Dinner over, the old man, my guide, offered no opposition to a flask of wine, which was brought in a glass measure with sugar thrown in.
"For choice," he said, "give me malmsey full and fine, sweetened with sugar. Your French wines are too thin for my old blood. Boy, bring a clean pipe and tobacco."
By this time almost every man in the room was smoking, though some contented themselves with their snuff-boxes. The tables were cleared, the boys ran about setting before every man his cup of wine and taking the reckoning.
Tobacco, the old man said, though introduced so recently, had already spread over the whole country, so that most men and many women took their pipe of tobacco every day with as much regularity as their cup of wine or tankard of ale. So widespread was now the practice that many hundreds made a livelihood in London alone by the retailing of this herb.
"And now," he said, when his pipe was reduced to ashes, "let us across the river and see the play at the Globe. The time serves; we shall be in the house before the second flourish."
There was a theatre, he told me on the way, easier of access among the ruins of the Dominicans', or Black Friars', Abbey, but that was closed for the moment. "We shall learn," he added, "the piece that is to be played from the posts of Queenhithe, where we take oars." In fact, we found the posts at that port placarded with small bills, announcing the performance of "Troilus and Cressida."
Bank Side consisted, I found, of a single row of houses, built on a dike, or levee, higher both than the river at high tide and the ground behind the bank. Before the building of the bank this must have been a swamp covered with water at every tide; it was now laid out in fields, meadows, and gardens. At one end of Bank Side stood the Clink Prison, Winchester House, and St. Mary Overies Church. At the other end was the Falcon Tavern, with its stairs, and behind it was the Paris Gardens.
The fields were planted with many noble trees, and in every one there was a pond or stagnant ditch which showed the nature of the ground. A little to the west of the Clink and behind the houses stood the Globe Theatre, and close beside it the "Bull-baiting." The theatre, erected in the year 1593, was hexagonal externally. It was open in the middle, but the stage and the galleries within were covered over with a thatched roof. Over the door was the sign of the house—Hercules supporting the globe, with the legend, "Totus mundus agit histrionem."
