful to him from other considerations. 'Many times,' Jonson wrote of Shakespeare in his _Timber_, 'hee fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter: As when hee said in the person of _Caesar_, one speaking to him [_i.e._ Caesar]; _Caesar_, _thou dost me wrong_. Hee [_i.e._ Caesar] replyed: _Caesar did never wrong_, _butt with just cause_: and such like, which were ridiculous.' Jonson derisively quoted the same passage in the induction to _The Staple of News_ (1625): 'Cry you mercy, you did not wrong but with just cause.' Possibly the words that were ascribed by Jonson to Shakespeare's character of _Caesar_ appeared in the original version of the play, but owing perhaps to Jonson's captious criticism they do not figure in the Folio version, the sole version that has reached us. The only words there that correspond with Jonson's quotation are Caesar's remark:

Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause
Will he be satisfied

(III. i. 47-8). The rhythm and sense seem to require the reinsertion after the word 'wrong' of the phrase 'but with just cause,' which Jonson needlessly reprobated. Leonard Digges (1588-1635), one of Shakespeare's admiring critics, emphasises the superior popularity of Shakespeare's _Julius Caesar_ in the theatre to Ben Jonson's Roman play of _Catiline_, in his eulogistic lines on Shakespeare (published after Digges's death in the 1640 edition of Shakespeare's _Poems_):

So have I seen when Caesar would appear,
And on the stage at half-sword parley were
Brutus and Cassius--oh, how the audience
Were ravish'd, with what wonder they went thence
When some new day they would not brook a line
Of tedious, though well laboured, Catiline.

{221} I wrote on this point in the article on Thomas Kyd in the _Dictionary of National Biography_ (vol. xxxi.): 'The argument in favour of Kyd's authorship of a pre-Shakespearean play (now lost) on the subject of Hamlet deserves attention. Nash in 1589, when describing [in his preface to _Menaphon_] the typical literary hack, who at almost every point suggests Kyd, notices that in addition to his other accomplishments "he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches." Other references in popular tracts and plays of like date prove that in an early tragedy concerning Hamlet there was a ghost who cried repeatedly, "Hamlet, revenge!" and that this expression took rank in Elizabethan slang beside the vernacular quotations from [Kyd's sanguinary tragedy of] _Jeronimo_, such as "What outcry calls me from my naked bed," and "Beware, Hieronimo, go by, go by." The resemblance between the stories of _Hamlet_ and _Jeronimo_ suggests that the former would have supplied Kyd with a congenial plot. In _Jeronimo_ a father seeks to avenge his son's murder; in _Hamlet_ the theme is the same with the position of father and son reversed. In _Jeronimo_ the avenging father resolves to reach his end by arranging for the performance of a play in the presence of those whom he suspects of the murder of his son, and there is good ground for crediting the lost tragedy of _Hamlet_ with a similar play-scene. Shakespeare's debt to the lost tragedy is a matter of conjecture, but the stilted speeches of the play-scene in his _Hamlet_ read like intentional parodies of Kyd's bombastic efforts in _The Spanish Tragedy_, and it is quite possible that they were directly suggested by an almost identical episode in a lost _Hamlet_ by the same author.' Shakespeare elsewhere shows acquaintance with Kyd's work. He places in the mouth of Kit Sly in the _Taming of the Shrew_ the current phrase 'Go by, Jeronimy,' from _The Spanish Tragedy_. Shakespeare quotes verbatim a line from the same piece in _Much Ado about Nothing_ (I. i. 271): 'In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke;' but Kyd practically borrowed that line from Watson's _Passionate Centurie_ (No. xlvii.), where Shakespeare may have met it.

{222} Cf. Gericke and Max Moltke, _Hamlet-Quellen_, Leipzig, 1881. The story was absorbed into Scandinavian mythology: cf. _Ambales-Saga_, edited by Mr. Israel Gollancz, 1898.

{224} Cf. _Hamlet_--parallel texts of the first and second quarto, and first folio--ed. Wilhelm Vietor, Marburg, 1891; _The Devonshire Hamlets_, 1860, parallel texts of the two quartos edited by Mr. Sam Timmins; _Hamlet_, ed. George Macdonald, 1885, a study with the text of the folio.

{226a} Arber's _Transcript of the Stationers' Registers_, iii. 226.

{226b} _Ib._ iii. 400.

