Forget we were thrust out; it is but thus,
God threatens Kings, Kings Lords, as Lords do us.[660]
Obviously, as John Chamberlain suggests in a letter to Dudley Carleton, to be befriended at court was to secure the easier admission. But subject to the limitations of space and the discretion of the door-keepers, the performances seem to have been open to all comers, although the wicked wit of the dramatists is apt to suggest that citizens' wives sometimes found access more readily than the citizens themselves.[661] It is difficult to say how many the room would hold. One of De la Boderie's dispatches speaks of 10,000, which was probably a considerable over-estimate.[662] Many of those who besieged the doors must of course have been disappointed, and perhaps many of those who got in experienced more satisfaction than comfort.[663] In order to save space, it was decreed in 1613 that no ladies should be admitted in farthingales, and the repetition of the Irish Mask of 1613 and the Mercury Vindicated of 1615 may have been due in part to an unsatisfied demand for seats as well as to the intrinsic merit of the performances.
The mask, beginning after supper, was prolonged far into the night. That at Sir Philip Herbert's wedding lasted three hours; Tethys' Festival was not over until hard upon sunrise. The pent-up audience dissolved in some confusion. Apparently the Tudor custom of finishing the proceedings by rifling the pageant and the dresses of their decorations had not been wholly abandoned.[664] A hardly less riotous scene followed. A banquet was spread in another room, the great chamber in 1605, the presence chamber in 1616, the specially built 'marriage' room in 1613. It was not etiquette for the King to partake of this with his guests, but he usually conducted the maskers to the tables, and took a survey of them before he retired. Then the fray began. The banquet was 'dispatched with the accustomed confusion', says a chronicler in 1604. In 1605 it 'was so furiously assaulted that down went tables and tressels before one bit was touched'. Tethys' Festival in 1610 closed with 'views and scrambling'. At Beaumont's mask in 1613, 'after the King had made the tour of the tables, everything was in a moment rapaciously swept away'.[665] Tired and unfed, the ladies made their way out into the courtyards of the palace, perhaps to find, as in 1604, that chains and jewels were gone, and that they were even 'made shorter by the skirts'.[666]
Next day the poets sat down to turn the programmes into books, which the stationers could print and sell at sixpence each, and so save them from being pestered for copies of the verses.[667] And the Lord Chamberlain's Secretary sat down to compare his expenses with his imprests, and to draw up his accounts for endorsement by his lord and the Master of the Horse, and presentation at the Exchequer. Any estimate of the cost of masking that we can now form must be approximate in character. Under Elizabeth, so long as masks were the care of the Revels, their expenses naturally appear in the accounts of that office; but in part only, since requisitions appear to have been made upon the Wardrobe and the Office of Works, and the services rendered by these departments not charged to the Revels. Moreover, the methods of bookkeeping employed by the officers of the Revels did not provide for distinguishing expenditure upon masks and upon plays when, as was usually the case, both types of entertainment were in concurrent preparation.[668] It is therefore rarely that the cost of an Elizabethan mask can be isolated, and still more rarely that it can be assumed to be complete. Four masks in the winter of 1559 only cost the Revels £127 11s. 2d., and it was estimated that two more at Shrovetide would cost another £100. The spectacular mask in June 1572 cost £506 11s. 8d., but it is noted that the 'Warderobe stuf' was 'excepted' from the reckoning. An estimate for another spectacular mask in April 1581 amounts to about £380, and again it is clear that the materials for garments are not included. It is rather surprising to find that a mask intended to accompany the embassy to Scotland at the time of James VI's wedding cost no more than £17 10s. 10d., but this was a simple mask without a pageant, and garments already in store were 'translated' for the purpose.[669] Nor did Elizabeth desire to do any excessive honour to her cousin. On the other hand, the accounts, and particularly the inventories attached to those for the earliest years of the reign, show that the richest materials were used without stint to deck out the maskers. Clothes of gold and silver, shot with innumerable hues and often further enriched with embroidered 'works', velvets and sarcenets, satins, taffetas, and damasks; all recur in a truly royal profusion, and at a cost of anything up to a guinea or so a yard. The cheaper stuffs were no doubt used for torch-bearers, and there was room for economy in the Cologne and Venice gold and silver and other forms of tinsel that served for fringes and trimmings.[670] Copper lace, as the Duke of Newcastle gravely informed Charles II at the Restoration, looked as well as gold for the two or three nights before it tarnished: 'All Queen Elizabethes dayes shee had itt, & Kinge James.'[671] Burghley's reorganization of the Revels in 1597 apparently left the office without any responsibility for the preparation of masks, and it is not clear what arrangements were made for these during the last few years of the reign. Under James the Revels claimed fees for the personal attendance of the officers at masks, for the lighting of the banqueting-house, for small repairs to its fittings, and for no more.