“He lieth in the truckle-bed,
While his young master lieth o’er his head.”
Even the wall paintings, as Shakespeare describes them, are not invention. In the sixteenth century people loved to paint the story of the lost son on the walls of the tavern room, just as in the fifteenth century they pinned up little primitive woodcuts representing St. Christopher. Later we shall see a painter of talent like Hogarth not despise the decoration of taverns as below his genius and embellish with works of his brush the “Elephant Tavern” in Fenchurch Street, where he stayed for a time.
The name “Garter Inn,” pronounced “de Jarterre” by Doctor Caius, is historical, too. Later, in the times of Charles I, who added the star to the insignia of the order founded by Edward III in 1350, the “Star and Garter” appeared.
A true Renaissance sign we find again in the “Sagittary,” cursorily mentioned in “Othello” (i, i). The archer, the ninth sign of the Zodiac, was very familiar to the people from the old calendar woodcuts. Italian prints, as the beautifully illustrated “Fasciculus medicinæ” (Venice, 1500), represent him in classical fashion as an elegant centaur, very unlike the little philistine with round belly, such as he appears in the earlier “teutsch kalender” of Ulm, 1498. The common people did not call him “Sagittarius,” but “bowman” (Schütze). There is good historical evidence of a “Bowman Tavern” in Drury Lane, London. It is natural that Shakespeare, a true son of the Renaissance, should call him with the classical name, just as the first German composer of operas changed his good German name “Schütze” to the more pretentious form of “Sagittarius.”
In these “Bowman Taverns” the guilds of the archers used to come together; as, for instance, in the “Hotel de l’Arquebuse” in Geneva, where the Swiss archers had their joyous reunions after they had finished their outdoor sport to shoot the “papegex” (the parrot). Here the king of the archers who had done the master shot “sans reproche” and “sans tricherie” (without cheating), was celebrated in poetical speeches, according to the customs of the times:—
“Je boy à vous, à votre amye,
Et à toute la compaignie!”
