THEATRICAL ENTERTAINMENTS.
When the players came to town I suspect that no Stratford boy was more delighted than William. John Shakespeare, like his fellows in the town council, seems to have been a lover of the drama. When he was bailiff in 1569 he granted licenses for performances of the Queen's and the Earl of Worcester's companies.
ITINERANT PLAYERS IN A COUNTRY HALL
The Queen's company received nine shillings and the Earl's twelvepence for their first entertainments, to which the public were admitted free. They doubtless gave others afterwards for which an entrance fee was charged.
Did John Shakespeare take the five-year-old William to see them act? He may have done so, for we know that in the city of Gloucester (only thirty miles from Stratford) a man took his little boy, born in the same year with Shakespeare, to a free dramatic performance similarly provided by the corporation. In his autobiography, written in his old age, the person tells how he went to the show with his father and stood between his legs as he sat upon one of the benches.
The play was one of the "moralities" then in vogue, and the good man's quaint description of it is worth quoting as giving an idea of those curious dramas:—
"It was called The Cradle of Security, wherein was personated a king or some great prince, with his courtiers of several kinds, amongst which three ladies were in special grace with him; and they, keeping him in delights and pleasures, drew him from his graver counsellors, ... that, in the end, they got him to lie down in a cradle upon the stage, where these three ladies, joining in a sweet song, rocked him asleep that he snorted again; and in the mean time closely [that is, secretly] conveyed under the clothes wherewithal he was covered a vizard, like a swine's snout, upon his face, with three wire chains fastened thereunto, the other end whereof being holden severally by those three ladies, who fall to singing again, and then discovered [uncovered] his face that the spectators might see how they had transformed him, going on with their singing.
"Whilst all this was acting, there came forth of another door at the farthest end of the stage two old men, the one in blue with a sergeant-at-arms his mace on his shoulder, the other in red with a drawn sword in his hand and leaning with the other hand upon the other's shoulder; and so they two went along in a soft pace round about by the skirt of the stage, till at last they came to the cradle, when all the court was in the greatest jollity; and then the foremost old man with his mace struck a fearful blow upon the cradle, whereat all the courtiers, with the three ladies and the vizard, all vanished; and the desolate prince starting up bare-faced, and finding himself thus sent for to judgment, made a lamentable complaint of his miserable case, and so was carried away by wicked spirits.
"This prince did personate in the moral the Wicked of the World; the three ladies, Pride, Covetousness, and Luxury [Lust]; the two old men, the End of the World and the Last Judgment.
"This sight took such impression in me that, when I came towards man's estate, it was as fresh in my memory as if I had seen it newly acted."
So far as the Stratford records show, the theatrical company of 1569 was the first that had visited the town, but afterwards players came thither almost every year.
How much they had to do in awakening a passion for the drama in the breast of young William and shaping his subsequent career, we cannot guess; but "the boy is father of the man," and in all that we know of Shakespeare as a boy we can detect the germinal influences of many characteristics of the man, the poet, and the dramatist.
WILLIAM KEMP DANCING THE MORRIS
[Part V.]
HOLIDAYS, FESTIVALS, FAIRS, ETC
THE BOUNDARY ELM