The other custom to be noted is that of taking night-caps. Macbeth, act i. scene 2.
Lady Macbeth. I have drugged their possets.
It appears from this passage as well as from many others in our old dramatic performances, that it was the general custom to take possets just before bed-time. So in the first part of King Edward IV., by Heywood: ‘thou shalt be welcome to beef and bacon, and perhaps a bag-pudding; and my daughter Nell shall pop a posset upon thee when thou goest to bed.’ Macbeth has already said:—
Go bid thy mistress, when my drink is ready,
She strike upon the bell.
Lady Macbeth has also just observed:—
That which hath made them drunk, hath made me bold.
And in The Merry Wives of Windsor Mrs. Quickly promises Jack Rugby a posset at night. This custom is also mentioned by Froissart.
One more quotation I cannot refrain from adding. It is not from Shakespeare, but from one who had studied him, and who, if nothing else, could certainly parody the ‘seven ages of man’ (As You Like It, act ii. scene 7).
Stages of Drunkenness.—All the world’s a pub,
And all the men and women merely drinkers;
They have their hiccoughs and their staggerings;
And one man in a day drinks many glasses,
His acts being seven stages. At first the gentleman,
Steady and steadfast in his good resolves;
And then the wine and bitters, appetiser,
And pining, yearning look, leaving like a snail
The comfortable bar. And then the arguments,
Trying like Hercules with a wrathful frontage
To refuse one more two penn’orth. Then the mystified,
Full of strange thoughts, unheeding good advice,
Careless of honour, sudden, thick, and gutt’ral,
Seeking the troubled repetition
Even in the bottle’s mouth; and then quite jovial,
In fair good humour while the world swims round
With eyes quite misty, while his friends him cut,
Full of nice oaths and awful bickerings;
And so he plays his part. The sixth stage shifts
Into the stupid, slipping, drunken man,
With ‘blossoms’ on his nose and bleery-eyed,
His shrunken face unshaved, from side to side
He rolls along; and his unmanly voice,
Huskier than ever, fails and flies,
And leaves him—staggering round. Last scene of all,
That ends this true and painful history,
Is stupid childishness, and then oblivion—
Sans watch, sans chain, sans coin, sans everything.
It is impossible to dismiss Shakespeare without some notice of the man himself. But how little is known apart from his works![107] Go to Stratford-on-Avon, visit ‘the birthplace;’ bear those good ladies who show it tell you of the eight villages immortalised by their supposed connection with the poet; hear them repeat the lines ascribed by tradition to Shakespeare himself:—