A. F. B.
Diss.
[It is a singular coincidence that we should receive the communication of A. F. B. on the day of the publication of the new and much improved library edition of Pepys's Diary. Would our correspondent permit us to submit his collection to the editor of Pepys, who would no doubt be gratified with a sight of it? We will guarantee its safe return, and any expenses incurred in its transmission. On turning to the fourth volume of the new edition of the Diary, we find the following letter (now first published) from Dr. Tanner, afterwards Bishop of St. Asaph, to Dr. Charlett, dated April 28, 1699:—"Mr. Pepys was just finishing a letter to you last night when I gave him yours. I hear he has printed some letters lately about the abuses of Christ's Hospital; they are only privately handed about. A gentleman that has a very great respect for Mr. Pepys, saw one of them in one of the Aldermen's hands, but wishes there had been some angry expressions left out; which he fears the Papists and other enemies of the Church of England will make ill use of." Is anything known of this "privately printed" volume? In the Life of Pepys (4th edit., p. xxxi.), mention is made of his having preserved from ruin the mathematical foundation at Christ's Hospital, which had been originally designed by him.—Ed.]
"Retainers to Seven Shares and a Half."—Can any reader of "N. & Q.," conversant with the literature of the seventeenth century, furnish an explanation of this phrase? It occurs in the preface to Steps to the Temple, &c., of Richard Crashaw (the 2nd edit., in the Savoy, 1670), addressed by "the author's friend" to "the learned reader," and is used in disparagement of pretenders to poetry. The passage runs thus:
"It were prophane but to mention here in the preface those under-headed poets, retainers to seven shares and a half; madrigal fellows, whose only business in verse is to rime a poor sixpenny soul, a subburb sinner into hell," &c.
H. L.
[The performers at our earlier theatres were distinguished into whole shares, three-quarter sharers, half sharers, seven-and-a-half sharers, hired men, &c. In one scene of the Histriomastic, 1610, the dissolute performers having been arrested by soldiers, one of the latter exclaims, "Come on, players! now we are the sharers, and you the hired men;" and in another scene, Clout, one of the characters, rejects with some indignation the offer of "half a share." Gamaliel Ratsey, in that rare tract, Ratseis Ghost, 1606, knights the principal performer of a company by the title of "Sir Three Shares and a Half;" and Tucca, in Ben Jonson's Poetaster, addressing Histrio, observes, "Commend me to Seven shares and a half," as if some individual at that period had engrossed as large a proportion. Shakspeare, in Hamlet, speaks of "a whole share" as a source of no contemptible emolument, and of the owner of it as a person filling no inferior station in "a cry of payers." In Northward Ho! also, a sharer is noticed with respect. Bellamont the poet enters, and tells his servant, "Sirrah, I'll speak with none:" on which the servant asks, "Not a player?" and his master replies:
"No, though a sharer bawl:
I'll speak with none, although it be the mouth
Of the big company."