Methinks the little wit I had is lost.
Since I saw you, for wit is like a rest
Held up at tennis, which men do the best
With the best gamesters. What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid! Heard words that have been
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame.
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life; than when there hath been thrown
Wit able enough to justify the town
For three days past, wit that might warrant be
For the whole city to talk foolishly.
Till that were cancelled; and when that was gone.
We left an air behind us, which alone
Was able to make the two next companies
Right witty, though but downright fools more wise."
For the better observance of the Lenten statutes, in every ward of London a jury was sworn, and charged by the aldermen, "for the true inquisition of killing, selling, dressing, or eating of flesh this present Lent, contrary to the laws and statutes of this realm and her Majesty's proclamation and express commandment." In accordance with this the jury "made diligent search divers and sundry times in all inns, tabling-houses, taverns, cook-houses, and victualling-houses within their ward," and thereupon either "resolved that they" had "not hitherto found any to offend against these laws," or they presented the names of those who had "so continued to offend, to the officer." Mr. Hubert Hall says: "The non-observance of these fast-days was no slight matter. Not only did the fisheries suffer in consequence, but the benefits of an occasional variation of the interminable diet of salt beef and bad beer must have been incalculable. The obligation of the crown toward one class of its subjects may not have been economically imperative, but a patriarchical government was bound to consult the welfare of each." When Philip Sidney was at Oxford, his uncle solicited for him "a license to eat flesh during Lent," he being "somewhat subject to sickness."
According to Mr. Fleay, "Every Man out of His Humor," produced at the Globe Theatre in 1599, was the first of Ben Jonson's personal satires against his contemporaries. Jonson had to remove these satires to the Blackfriars, that same year; when began the "war of the theatres," a war conducted, through plays laden with personalities, by the writers and actors of one theatre against the writers and actors of another. This "war" seems to have endured till after the time of our narrative, and to have died a natural death. Its most celebrated productions were Jonson's "The Poetaster" and Thomas Dekker's reply thereto, "Satiromastix." Jonson's "comical satires" were acted at the Blackfriars by the Chapel Royal boys, the "little eyases" derided in "Hamlet." Mr. Fleay finds that Jonson's satires were directed against Shakespeare as well as against Dekker and Marston. Certain allusions and characters, in Shakespeare's plays produced apparently about this time, have been taken as his contributions to this war. With another rival company, also of boys,—those of St. Paul's cathedral,—the lord chamberlain's players were friendly. Mr. Saintsbury says that Jonson, Dekker, Chapman, and Marston "were mixed up, as regards one another, in an extricable but not uninteresting series of broils and friendships, to some part of which Shakespeare himself was, it is clear, by no means a stranger." But he observes that the direct connection of these quarrels, "even with the literary work which is usually linked to them, will be better established when critics have left being uncertain whether A was B, or B, C." I have heard it suggested, in fun, that the war may have been a device to stimulate public interest in the theatres. The Elizabethan age had its visitations of the plague, and was therefore, by the not too cruel dispensers of good and evil, spared the advertising malady of our nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Should anything like this war of the theatres occur to-day, it would not take a Scotland Yard or Mulberry Street detective to smell out ulterior motives at the back of it. The Elizabethans, besides their other advantages, enjoyed that of living too soon to know or even foresee the crafty self-advertiser or the "clever press agent;" else had there surely been an additional verse in their Litany, followed by a most fervent "Good Lord, deliver us!"
"But that a gentleman should turn player hath puzzled me." To make an actor of a young gentleman, might, indeed, become a "Star Chamber matter." Among other "misdemeanors not reducible to heads," given in a Bodleian Library MS., entitled "A Short View of Criminal Cases Punishable and Heretofore Punished in the Court of the Star Chamber in the Times of Queen Elizabeth. King James, and His Late Majesty King Charles," is this: "Taking up a gentleman's son to be a stage player." See John S. Burn's notices of the "Star Chamber."