The
Antiquarian Magazine
& Bibliographer.
Shakespeare’s Gloves
By S. William Beck, F.R.H.S.
NOUGH has been written of the calamities of authors, the mishaps which have befallen precious MSS., their unfortunate mistakes, their afflictions in many and various degrees of misery, but of their consolations, of their happy stumbling on the clue to some historical puzzle, the accidental discovery of some fresh information on a treasured subject, their reward in at last finding some long-sought facts—of all this we have heard little or nothing. But something of such pleasure comes to most students; not so often as could be wished, perhaps, but possibly quite as frequently as is good for study. And such good hap did I hold to have fallen to my lot, when, in the autumn of 1882, I casually came across the announcement in a newspaper that a pair of gloves, once the property of Shakespeare, were on loan to the Worcester Industrial Exhibition then open, to illustrate the oldest-established and yet the most considerable industry of the Fair City. Gloves, and their connection with ceremonials now obsolete, and customs only blindly followed, had long before been a favourite subject of mine; and as I found how it led farther and farther afield into history, and how closely it touched our national life, it became altogether fascinating, and I was even then preparing for publication a book upon it. If I held myself fortunate in chancing upon a reference to so interesting a relic, as these gloves promised to prove, still more cause did there seem for congratulation when a request to their owner for further information led to their being most courteously entrusted to my care to be photographed, and to my being furnished with the several facts relating to their identity narrated on p. 122 of my “Gloves: their Annals and Associations.” I “enthoozed” over these gloves not a little, with no small reverence and half a hope that some reflected inspiration might follow on what many people would regard as little short of sacrilege, I ventured to put them on my hands, holding myself in great measure excused by a very fair descent of them from the keeping of Garrick to their present possessor, and by the undoubted fact that they were at least attributable to the period from which they were said to date. They are, at any rate, relics of undoubted age and value, apart from any other considerations; not like those with which Mr. Black invests “Judith Shakespeare,” in the novel with that title, now appearing in Harper’s Magazine. Here the young lady at one time wears, correctly and properly, a fine pair of gloves, scented and embroidered, that her father had brought her from London, but when (on p. 541) one of her lovers has departed from her in dudgeon, she very prettily—for she is a charming young lady—looks “after him for a moment or two, as she fastened a glove button that had got loose.” This is very unfortunate, for people did not wear buttoned gloves then, nor for a long time after, until it was desired to make them fit closely and display, rather than merely cover, the hand, whereas it was the glove, and not the proportions of the hand, that was made most conspicuous in Shakespeare’s day.
In January of this year I received from Mr. Horace Howard Furness, of Philadelphia, the eminent Shakespearian scholar, the following letter:—
Sir,—In a review of your admirable book in the Spectator for November 24, 1883, mention is made of a pair of Shakespeare’s gloves now in the possession of Miss Benson, which the reviewer states you incline “to consider genuine relics.” (I quote the review and the reviewer, because I have not yet seen your book. I ordered it from London through my bookseller some time ago, but it has not yet arrived.)