GATE-HOUSE OF KENILWORTH CASTLE
There were great doings at this castle of Kenilworth in 1575, when Shakespeare was eleven years old, and the good people from all the country roundabout thronged to see them. Then it was that Queen Elizabeth was entertained by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and from July 9th to July 27th there was a succession of holiday pageants in the most sumptuous and elaborate style of the time. Master Robert Laneham, whose accuracy as a chronicler is not to be doubted, though he may have been, as Scott calls him, "as great a coxcomb as ever blotted paper," mentions, as a proof of the earl's hospitality, that "the clock bell rang not a note all the while her highness was there; the clock stood also still withal; the hands stood firm and fast, always pointing at two o'clock," the hour of banquet! The quantity of beer drunk on the occasion was 320 hogsheads, and the total expense of the entertainments is said to have been £1000 ($5000) a day.
John Shakespeare, as a well-to-do citizen of Stratford, would be likely to see something of that stately show, and it is not improbable that he took his son William with him. The description in the Midsummer-Night's Dream (ii. 1. 150) of
"a mermaid on a dolphin's back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious sounds
That the rude sea grew civil at her song,"
appears to be a reminiscence of certain features of the Kenilworth pageant. The minstrel Arion figured there, on a dolphin's back, singing of course; and Triton, in the likeness of a mermaid, commanded the waves to be still; and among the fireworks there were shooting-stars that fell into the water, like the stars that, as Oberon adds,
"shot madly from their spheres
To hear the sea-maid's music."
When Shakespeare was writing that early play, with its scenes in fairy-land, what more natural than that this youthful visit to what must then have seemed veritable fairy-land should recur to his memory and blend with the creations of his fancy?