{228} Less satisfactory is the endeavour that has been made by Mr. F. G. Fleay and Mr. George Wyndham to treat _Troilus and Cressida_ as Shakespeare's contribution to the embittered controversy of 1601-2, between Jonson on the one hand and Marston and Dekker and their actor friends on the other hand, and to represent the play as a pronouncement against Jonson. According to this fanciful view, Shakespeare held up Jonson to savage ridicule in Ajax, while in Thersites he denounced Marston, despite Marston's intermittent antagonism to Jonson, which entitled him to freedom from attack by Jonson's foes. The appearance of the word 'mastic' in the line (1. iii. 73) 'When rank Thersites opes his mastic jaws' is treated as proof of Shakespeare's identification of Thersites with Marston, who used the pseudonym 'Therio-mastix' in his _Scourge of Villainy_. It would be as reasonable to identify him with Dekker, who wrote the greater part of _Satiro-mastix_. 'Mastic' is doubtless an adjective formed without recondite significance from the substantive 'mastic,' _i.e._ the gum commonly used at the time for stopping decayed teeth. No hypothesis of a polemical intention is needed to account for Shakespeare's conception of Ajax or Thersites. There is no trait in either character as depicted by Shakespeare which a reading of Chapman's _Homer_ would fail to suggest. The controversial interpretation of the play is in conflict with chronology (for _Troilus_ cannot, on any showing, be assigned to the period of the war between Jonson and Dekker, in 1601-2), and it seems confuted by the facts and arguments already adduced in the discussion of the theatrical conflict (see pp. 213-219). If more direct disproof be needed, it may be found in Shakespeare's prologue to _Troilus_, where there is a good-humoured and expressly pacific allusion to the polemical aims of Jonson's _Poetaster_. Jonson had introduced into his play 'an _armed_ prologue' on account, he asserted, of his enemies' menaces. Shakespeare, after describing in his prologue to _Troilus_ the progress of the Trojan war before his story opened, added that his 'prologue' presented itself '_arm'd_,' not to champion 'author's pen or actor's voice,' but simply to announce in a guise befitting the warlike subject-matter that the play began in the middle of the conflict between Greek and Trojan, and not at the beginning. These words of Shakespeare put out of court any interpretation of Shakespeare's play that would represent it as a contribution to the theatrical controversy.

{230} _England's Mourning Garment_, 1603, sign. D. 3.

{231} At the same time the Earl of Worcester's company was taken into the Queen's patronage, and its members were known as 'the Queen's servants,' while the Earl of Nottingham's company was taken into the patronage of the Prince of Wales, and its members were known as the Prince's servants. This extended patronage of actors by the royal family was noticed as especially honourable to the King by one of his contemporary panegyrists, Gilbert Dugdale, in his _Time Triumphant_, 1604, sig. B.

{232a} The entry, which appears in the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber, was first printed in 1842 in Cunningham's _Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court_, p. xxxiv. A comparison of Cunningham's transcript with the original in the Public Record Office (_Audit Office_--_Declared Accounts_--Treasurer of the Chamber, bundle 388, roll 41) shows that it is accurate. The Earl of Pembroke was in no way responsible for the performance at Wilton House. At the time, the Court was formally installed in his house (cf. _Cal. State Papers_, Dom. 1603-10) pp. 47-59), and the Court officers commissioned the players to perform there, and paid all their expenses. The alleged tradition, recently promulgated for the first time by the owners of Wilton, that _As You Like It_ was performed on the occasion, is unsupported by contemporary evidence.

{232b} The grant is transcribed in the New Shakspere Society's _Transactions_, 1877-9, Appendix ii., from the Lord Chamberlain's papers in the Public Record Office, where it is now numbered 660. The number allotted it in the _Transactions_ is obsolete.

{233a} A contemporary copy of this letter, which declared the Queen's players acting at the Fortune and the Prince's players at the Curtain to be entitled to the same privileges as the King's players, is at Dulwich College (cf. G. F. Warner's _Catalogue of the Dulwich Manuscripts_, pp. 26-7). Collier printed it in his _New Facts_ with fraudulent additions, in which the names of Shakespeare and other actors figured.

{233b} Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps in his _Outlines_, i. 213, cites a royal order to this effect, but gives no authority, and I have sought in vain for the document at the Public Record Office, at the British Museum, and elsewhere. But there is no reason to doubt the fact that Shakespeare and his fellow-actors took, as Grooms of the Chamber, part in the ceremonies attending the Constable's visit to London. In the unprinted accounts of Edmund Tilney, master of the revels, for the year October 1603 to October 1604, charge is made for his three days' attendance with four men to direct the entertainments 'at the receaving of the Constable of Spayne' (Public Record Office, _Declared Accounts_, Pipe Office Roll 2805). The magnificent festivities culminated in a splendid banquet given in the Constable's honour by James I at Whitehall on Sunday, August 19/29--the day on which the treaty was signed. In the morning all the members of the royal household accompanied the Constable in formal procession from Somerset House. After the banquet, at which the earls of Pembroke and Southampton acted as stewards, there was a ball, and the King's guests subsequently witnessed exhibitions of bear baiting, bull baiting, rope dancing, and feats of horsemanship. (Cf. Stow's _Chronicle_, 1631, pp. 845-6, and a Spanish pamphlet, _Relacion de la jornada del exc__mo__ Condestabile de Castilla_, etc., Antwerp, 1604, 4to, which was summarised in Ellis's _Original Letters_, 2nd series, vol. iii. pp. 207-215, and was partly translated in Mr. W. B. Rye's _England as seen by Foreigners_, pp. 117-124).

{234} At the Bodleian Library (MS. Rawlinson, A 204) are the original accounts of Lord Stanhope of Harrington, Treasurer of the Chamber for various (detached) years in the early part of James I's reign. These documents show that Shakespeare's company acted at Court on November 1 and 4, December 26 and 28, 1604, and on January 7 and 8, February 2 and 3, and the evenings of the following Shrove Sunday, Shrove Monday, and Shrove Tuesday, 1605.