[672] Small sums also appear in the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber for services of the mat-layer in making ready the dancing-floor, and of Grooms of the Chamber in attendance on the maskers, and in those of the Office of Works for the erection of stages and scaffolds. The incidence of the main expenditure of course depended upon whether the mask was ordered by James himself, or contributed out of the loyalty of others. James appears to have paid, in whole or in part, for at least fourteen of the twenty-five court masks traceable during the years 1603-16. These include the six Queen's masks (Twelve Goddesses, Blackness, Beauty, Queens, Tethys' Festival, Love Freed), two Prince's masks (Oberon, Love Restored), and five other masks by lords and gentlemen, one at the first Christmas of the reign (Indian and Chinese Knights), one at his daughter's wedding (Lords), one at Somerset's (Squires), and two of later date (Mercury Vindicated, Golden Age Restored). He may also have paid for the Mask of Scots in 1604 and the Irish Mask in 1613, but these were probably non-spectacular and cheap. As to the finance of the Winchester mask of 1603 and of the Twelve Months nothing is known, or whether the latter, evidently planned for a Prince's mask, was ever in fact performed. To Oberon and Love Restored James contributed amounts of at least £387 and at least £280 respectively, but so far as Oberon is concerned this was by no means the whole cost, for a sum of £1,076 6s. 10d. was charged to Henry's personal account, and it is probable that the burden of Love Restored was similarly divided. I have no evidence that Anne's personal account was ever charged with any part of the cost of the Queen's masks. Certainly it was not so with Love Freed in 1611, for of this mask, and of this alone, a full balance-sheet happens to be available. It was a comparatively cheap mask, deliberately so, because Tethys' Festival in the summer before had been 'excessively costly'. It was intended that it should cost no more than £600. In fact the total expenditure came to £719 1s. 3d. Of this £238 16s. 10d. went to Inigo Jones on 'his byll', doubtless for the scenery; £69 17s. 5d. in minor items of costume; £292 in 'rewards', making a total of £600 14s. 3d., of which £400 had already been received from the Exchequer. This agrees closely with the original estimate, but there was a further amount of £118 7s. due to the Master of the Wardrobe for materials which he had supplied for costumes, and the document concludes with a memorandum signed by the Earls of Suffolk and Worcester to the effect that this amount, over and above the £600 14s. 3d., is payable. These lords, one as Lord Chamberlain, the other as Master of the Horse, seem regularly to have had the supervision of 'emptions and provisions for masks given at the royal expense'.[673] The financial procedure was as follows. At an early date, the King directed a warrant under the privy seal to the Exchequer, in which the names of the supervising officers were set out, and the Treasurer was authorized to make payments upon certificates by them.[674] A letter of 1608 suggests that up to that date it had been usual to name a maximum cost in the warrant, but thenceforward the supervising officers seem normally to have had a free hand.[675] Their own methods varied. Sometimes they asked the Exchequer, as occasion arose, to pay small sums direct to Inigo Jones and others; sometimes they wrote acknowledgements on the bills of furnishers, and sent these forward for Exchequer payment; sometimes they authorized a subordinate officer to draw one or two large sums and meet the expenditure out of these. For 'rewards' no doubt the last was the more convenient way. We find one Bethell, a gentleman usher of the chamber, thus designated as payee in 1608, Henry Reynolds in 1609, Meredith Morgan in 1612, 1613, 1614, and 1616, Walter James in 1615, and Edmund Sadler in 1616.[676] The balance-sheet for Love Freed, although it contains items for the dresses of the presenters, antimaskers, and musicians, contains none which can be assigned to those of the main maskers, and there is other evidence for thinking that, even in a royal mask, the lords or ladies who danced were expected to dress themselves. Thus John Chamberlain tells us of the Mask of Squires that the King was to bear the charge, 'all saving the apparel'. The practice, however, was probably not invariable, for the Exchequer documents relating to Tethys' Festival contain a silkman's bill for lace used for the dresses of fourteen ladies. For the Twelve Goddesses warrants were issued to Lady Suffolk and Lady Walsingham to take Queen Elizabeth's robes from the wardrobe in the Tower. The list of 'rewards' for Love Freed can be supplemented from similar lists for Oberon and the Lords' Mask and a few scattered records. The largest amounts went to the poets and the architect. Jones had £50 for the Lords' Mask and £40 each for Love Freed and Oberon, Jonson £40 for Love Freed, Daniel £20 for Tethys' Festival, Campion, being both poet and musician, £66 13s. 4d. for the Lords' Mask. Dancers and composers got from £10 to £40; lutenists and violinists £1 or £2; players £1 each. For the total cost we are mainly reduced to guess-work, although contemporary gossip, sometimes a little disturbed at the extravagance, may help us, if it was not itself based on guess-work.