The second part of bandstrings and the ring.
Upon the evening of the same Sunday, the students of Christ-Church, willing to show their respect for the royal visitor, obtained leave to present a play before the King; and they chose, with no great display of taste, Barten Holyday’s ΤΕΧΝΟΓΑΜΙΑ, or “The Marriage of the Arts,” which had been acted in Christ-Church hall the 13th of February, 1617. The play was so little relished, that the king was with difficulty persuaded to sit till its conclusion: the “enactors” became subjects of ridicule to the University; and, though Corbet and King rhymed in their favour, the laugh went against them.
Indeed the Oxonians were not more unfortunate in their theatrical representations on this than on former occasions. Upon the visit of James, in 1605, two out of three dramatic exhibitions, prepared at great expense and performed by the students, were, according to the testimony of an eye-witness, received with tædium, and rewarded with unconcealed disgust[17].
The writers of the poet’s life are silent as to the period of his marriage; and if I am unable to communicate any information on this point, it will not, I trust, be attributed to any parsimony of research, or indifference as to fact when conjecture can be substituted. Those who have made literary biography their study, know that it is frequently much easier to write many pages than to ascertain a date, and hence but too frequently ingenuity supplies the place of labour and inquiry: in the present instance, every record that suggested a probability of containing any memorial relative to the family of the subject of this biography has been inspected personally; but before the passing of the Marriage Act, nothing is more uncertain than the probable place of the celebration of that ceremony[18].
In this dearth of fact as to dates, I shall presume to suppose he married about 1625 Alice the only daughter of his fellow-collegian Dr. Leonard Hutton, a man of some eminence in his day as a divine and an antiquary, and whose character is thus drawn by Antony Wood with a felicity that rarely accompanies his pencil: “His younger years were beautified with all kind of polite learning, his middle with ingenuity and judgment, and his reverend years with great wisdom in government, having been often subdean of his college.”
This union of wit and beauty was not looked upon with indifference, nor was their epithalamium unsung, or the string touched by the hand of an unskilful master:
Come, all ye Muses, and rejoyce