“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!”
Shakespeare and the Globe.
Neither our Italian friend, however, nor Ben Jonson have given us any such glimpse as we would like to have of that keen-witted Warwickshire actor and playwright who, in the early years of James’ reign, is living off and on in London; having bought, within a few years—as the records tell us—a fine New Place in Stratford, and has won great favor with that King Jamie, who with all his pedantry knows a good thing when he sees it, or hears it. Indeed, there is some warrant for believing that the King wrote a commendatory letter to the great dramatist, of which Mr. Black, in our time, makes shadowy use in that Shakespearean romance of his,[6] you may have encountered. The novelist gives us some very charming pictures of the Warwickshire landscape, and he has made Miss Judith Shakespeare very arch and engaging; but it was perilous ground for any novelist to venture upon; and I think the author felt it, and has shown a timidity and doubt that have hampered him; I do not recognize in it the breezy freedom that belonged to his treatment of things among the Hebrides. But to return to “Judith’s father”—he is part proprietor of the Globe Theatre, taking in lots of money (old cronies say) in that way; was honored by the Queen, too, before her death, and had written that “Merry Wives of Windsor,” tradition says, to show Queen Bess how the Fat Falstaff would carry his great hulk as a lover.