The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 1

by E. K. Chambers

I
ELIZABETH AND JAMES

[Bibliographical Note.—The formal history of the period is covered, with the exception of the years 1588-1603, by J. A. Froude, History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Armada (1856-70), and S. R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War (1863-84). A beginning towards filling the gap has been made in vol. i of E. P. Cheyney, History of England from the Defeat of the Armada to the Death of Elizabeth (1914), in which the organization of the court and administration is very fully treated. For specifically social history may be added J. R. Green, History of the English People (1877-80), an expansion of the same writer's Short History of the English People (1874), and H. D. Traill, Social England (1893-7). Shorter surveys are A. D. Innes, England under the Tudors (1905), A. F. Pollard, History of England, 1547-1603 (1910), G. M. Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts (1904), F. C. Montague, History of England, 1603-60 (1907), all with detailed bibliographies, of which Professor Pollard's is notably full and good. The chief contemporary chronicles are those of Holinshed (1577), Stowe (1580, &c.), and Camden (1615-25), while personalia and Court details are preserved in R. Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia (1641), J. Finett, Philoxenis (1656), E. Bohnn, Character of Queen Elizabeth (1693), and the malicious pamphlets collected by Sir W. Scott in his Secret History of the Court of James the First (1811). Court life is the main theme of L. Aikin, Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth (1818) and Memoirs of the Court of James I (1822), and of A. Strickland, The Life of Queen Elizabeth (1840), while the best biographical studies of the sovereigns are E. S. Beesly, Queen Elizabeth (1892), M. Creighton, Queen Elizabeth (1896), and T. F. Henderson, James I and VI (1904). Court ceremonies are treated in J. Nichols, Progresses of Elizabeth (2nd ed., 1823). Contemporary England is pictured in W. Harrison, Description of Britain (1577), and W. B. Rye, England as Seen by Foreigners (1865), and the extracts in J. D. Wilson, Life in Shakespeare's England (1911). The studies of social details in N. Drake, Shakespeare and his Times (1817), and G. W. Thornbury, Shakspere's England (1856), are now superseded by the combined work of many collaborators in Shakespeare's England (1916), where special bibliographies on numerous subjects will be found. Shorter books of interest are H. Hall, Society in the Elizabethan Age (1886), H. T. Stephenson, The Elizabethan People (1910), and P. H. Ditchfield, The England of Shakespeare (1917). London may be specially studied in C. L. Kingsford's edition (1908) of J. Stowe's Survey of London (1598) and in W. J. Loftie, History of London (1883), H. B. Wheatley, London Past and Present (1891), T. F. Ordish, Shakespeare's London (1904), W. Besant, London in the Time of the Stuarts (1903), London in the Time of the Tudors (1904), London South of the Thames (1912), H. T. Stephenson, Shakespeare's London (1905), J. A. de Rothschild, Shakespeare and his Day (1906), H. A. Harben, A Dictionary of London (1918), and the publications of the London Topographical Society; Westminster in J. T. Smith, Antiquities of Westminster (1807), and E. Sheppard, The Old Royal Palace of Whitehall (1902); and the royal houses generally in F. Chapman, Ancient Royal Palaces in and near London (1902), R. S. Rait, Royal Palaces of England (1911), A. W. Clapham and W. H. Godfrey, Some Famous Buildings and their Story (1913), and the numerous monographs cited in the notes to the present chapter. Perhaps the most useful books of general reference are The Dictionary of National Biography, G. E. C[okayne]'s Complete Peerage, W. A. Shaw's The Knights of England, and The Victoria History of the Counties of England.

