An Italian Reporter.
It was in the very year of Ben Jonson’s return from the north that a masque of his—“Pleasure is Reconciled to Virtue”—was represented at Whitehall; and it so happens that we have a lively glimpse of this representation from the note-book of an Italian gentleman who was chaplain to Pietro Contarini, then ambassador from Venice, and who was living at Sir Pindar’s home in Bishopsgate Street (a locality still kept in mind by a little tavern now standing thereabout called “Sir Pindar’s Head”).
This report of Busino, the Italian gentleman of whom I spoke, about his life in London, was buried in the archives of Venice, until unearthed about twenty years since by an exploring Englishman.[5] So it happens, that in this old Venetian document we seem to look directly through those foreign eyes, closed for two hundred and seventy years, upon the play at Whitehall.
“For two hours,” he says, “we were forced to wait in the Venetian box, very hot and very crowded. Then the Lord Chamberlain came up, and wanted to add another, who was a greasy Spaniard.”
This puts Busino in an ill humor (there was no good-will between Italy and Spain in those days); but he admires the women—“all so many queens.”
“There were some very lovely faces, and at every moment my companions kept exclaiming: ‘Oh, do look at this one!’ ‘Oh, do see that other!’ ‘Whose wife is this?’ ‘And that pretty one near her, whose daughter is she?’ [Curious people!] Then the King came in and took the ambassador to his royal box, directly opposite the stage, and the play began at 10 P.M.”
There was Bacchus on a car, followed by Silenus on a barrel, and twelve wicker-flasks representing very lively beer bottles, who performed numerous antics; then a moving Mount Atlas, as big as the stage would permit; scores of classic affectations and astonishing mythologic mechanism; and at last, with a great bevy of pages, twelve cavaliers in masques—the Prince Charles (afterward Charles I.) being chief of the revellers.
“These all choose partners and dance every kind of dance—every cavalier selecting his lady. After an hour or two of this, they, being tired, began to flag;” whereat—says the chaplain—“the choleric King James got impatient and shouted out from his box, ‘Why don’t they dance? What did you make me come here for? Devil take you all—dance!’”
What a light this little touch of the old gentleman’s choleric spirit throws upon the court manners of that time!
Then Buckingham, the favorite, whom Scott introduces in Nigel as Steenie—comes forward to placate the King, and cuts a score of lofty capers with so much grace and agility as not only to quiet the wrathy monarch but to delight everybody. Afterward comes the banquet, at which his most sacred majesty gets tipsy, and amid a general smashing of Venetian glass, continues the Italian gentleman, “I went home, very tired, at two o’clock in the morning.”
Ah, if we could only unearth some good old play-going chaplain’s account of how Shakespeare appeared—of his dress—of his voice—and with what unction of manner he set before the little audience at the Globe, or Blackfriars, his part of Old Adam (which there is reason to believe he took), in his own delightful play of “As You Like It.” What would we not give to know the very attitude, and the wonderful pity in his look, with which he spoke to his young master, Orlando:—
“Oh, my sweet master, what make you here?
Why are you virtuous? Why do people love you?
Oh, what a world is this, when what is comely
Envenoms him, that bears it!”