A Tavern Coterie.
But let us not forget where we are, and where we are finding such men and such poems: we are in London and are close upon the end of the sixteenth century; there are no morning newspapers; these came long afterward; but the story of such a death as that of Marlowe, stabbed in the eye—maybe by his own dagger—would spread from tongue to tongue; (possibly one of his horrific dramas had been played that very day): certainly the knowledge of it would come quick to all his boon friends—actors, writers, wits—who were used to meet, maybe at the Falcon on Bankside, or possibly at the Mermaid Tavern.
This Mermaid Tavern was a famous place in those and in succeeding days. It stood on Cheapside (between Friday and Bread Streets) gorgeous with three ranges of Elizabethan windows, that gave look-out upon an array of goldsmiths’ shops which shone across the way. It was almost in the shadow of the Church of St. Mary le Bow, burned in the great fire, but having its representative tower and spire—a good work of Christopher Wren—standing thereabout in our time, and still holding out its clock over the sidewalk.
And the literary friends who would have gathered in such a place to talk over the sad happening to Kit Marlowe are those whom it behoves us to know, at least by name. There, surely would be Thomas Lodge,[104] who was concerned in the writing of plays; wrote, too, much to his honor, a certain novel (if we may call it so) entitled Rosalynde, from which Shakespeare took the hint and much of the pleasant machinery for his delightful drama of “As You Like It.” This Lodge was in his youth hail fellow with actors who gathered at taverns; and—if not actor himself—was certainly a lover of their wild ways and their feastings. He admired Euphues overmuch, was disposed to literary affectations and alliteration—writing, amongst other things, A Nettle for Nice Noses. He was, too, a man of the world and wide traveller; voyaged with Cavendish, and was said to be engaged in a British raid upon the Canaries. In later years he became a physician of soberly habits and much credit, dying of the plague in 1625.
Nashe[105] also would have been good mate-fellow with Marlowe; a Cambridge man this—though possibly “weaned before his time;” certainly most outspoken, hard to govern, quick-witted, fearless, flinging his fiery word-darts where he would. Gabriel Harvey, that priggish patron of Spenser, to whom I have alluded, found this to his cost. Indeed this satirist came to have the name of the English Aretino—as sharp as he, and as wild-living, and wild-loving as he.
Nashe was a native of Lowestoft, on the easternmost point of English shore, in Suffolk, not far from those potteries (of Gurton) whose old quaint products collectors still seek for and value. Dr. Grosart, in the Huth Library, has built a wordy monument to his memory; we do not say it is undeserved; certainly he had a full brain, great readiness, graphic power, and deep love for his friends. Like Lodge, he travelled: like him took to his wits to pay tavern bills; a sharp fellow every way. He lent a hand, and a strong one, to that tedious, noisy, brawling ecclesiastic controversy of his day—called the Mar-Prelate one; a controversy full of a great swash of those prickly, sharp-tasted, biting words—too often belonging to church quarrels—and which men hardly approach for comment, even in our time, without getting themselves pricked by contact into wrathful splutter of ungracious language.
One may get a true taste (and I think a surfeit) of his exuberance in epithet, and of his coarse but rasping raillery in his Pierce Penilesse. Here is one of his pleasant lunges at some “Latinless” critic:—“Let a scholar write and he says—‘Tush, I like not these common fellows’; let him write well, and he says—‘Tush, it’s stolen out of some book.’”
Then there was Robert Greene[106]—a Reverend, but used to tavern gatherings, and whose story is a melancholy one, and worth a little more than mere mention. He was a man of excellent family, well nurtured, as times went; native of the old city of Norwich, in Norfolk; probably something older than either Marlowe or Shakespeare; studied at St. John’s, Cambridge—“amongst wags”—he says in his Repentance—“as lewd as myself;” was a clergyman (after a sort); pretty certainly had a church at one time; married a charming wife in the country, but going up to that maelstrom of London fell into all evil ways: wrote little poems a saint might have written, and cracked jokes with his tongue that would make a saint shudder; deserted his wife and child; became a red-bearded bully, raging in the taverns, with unkempt hair: Yet even thus and there (as if all England in those Elizabethan times bloomed with lilies and lush roses, which lent their perfume to all verse the vilest might write) inditing poems having a tender pathos, which will live. Take these verselets for instance; and as you read them, remember that he had deserted his pure, fond, loving wife and his prattling boy, and was more deeply sunk in ways of debauchery than any of his fellows; ’tis a mother’s song to her child:—
“Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee,
When thou art old, there’s grief enough for thee.