Behind and beyond these treatises, much social and personal material is available in prints or abstracts of official and private letters and analogous documents. The following is not an exhaustive list of sources. There are the Calendars of State Papers, of which the Domestic, Foreign, Scottish, Spanish, and Venetian Papers are the most valuable. There are the Privy Council minutes in J. R. Dasent, Acts of the Privy Council (1890-1907), and those of the Welsh Council in R. Flenley's Calendar (1916). There is, unfortunately, no collection of the letters missive of Elizabeth. There are full texts, by no means only of treaties, in T. Rymer's Foedera (1704-35). Proclamations are calendared in R. Steele, Bibliography of Royal Proclamations (1910-11), and London civic correspondence in Analytical Index to the Remembrancia (1878). There are the Reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, covering private collections, of which the Hatfield MSS. (papers of Lord Burghley and Sir R. Cecil) are by far the most important, while the Rutland MSS., Loseley MSS. (Sir T. Cawarden and Sir W. More), Pepys MSS. (Earl of Leicester), Finch MSS. (Sir T. Heneage), and Middleton MSS. are also useful. With these may be classed J. E. Jackson, Longleat Papers (Wilts. Archaeological Magazine, xiv, xviii, xix), I. H. Jeayes, Catalogue of the Muniments at Berkeley Castle (1892, George Lord Hunsdon), and H. W. Saunders, Stiffkey MSS. (1915, Sir Nathaniel Bacon). There is a long series of collections of letters from the seventeenth century onwards, in some of which the interest is mainly diplomatic, in others ecclesiastical, in others again personal; Cabala (1654, Lord Burghley), D. Digges, The Compleat Ambassador (1655, Sir F. Walsingham), E. Sawyer, Winwood Memorials (1725), F. Peck, Desiderata Curiosa (1732), A. Collins, Sydney Papers (1746), T. Birch, Memoirs of Queen Elizabeth (1754, Anthony Bacon), S. Haynes and W. Murdin, A Collection of State Papers (1740-59, Lord Burghley), L. Howard, A Collection of Letters (1753), H. Harington, Nugae Antiquae (1769, 1804, Sir J. Harington), Earl of Hardwicke, Miscellaneous State Papers (1778), E. Lodge, Illustrations of British History and Manners (1791, 1838), A. Clifford, Sadleir Papers (1809), H. Ellis, Original Letters Illustrative of English History (1825-46), A. J. Kempe, Loseley MSS. (1835), T. Wright, Queen Elizabeth and her Times (1838), G. Goodman, Court of King James I (1839), J. P. Collier, Egerton Papers (1840, Sir T. Egerton), H. Robinson, Zurich Letters (1842-5), T. Birch, Court and Times of James I (1848), J. Bruce, Letters of Elizabeth and James I (1849), J. Bruce and T. T. Perowne, Correspondence of M. Parker (1853), S. Williams, Letters of John Chamberlain (1861), I. H. Jeayes, Letters of Philip Gawdy (1906). There are biographies, in which also collections of letters are often included; J. Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys (c. 1618), Memoirs of Robert Carey (1577-1627), J. Strype, Sir T. Smith (1698), T. Birch, Henry Prince of Wales (1760), N. H. Nicolas, William Davison (1823), E. Nares, William Cecil Lord Burghley (1828-31), J. H. Wiffen, The House of Russell (1833), J. W. Burgon, Sir T. Gresham (1839), N. H. Nicolas, Sir C. Hatton (1847), W. B. Devereux, The Devereux, Earls of Essex (1853), J. Spedding, Francis Bacon (1861-74), E. Edwards, Sir W. Raleigh (1868), E. T. Bradley, Arabella Stuart (1889), B. C. Hardy, Arbella Stuart (1913), E. Gosse, John Donne (1899), L. P. Smith, Sir H. Wotton (1907), Mrs. A. Richardson, The Lover of Queen Elizabeth (1907), A. H. Mathew and A. Calthrop, Sir T. Matthew (1907), C. Stählin, Sir F. Walsingham und seine Zeit (1908), M. A. E. Green, Elizabeth Electress Palatine and Queen of Bohemia (1909), A. Cecil, Sir R. Cecil, Earl of Salisbury (1915). The Camden Society has published the diaries of John Dee (1842), Henry Machyn (1848), John Manningham (1868), Sir Francis Walsingham (1870), and Sir Roger Wilbraham (1902). Finally the ambassadorial dispatches analysed in the calendars are supplemented, for Scotland by Sir James Melville's Memoirs (1827), for the Netherlands by J. Kervyn de Lettenhove, Relations politiques des Pays-Bas et de l'Angleterre (1882-1900), for Spain by the Correspondencia de Felipe II con sus embajadores en Inglaterra (C. D. I. lxxxvii, lxxxix-xcii) and the Viaje de Juan Fernandez de Velasco á Inglaterra (C. D. I. lxxi), and for France by many publications, of which C. P. Cooper, Correspondance diplomatique de La Mothe Fénelon (1838-75), the Mémoires (1850) of the Duc de Sully, and Ambassades de M. de la Boderie en Angleterre (1750) are the richest in court detail.]

