With flawns, curds, clouted cream, and country dainties stored;
And whilst the bagpipe plays, each lusty jocund swain
Quaffs syllabubs in cans to all upon the plain;
And to their country girls, whose nosegays they do wear,
Some roundelays do sing, the rest the burden bear."
In The Winter's Tale, instead of the shepherd-king we have the more poetical shepherdess-queen. Dr. F. J. Furnivall, in his introduction to this play, remarks: "How happily it brings Shakespeare before us, mixing with his Stratford neighbors at their sheep-shearing and country sports, enjoying the vagabond peddler's gammon and talk, delighting in the sweet Warwickshire maidens, and buying them 'fairings,' opening his heart afresh to all the innocent mirth and the beauty of nature around him!" Doubtless he enjoyed these rural festivities in his later years, after he settled down in his own house at Stratford, no less heartily than he did in his boyhood, when his father may have had sheep to shear.
Mr. Knight remarks: "There is a minuteness of circumstance amidst the exquisite poetry of this scene [in The Winter's Tale] which shows that it must have been founded upon actual observation, and in all likelihood upon the keen and prying observation of a boy occupied and interested with such details. Surely his father's pastures and his father's homestead might have supplied all these circumstances. His father's man might be the messenger to the town, and reckon upon 'counters' the cost of the sheep-shearing feast. 'Three pounds of sugar, five pounds of currants, rice'—and then he asks, 'What will this sister of mine do with rice?' In Bohemia the clown might, with dramatic propriety, not know the use of rice at a sheep-shearing; but a Warwickshire swain would have the flavor of cheese-cakes in his mouth at the first mention of rice and currants. Cheese-cakes and warden-pies were the sheep-shearing delicacies."
Shakespeare evidently knew for what the rice was wanted at the feast; but the clown, who was no cook, might be familiar with the flavor of the cakes without understanding all the ingredients that entered into their composition.
Thomas Tusser, in his Five Hundred Points of Husbandry (1557), describing this festival, makes the shepherd say:—
"Wife, make us a dinner, spare flesh neither corn,