[677] We hear of £2,000 to £3,000 for the Twelve Goddesses and the two other masks of the first winter, £3,000 and 25,000 scudi for Blackness, 6,000 or 7,000 and later 30,000 scudi for Beauty, £1,500 for Mercury Vindicated, £2,000 for Queens, which, however, M. Reyher estimates from Exchequer documents which he does not print, at more than £4,000.[678] These figures probably include the contributions of the Wardrobe, as these were to be repaid out of the special allowances in 1611. There is yet one other source of information. A return of extraordinary disbursements of the Exchequer for 1603-9, during which period there were six or seven royal masks, gives £4,215 under this head, and a similar return for 1603-17, during which there were from fourteen to sixteen, including the Vision of Delight in 1617, gives £7,500.[679] But this last figure is specifically stated not to include 'the provisions had out of the Warderobe and materials and workmen from the Office of the Works'. At a venture, I should say that a royal mask cost about £2,000 on the average. Something may also be gleaned about the finance of those masks that were not wholly charged on the Exchequer. Oberon, to which both James and Henry contributed, was supervised by the chamberlain of Henry's household, Sir Thomas Chaloner. The Inns of Court masks brought to the Princess Elizabeth's wedding were paid for out of admission fees to chambers and levies raised upon the members of the Inns, according to their status. Chamberlain estimated the cost of the two masks as 'better than £4,000', and the accounts that have been preserved show that in fact Chapman's mask cost Lincoln's Inn and the Middle Temple £1,086 8s. 11d. each, and Beaumont's cost Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple over £1,200 each. On the other hand, the whole cost of the Mask of Flowers, given by Gray's Inn at the Earl of Somerset's wedding, being over £2,000, was met by Sir Francis Bacon, who refused an offered contribution of £500 from Sir Henry Yelverton. The masks at the weddings of Sir Philip Herbert, Lord Essex, Lord Hay, and Lord Haddington were all, certainly or probably, complimentary offerings of friends of the hymeneal couples. Lady Rutland, who danced in Hymenaei, paid £80 to Bethell, and £26 11s. more for her own apparel. The Haddington Mask cost each of the twelve dancers £300, and must therefore have been one of the most expensive masks of the period. Obviously the highest estimates for the masks do not include the value of the jewels with which the dancers bedizened themselves. In the Twelve Goddesses Anne is said to have worn £100,000 worth and the other ladies £20,000 worth. Of Hymenaei John Pory says, 'I think they hired and borrowed all the principall jewels and ropes of perle both in court and citty. The Spanish ambassador seemed but poore to the meanest of them.' Even this Chamberlain could cap for Beauty. 'One lady, and that under a baroness, is said to be furnished for better than a hundred thousand pounds. And the Lady Arabella goes beyond her; and the queen must not come behind.' Thus they revelled it.
VII
THE COURT PLAY
[Bibliographical Note.—The books cited at the head of ch. iii, with F. S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (1914), provide material for this chapter; cf. A. Thaler, The Players at Court (1920, J. G. P. xix. 19).]
THE foregoing chapters have illustrated the overflow of the Renaissance passion for drama, taking shape in the spectacular enrichment of elements in court life which were not originally mimetic in their intention; the welcome, the exercise of arms, the dance. They are subordinate in their interest to us, as they were in fact subordinate by reason of their occasional character to the play itself, which formed, both in Elizabeth's reign and in that of James, the staple amusement of the court winter. The ordinary season for plays was a comparatively restricted one. Traditionally it began with All Saints, but Elizabeth at least rarely reached her winter quarters by the beginning of November, and her revels began with the Christmas festival itself, the twelve days of ancient licence in Calends and Saturnalia that extended from Nativity to Epiphany.[680] Within this period the three feasts of St. Stephen, St. John, and the Innocents, with New Year's Day and Twelfth Night, were nearly always gladdened by play or mask. Sometimes one of them was omitted, and sometimes, in substitution or addition, another day, often the Sunday in Christmas week, was selected. I know no record of a play on Christmas Day itself. Chamberlain writes in January 1608, 'The king was very earnest to have one on Christmas night, though, as I take it, he and the prince received that day, but the Lords told him it was not the fashion. Which answer pleased him not a whit, but said, "What do you tell me of the fashion? I will make it a fashion."'[681] But the Chamber accounts show that he dropped the point. After Twelfth Night there was a lull, broken perhaps by an occasional play, notably on February 2 at Candlemas, until a group of two or three at Shrovetide brought revelling to a conclusion before the rigours of Lent. This was the close of the official season, and the Revels office had now little to think of but the annual airing of the wardrobe stuff, at any rate until the progress came round.