AT the close of the Middle Ages, the mimetic instinct, deep-rooted in the psychology of the folk, had reached the third term of its social evolution. After colouring the liturgy of the Church and the festival celebrations of the municipal guilds, it had attached itself, in an outgrowth of minstrelsy, to the household of the sovereign, which had now definitely become, with the advent of the Tudors, the centre of the intellectual and artistic life of the country. It will be manifest, in the course of the present treatise, that the palace was the point of vantage from which the stage won its way, against the linked opposition of an alienated pulpit and an alienated municipality, to an ultimate entrenchment of economic independence. On the literary side the milieu of the Court had its profound effect in helping to determine the character of the Elizabethan play as a psychological hybrid, in which the romance and the erudition, dear to the bower and the library, interact at every turn with the robust popular elements of farce and melodrama. It is worth while, therefore, to attempt to recover something of the atmosphere of the Tudor Court, and to define the conditions under which the presentation of plays formed a recurring interest in its bustling many-coloured life.

In every court the personality of the sovereign is naturally a dominant factor. Who shall say with what bitter discretion learnt in the hard school of adversity, or with what burden of secret policy for the shaping of the nation's destiny in critical hours, Elizabeth mounted the steps of her throne when her summons came in 1558. Our concern, at least, is with externalities. Elizabeth, at twenty-five, was a young and attractive queen, with her full share of the sensuous Tudor blood, and of her father's early gust for colour and for amusement, for jewels and for pageantry. 'Regina tota amoribus dedita est venationibusque, aucupiis, choreis et rebus ludicris insumens dies noctesque,' wrote one of her own subjects in 1563; and the dispatches of the Spanish and Venetian diplomatists strike the same note.[1] Although these things had their appeal for her to the end, she was perhaps not so utterly absorbed in them, even at the beginning, as the observers thought. Yet it was assuredly the love of excitement and spectacle, no less than the desire to win the heart of London, that led her to encourage by her presence the revived folk-festivals of the citizens and the lawyers, the morris dances and May-games by land and water, and the Midsummer watch, which she hurried from Richmond to behold incognita from the Earl of Pembroke's house at Baynard's Castle. There was much talk of marriage for her in these early years. Philip of Spain himself, incredible as it now sounds, the Kings of Denmark and Sweden, the Archdukes Charles and Ferdinand of Austria, the Duke of Nemours, the Earl of Arran, and of her own subjects, the Earl of Arundel, Lord Robert Dudley, Sir William Pickering, were some of the possible consorts whose names passed from mouth to mouth. The gaiety of Whitehall was enhanced by the outward show of courtship, the embassies and their trains, the gifts and compliments, the receptions and banquets. But it soon became apparent that, from policy or from temperament, the Queen had no serious intention of trusting herself in marriage. Gradually the troops of suitors faded away. Dudley alone was left, and with Dudley the Tudor lack of reticence, which had already brought Elizabeth into trouble as a girl, permitted familiarities wherein hostile and interested critics soon found material for a scandal. Whether her heart or her senses, now or at any time, were touched cannot be said. After all, Dudley had, as time went on, to share her favours, such as they were, with Hatton and with Oxford, with Heneage and with Raleigh and with Blount. But it is to our purpose that, when the embassies were gone, and Elizabeth became more and more involved in the web of political intrigues, and began to lose her looks and her health, the court which had started so brilliantly might well have sunk into the commonplace of middle