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.
CHAPTER VIII.
In opening the preceding chapter I spoke of that dainty John Lyly, who first set a fashion in letters, and whose daintiness hid much of the strength and cleverness that were in him: I spoke of the wonderful twin development of the Lord Chancellor Bacon—selfish and ignoble as a man, serene and exalted as a philosopher; and I tried to fasten in the reader’s mind the locality of his tomb and home at the old town of St. Alban’s—a short coach-ride away from London, down in “pleasant Hertfordshire:” I spoke of Hobbes (somewhat before his turn) whose free-thinking—of great influence in its day, and the sharply succeeding days—is supplemented by more acute and subtle, if not more far-reaching, free-thinking now. I quoted the Homer of Chapman, under whose long and staggering lines there burned always true Homeric fire. I cited Marlowe, because his youth and power promised so much, and the promise so soon ended in an early and inglorious death. Then came Lodge, Nashe, and Greene, mates of Marlowe, all well-bred, all having an itch for penwork, and some of them for the stage; all making rendezvous—what time they were in London—at some tavern of Bankside, or at the Mermaid, where we caught a quick glimpse of Ben Jonson, and another of the Stratford player.
George Peele.
I might, however, have added to the lesser names that decorated the closing years of the sixteenth century that of George Peele,[107] of Devonshire birth, but, like so many of his fellows, a university man: he came to be a favorite in London; loved taverns and wine as unwisely as Greene; was said to have great tact for the ordering of showy pageants; did win upon Queen Elizabeth by his “Arraignment of Paris” (half masque and half play) represented by the children of the Chapel Royal—and carrying luscious flattery to the ready ears of Eliza, Queen of—