GROWING LITERARY RENOWN. ROYAL PATRONS.
"Follow your envious courses, men of malice;
You have Christian warrant for them, and, no doubt,
In time will find their fit rewards."
"O beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock
The meat it feeds on."
The literary and dramatic world of London in the years 1589 to 1592 was stirred with pride and astonishment at the productions of William Shakspere, and from the tavern and guilds of tradesmen to the crack clubs of authors, lords and royalty itself, the Dramatic Magician of the Blackfriars was praised to the skies and sought for by even Queen Elizabeth, who saw more than another Edmund Spenser to glorify her reign and flash her name down the ages with even finer, luminous colors than bedecked the sylvan pathway of the Faerie Queen!
The Earl of Leicester was one of the first great men of England to recognize the divine accomplishments of the Warwickshire boy who had made his first theatrical adventures through the domain of the old Earl, and who was ever the friend of old John Shakspere, the impecunious and agnostic father of our brilliant Bard.
On the death of the old Earl in the autumn of 1588, his domain reverted to his stepson, the young Earl of Essex, who continued to be the patron of letters and often attended the Blackfriars, with his friend, the handsome and intellectual Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, who took the greatest interest in the plays of "Love's Labor's Lost," "Two Gentlemen of Verona," "King John," "Henry the Fourth," "Henry the Fifth," and "Henry the Sixth," that were then fermenting in the brain of William.
He had ransacked the history of Hollingshead and others to illustrate on the stage the civil wars between the houses of York and Lancaster, known as the war of the Red and White Roses, with canker and thorn to pester each royal clan and bring misery on the British people because of a family quarrel!
"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."
"What have Kings that privates have not too,
Save ceremony?"
The jealousy of Kyd, Lodge and Greene continued to secretly knife the Stratford butcher boy, but the more they tried to cough him down the more he rose in public estimation, until finally these little vipers of spite and spleen gave up their secret scandal chase, when, like a roebuck from the forest of Arden or Caledonian heather crags, he flashed out of sight of all the dramatic and poetic hounds who pursued him, and ever after looked down from the imperial heights of Parnassus at the dummies of theatrical pretense.