age, had it not been for the presence of a band of high-spirited youths, bound in the interests of their careers to maintain the traditions of official gallantry, and above all to incur no small expense in leading the revels for the recreation of an imperious and critical mistress. For although Elizabeth loved magnificence, she loved economy more. The repair of a ruined exchequer was one of the primary objects and triumphs of her statecraft. Her household, although stately, was by no means on her father's, or even her sister's, scale of expenditure. The splendours of her jewel-house and even of her wardrobe largely owed their origin to the strenae of successive New Years. A similar policy governed the ordering of her amusements. Her Christmas annals afford no parallels to the costly masks, with their marvels of architectural decoration, which had glorified the court of Henry and were to glorify that of James. Her masks, at least those she paid for, were dances, not pageants. The great spectacles of the reign were liturgies, undertaken by her gallants, or by the nobles whose country houses she visited in the course of her annual progresses. The most famous of all, the 'Princely Pleasures of Kenilworth' in 1575, was at the expense of Dudley, to whom the ancient royal castle had long been alienated. Gradually, no doubt, the financial stringency was relaxed. Camden notes a growing tendency to luxury about 1574; others trace the change to the coming of the Duke of Alençon in 1581.[2] Elizabeth had found the way to evoke a national spirit, and at the same time to fill her coffers, by the encouragement of piratical enterprise, and the sumptuous entertainments prepared for the welcome of Monsieur were paid for out of the spoils brought back by Drake in the Golden Hind.[3] The Alençon negotiations, whether seriously intended or not, represent Elizabeth's last dalliance with the idea of matrimony. They gave way to that historic pose of unapproachable virginity, whereby an elderly Cynthia, without complete loss of dignity, was enabled to the end to maintain a sentimental claim upon the attentions, and the purses, of her youthful servants. The strenuous years, which led up to the final triumph over the Armada in 1588, spared but little room for revels and for progresses. They left Elizabeth an old woman. But with the removal of the strain the spirit of gaiety awoke. The entertainments during the progresses of 1591 and 1592 hardly yield to those of 1575 in the cost and ingenuity of their symbolical devices. Essex, the darling of these later years, perhaps found it easier to keep the court alive with tilts and masks, than to play his required part in the sentimental comedy. The love of the dance endured with Elizabeth to the verge of the grave. Her share in the Twelfth Night revels of 1599 was reported to Spain with the sarcastic comment that 'the head of the Church of England and Ireland was to be seen in her old age dancing three or four gaillards'. A year or so later, she was still dancing 'gayement et de belle disposition' at the wedding of Anne Russell, and in April 1602 she trod two gaillards with the Duke of Nevers.[4] It was near the end of her life, too, when her desire to see Falstaff in love inspired Shakespeare, to the regret of those who sentimentalize over Falstaff, with the racy English farce of The Merry Wives of Windsor. During these last years of all, there was a touch of fever in her restless activity. She needed much entertainment both within doors and without in the course of 1600, and her wearied statesmen resented the arduousness of the progress upon which she resolved on the verge of sixty-seven. She went a-Maying at Highgate in 1601 and at Lewisham in 1602. During the next winter her councillors provided a special series of festivities, with the object of inducing her to spend Christmas in London, instead of at Richmond; and we learn that the Court 'flourisht more then ordinarie' with plays, only a month before the indomitable lady took to her bed, and died of no very clearly ascertained disease, but in 'a settled and unremoveable melancholy'.

