And in Much Ado (iii. 4. 54) when Beatrice sighs, Margaret asks: "For a hawk, a horse, or a husband?"
Commentators on Shakespeare, like the critic quoted above, have sometimes erred in their interpretation of a passage because they did not understand the fact or usage upon which a figure or allusion was founded.
THEATRICAL ENTERTAINMENTS.
When the players came to town I suspect that no Stratford boy was more delighted than William. John Shakespeare, like his fellows in the town council, seems to have been a lover of the drama. When he was bailiff in 1569 he granted licenses for performances of the Queen's and the Earl of Worcester's companies.
ITINERANT PLAYERS IN A COUNTRY HALL
The Queen's company received nine shillings and the Earl's twelvepence for their first entertainments, to which the public were admitted free. They doubtless gave others afterwards for which an entrance fee was charged.
Did John Shakespeare take the five-year-old William to see them act? He may have done so, for we know that in the city of Gloucester (only thirty miles from Stratford) a man took his little boy, born in the same year with Shakespeare, to a free dramatic performance similarly provided by the corporation. In his autobiography, written in his old age, the person tells how he went to the show with his father and stood between his legs as he sat upon one of the benches.
The play was one of the "moralities" then in vogue, and the good man's quaint description of it is worth quoting as giving an idea of those curious dramas:—
"It was called The Cradle of Security, wherein was personated a king or some great prince, with his courtiers of several kinds, amongst which three ladies were in special grace with him; and they, keeping him in delights and pleasures, drew him from his graver counsellors, ... that, in the end, they got him to lie down in a cradle upon the stage, where these three ladies, joining in a sweet song, rocked him asleep that he snorted again; and in the mean time closely [that is, secretly] conveyed under the clothes wherewithal he was covered a vizard, like a swine's snout, upon his face, with three wire chains fastened thereunto, the other end whereof being holden severally by those three ladies, who fall to singing again, and then discovered [uncovered] his face that the spectators might see how they had transformed him, going on with their singing.