Streaming tears that never stint,
Like pearl-drops from a flint,
Fell by course from his eyes,
That one another’s place supplies.
Thus he grieved in every part,
Tears of blood fell from his heart
When he left his pretty boy,
Father’s sorrow—father’s joy.
The wanton smiled, father wept,
Mother cried, baby leapt;
More he crowed more we cried,
Nature could not sorrow hide;
He must go, he must kiss
Child and mother—baby bless—
For he left his pretty boy,
Father’s sorrow, father’s joy.
Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee,
When thou art old, there’s grief enough for thee.”
And the poet who wrote this—putting tenderness into poems of the affections, and a glowing color into pastoral verse, and point and delicacy into his prose—wrote also A Groates worth of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance, and he died of a surfeit of pickled herring and Rhenish wine.
In that ‘Groat’s worth of Wit’ (published after his death) there is a memorable line or two—being probably the first contemporary notice of Shakespeare that still has currency; and it is in the form of a gibe:—
“There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygres heart wrapt in a players hide, supposes hee is as well able to bombast out a blanke-verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes-fac-totum, is in his owne conceyt the onely Shake-Scene in a countrey.”
How drolly it sounds—to hear this fine fellow, broken up with drink and all bedevilments, making his envious lunge at the great master who has perhaps worried him by theft of some of his dramatic methods or schemes, and who gives to poor Greene one of his largest titles to fame in having been the subject of his lampoon!
It gives added importance, too, to this gibe, to know that it was penned when the writer, impoverished, diseased, deserted by patrons, saw death fronting him; and it gives one’s heart a wrench to read how this debauched poet—whose work has given some of the best color to the “Winter’s Tale” of Shakespeare—writes with faltering hand, begging his “gentle” wife’s forgiveness, and that she would see that the charitable host, who has taken him in, for his last illness, shall suffer no loss—then, toying with the sheets, and “babbling o’ green fields,” he dies.
Keen critics of somewhat later days said Shakespeare had Greene’s death in mind when he told the story of Falstaff’s.
It is quite possible that all these men I have named will have encountered, off and on, at their tavern gatherings, the lithe, youngish fellow, large browed and with flashing eyes, who loves Rhenish too in a way, but who loves the altitudes of poetic thought better; who is just beginning to be known poet-wise by his “Venus and Adonis”—whose name is William Shakespeare—and who has great aptitude at fixing a play, whether his own or another man’s; and with Burbage for the leading parts, can make them take wonderfully well.
Possibly, too, in these tavern gatherings would be the young, boyish Earl of Southampton, who is associated with some of the many enigmas respecting Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and whom we Americans ought to know of, because he became interested thereafter in schemes for colonizing Virginia, and has left his name of Southampton to one of the Virginia counties; and, still better, is associated with that beautiful reach of the Chesapeake waters which we now call “Hampton Roads.”
In that company too—familiar with London taverns in later Elizabethan years—the beefy Ben Jonson was sure to appear, with his great shag of hair, and his fine eye, and his coarse lip, bubbling over with wit and with Latin: he, quite young as yet; perhaps just now up from Cambridge; ten years the junior of Shakespeare; and yet by his bulky figure and doughty air dominating his elders, and sure to call the attention of all idlers who hung about the doors of the Mermaid. He may be even now plotting his first play of “Every Man in his Humour,” or that new club of his and Raleigh’s devising, which is to have its meeting of jolly fellows in the same old Cheapside tavern, and to make its rafters shake with their uproarious mirth. For the present we leave them all there—with a May sun struggling through London fogs, and gleaming by fits and starts upon the long range of jewellers’ shops, for which Cheapside was famous—upon the White Cross and Conduit, whereat the shop-girls are filling their pails—upon the great country wains coming in by Whitechapel Road—upon the tall spire of St. Mary le Bow, and upon the diamond panes of the Mermaid tavern, to whose recesses we have just seen the burly figure of Ben Jonson swagger in.