When James came to London he adopted the traditional splendours of the English Court, in place of the simpler style of living to which he had been accustomed in Edinburgh. His scale of expenditure, indeed, was from the beginning far in excess of Elizabeth's, and landed him before long in considerable embarrassment of the purse. For this there were various reasons: the necessity of keeping up supplementary establishments for a queen consort and an heir apparent, the personal inclination of Anne of Denmark for ostentatious prodigality, the crowd of hungry Scots demanding provision for their needs; above all, no doubt, the absence of any statesmanlike instinct for financial control. There is plenty of evidence that the dignity and sobriety which, on the whole, had characterized Elizabeth's Court soon vanished under the lax rule of her successors. But extravagance and wantonness, although deplorable in themselves, are not necessarily unfriendly to the arts. The transference of the leading companies of players to the direct service of the royal households made it clear that the drama would occupy no less important a place in the new order of things than it had done in the old. And in fact the yearly tale of performances at court soon doubled and trebled that which had sufficed for the Christmas 'solace' of Elizabeth. Doubtless the King had some personal taste for the drama, though perhaps less than other members of his family.[5] He had long entertained the English actor, Laurence Fletcher, into his service and shown him high favour, and Jonson is our authority for the statement that Shakespeare's plays did 'take', not only 'Eliza' but 'our James'. But his great preoccupation was the hunt, to which he hurried on every opportunity, regardless of the discontent of London and even of the claims of business. Anne, on the other hand, brought up in a court which had been one of the first to come under the influence of the English players abroad, and wedded into a court from which the Kirk had never succeeded in expelling the French habits of amusement domiciled by Mary Queen of Scots, found her chief pleasure in the spectacular arts; and to her influence is mainly due that great development of the Jacobean mask, which gave such scope to the exercise of courtly pens, and to the remarkable decorative genius of Inigo Jones.[6] Anne's interest in all forms of the drama, which even led her to the innovation of visiting a theatre, was fully shared by the royal children, and combined in Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, with a passion for the knightly exercise of the tilt to prolong into the seventeenth century the Renaissance tradition of spectacular feats of arms. The death of this beloved prince, to whom the thoughts of England, disillusioned of his father, turned as the hope of the future, fell near the end of our period. The splendour of the Court festivities reached a climax with the wedding of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613, and faded even before the death of Anne herself in 1619. It had its revival under Henrietta Maria.

The Court was a movable institution, constituted by the actual presence of the sovereign. Abundant choice both of 'standing houses' or 'houses of abode' and of country manors was available.[7] The most important palaces, under Elizabeth, were five in number, Whitehall, Hampton Court, Greenwich, Richmond, and Windsor. All of these stood upon the river, and all except Windsor and in part Greenwich dated structurally from the reign of Henry VII or that of Henry VIII. The ancient palace of Westminster, with its royal chapel of St. Stephen and its great hall built by William Rufus and rebuilt by Richard II, served for coronations and for the housing of Parliament and the courts of justice. But it was no longer used as a royal residence, and the name of one of its principal chambers, the 'white hall', had been transferred to the neighbouring structure of York Place, originally begun by Wolsey, and surrendered to Henry VIII, a fruitless sacrifice, at the moment of the great Cardinal's downfall in 1530.[8] This was the metropolitan palace. It was an extensive and irregular pile, covering many acres. Through its centre ran the highway from London to Westminster, piercing two arched gateways, of which the northern one was the work of Holbein. The hall and chapel, with the royal lodgings, galleries, and privy garden, stood on the east, and were connected with the river by a flight of privy stairs. On the west, reached by galleries over the gateways, were many additional lodgings, grouped round a cockpit, a tennis-court, and a tilt-yard. At the back of these lay St. James's Park.[9] Richmond and Hampton Court, a few miles up the river, and Greenwich, a few miles down, were all accessible by river as well as by road, and the royal barge lay ready in its bargehouse opposite Whitehall, off Paris Garden on the Surrey side. Both for Court and city the Thames was a frequented water-way. Richmond had been built by Henry VII to replace the older palace of Sheen, destroyed by fire in 1497.[10] Hampton Court, also upon the site of an earlier royal manor-house, was like Whitehall a monument of the architectural taste of Wolsey, and like Whitehall became part of the spoil of Henry VIII, by whom it was completed.[11] Greenwich owed its origin to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who gave it the name of 'Placentia' or 'Pleasaunce'. It had been enlarged by Henry VII and was the birthplace and the favourite habitation of Henry VIII.[12] Windsor, on the other hand, which stood in a wide hunting domain some score or more of miles up the river, was an ancient fortress of the English kings. William the Conqueror had built it; William of Wykeham had added to it for Edward III, who established the college of St. George within its walls upon an older foundation of Henry I, and made it the habitation of his chivalric Order of the Garter. Elizabeth modified the mediaeval aspect of the castle, by adding a library and a garden terrace.[13]

