A Life of William Shakespeare / with portraits and facsimiles

by Sir Sidney Lee

[232b] The grant is transcribed in the New Shakspere Society’s Transactions, 1877-9, Appendix ii., from the Lord Chamberlain’s papers in the Public Record Office, where it is now numbered 660. The number allotted it in the Transactions is obsolete.

[233a] A contemporary copy of this letter, which declared the Queen’s players acting at the Fortune and the Prince’s players at the Curtain to be entitled to the same privileges as the King’s players, is at Dulwich College (cf. G. F. Warner’s Catalogue of the Dulwich Manuscripts, pp. 26-7). Collier printed it in his New Facts with fraudulent additions, in which the names of Shakespeare and other actors figured.

[233b] Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps in his Outlines, i. 213, cites a royal order to this effect, but gives no authority, and I have sought in vain for the document at the Public Record Office, at the British Museum, and elsewhere. But there is no reason to doubt the fact that Shakespeare and his fellow-actors took, as Grooms of the Chamber, part in the ceremonies attending the Constable’s visit to London. In the unprinted accounts of Edmund Tilney, master of the revels, for the year October 1603 to October 1604, charge is made for his three days’ attendance with four men to direct the entertainments ‘at the receaving of the Constable of Spayne’ (Public Record Office, Declared Accounts, Pipe Office Roll 2805). The magnificent festivities culminated in a splendid banquet given in the Constable’s honour by James I at Whitehall on Sunday, August 19/29—the day on which the treaty was signed. In the morning all the members of the royal household accompanied the Constable in formal procession from Somerset House. After the banquet, at which the earls of Pembroke and Southampton acted as stewards, there was a ball, and the King’s guests subsequently witnessed exhibitions of bear baiting, bull baiting, rope dancing, and feats of horsemanship. (Cf. Stow’s Chronicle, 1631, pp. 845-6, and a Spanish pamphlet, Relacion de la jornada del exc^mo Condestabile de Castilla, etc., Antwerp, 1604, 4to, which was summarised in Ellis’s Original Letters, 2nd series, vol. iii. pp. 207-215, and was partly translated in Mr. W. B. Rye’s England as seen by Foreigners, pp. 117-124).

At the Bodleian Library (MS. Rawlinson, A 204) are the original accounts of Lord Stanhope of Harrington, Treasurer of the Chamber for various (detached) years in the early part of James I’s reign. These documents show that Shakespeare’s company acted at Court on November 1 and 4, December 26 and 28, 1604, and on January 7 and 8, February 2 and 3, and the evenings of the following Shrove Sunday, Shrove Monday, and Shrove Tuesday, 1605.

[235] These dates are drawn from a memorandum of plays performed at Court in 1604 and 1605 which is among Malone’s manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, and was obviously derived by Malone from authentic documents that were in his day preserved at the Audit Office in Somerset House. The document cannot now be traced at the Public Record Office, whither the Audit Office papers have been removed since Malone’s death. Peter Cunningham professed to print the original document in his accounts of the revels at Court (Shakespeare Society, 1842, pp. 203 et seq.), but there is no doubt that he forged his so-called transcript, and that the additions which he made to Malone’s memorandum were the outcome of his fancy. Collier’s assertion in his New Particulars, p. 57, that Othello was first acted at Sir Thomas Egerton’s residence at Harefield on August 6, 1602, was based solely on a document among the Earl of Ellesmere’s MSS. at Bridgwater House, which purported to be a contemporary account by the clerk, Sir Arthur Maynwaring, of Sir Thomas Egerton’s household expenses. This document, which Collier reprinted in his Egerton Papers (Camden Soc.), p. 343, was authoritatively pronounced by experts in 1860 to be ‘a shameful forgery’ (cf. Ingleby’s Complete View of the Shakspere Controversy, 1861, pp. 261-5).

[237] Dr. Garnett’s Italian Literature, 1898, p. 227.

[239] Cf. Letter by Mrs. Stopes in Athenæum, July 25, 1896.

[240] Cf. Macbeth, ed. Clark and Wright, Clarendon Press Series.

[241a] This fact is stated on the title-page of the quartos.

[241b] Sidney tells the story in a chapter entitled ‘The pitiful state and story of the Paphlagonian unkind king and his blind son; first related by the son, then by his blind father’ (bk. ii. chap. 10, ed. 1590 4to; pp. 132-3, ed. 1674, fol.)