Some older royal residences in London had long been converted to other purposes. The Tower served as a wardrobe or storehouse and a prison, but was only occupied by the sovereign on the eve of a coronation.[14] The Wardrobe on St. Andrew's Hill was assigned to the Master of the Wardrobe as an office and personal lodging.[15] The Savoy held a hospital, together with various sets of lodgings.[16] Baynard's Castle had been granted to the Herberts, nominally as keepers, in 1546.[17]

Crosby Hall was the abode of wealthy merchants.[18] Somerset House, the unfinished palace of the Protector on the Strand, had been made over to Elizabeth as princess by Edward VI in 1552. She sometimes occupied it, in order to be near the city, but more usually kept it available for foreign visitors or favoured courtiers.[19] For the latter purpose it was supplemented by Durham House, farther westwards on the Strand, which Henry VIII had acquired by exchange from the see of Durham in 1536.[20] Most of the ecclesiastical buildings, which had reverted to the Crown on the dissolution of the religious orders, such as the Blackfriars, the Whitefriars, and the Charterhouse, had been alienated.[21] Elizabeth retained the priory of St. John in Clerkenwell, and placed there some of the minor Household offices, including that of the Revels.[22] Somewhat retired from the press of city life lay St. James in the Fields, built on the site of an old leper hospital by Henry VIII in 1532. It ranked almost as a country house. A park, enclosed in 1537 and adorned with the artificial water known as Rosamund's Pool, separated it from Whitehall, and on the other side of it stretched the enclosures of Hyde and Marylebone Parks.[23] There were many country houses still farther afield. Oatlands, on the Surrey border of Windsor Forest, served for hunting.[24] To this, and to Nonsuch in Surrey, the Queen often made resort.[25] Eltham, in Kent, was another hunting ground, convenient of access from Greenwich. Visits were paid from time to time to Havering Bower in Essex, Enfield in Middlesex, Hatfield, where Elizabeth had lived as a princess, in Hertfordshire, the monastic spoil of Reading Abbey in Berkshire, Woodstock in Oxfordshire, and the ancient capital of Winchester in Hampshire.[26] But for the most part these, and yet other royal castles and manors in more distant counties, slept peacefully under the privileged sway of their constables and keepers.[27] There were some changes at the succession of James. Somerset House was assigned to Queen Anne, and a not very successful attempt was made to re-name it Queen's Court. This appellation was revived when the creation of an Earl of Somerset in 1613 seemed suggestive of confusion, and then abandoned in favour of Denmark House.[28] Nonsuch, Havering, and Hatfield, with many other manors, were also assigned to Anne as part of her dowry. Hatfield was exchanged in 1607 with Lord Salisbury for Theobalds, to which James rather than Anne appears to have taken a fancy, and the transfer gave occasion for a characteristic entertainment by Ben Jonson. Oatlands was given to Anne in 1611 and Greenwich in 1613.[29] At the beginning of the reign Oatlands had been the royal nursery for Henry and Elizabeth, and it continued to be Henry's country home for some years.[30] Elizabeth, however, was soon placed in the charge of Lord Harington, first at Exton in Rutlandshire and then at Combe Abbey in Warwickshire. When she came to Court in 1608, a house was found for her at Kew. Both she and Henry sometimes resided at Hampton Court and at Whitehall, where they were lodged in that part of the palace known as the Cockpit, on the border of St. James's Park.[31] But St. James's Palace itself was reserved for the ultimate use of Henry, and here he set up his establishment as Prince of Wales in 1610 and died in 1612. Richmond and Woodstock were given him for country houses, and at his death he was also buying up interests in Sheen House and Kenilworth.[32] For Charles Holdenby or Holmby House in Northamptonshire was bought in 1605, and on his brother's death he succeeded to St. James's.[33] The King was thus left with Whitehall, Hampton Court, and Windsor as his principal palaces. Naturally those of his wife and son remained available for occasional visits, and the hunting facilities of Theobalds and Woodstock were an agreeable addition to those of Hampton Court and Windsor themselves.[34] But they did not suffice for James, who set about providing himself with hunting quarters in various localities. The most important of these was Royston Priory, on the borders of Cambridgeshire and Herts., which he bought after a year's trial in 1604 and enlarged into a house of some pretensions.[35] Others were at Newmarket, Thetford, Hinchinbrook, Ware, and Woking, while stables were kept up at St. Albans and Reading.[36] Theobalds, Royston, and Newmarket were all reached by a private road, maintained, like the King's Road to Hampton Court and another to Greenwich, by James himself.[37]