151, gives a kindly picture of the friendliness and geniality of the
lower classes of his age, which is justly commended by Furnivall.
lower classes of his age, which is justly commended by Furnivall.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v05
Cf.
Sandys, W.
, Festive Songs, etc.
, U.
S.
(introduction), and see Vatke, T. , 'Wirthshäuser und Wirthshausleben'in Culturbilder
aus Alt-England. As to 'ordinaries' (the fashionable tables d'hôte of the day), see
the amusing tract The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie, or The Walkes in Powles,
1604 (Percy Soc. Publ. , 1845, vol. v). To the main walk of the great gothic church of
St Paul's, a club open to all—even to those who came only to dine with duke Humphrey
-there are frequent allusions in our dramatists. (Bobadill was a 'Paul's man,' and
Falstaff 'bought Bardolph in Paul's. ' See, also, L. Barry's Ram-Alley, act iv, so. 1,
and Mayne's City. Match, act mi, so. 3. ) These and other features of London life are
described in numerous works of easy access; for a graphic picture of Elizabethan
;
London, drawn with the author's usual felicity of touch, the reader may be referred
to the section ‘Le Pays Anglais' in vol. I of Jusserand's Histoire Littéraire du Peuple
Anglais. Creizenach, vol. iv, part 1, p. 486, goes so far as to assert that, with the
exception of university and school plays, not a single dramatic work of consequence
saw the light of day anywhere else than in London town.
? p. 204.
## p. 368 (#392) ############################################
368 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
familiar with its terms and processes! It was with landed property
that litigation, so far as lawyers were called in, seriously concerned
itself; and it was through the management, direct or indirect, of
country estates, and through speculation as well as litigation
respecting them, that fortunes were made and, as already noticed,
county families were founded by Elizabethan lawyers? If we
glance at the other end of the professional ladder, it will appear
that at no time before or since has a legal training been so clearly
recognised as the necessary complement of the school and university
education of a man called upon to play a part in public life. The
inns of court were one of the great social as well as educational
institutions of the Elizabethan and early Stewart period; and
within their walls, in their halls and gardens, in their libraries and
chambers, was pre-eminently fostered that spirit of devoted loyalty
towards the crown, as well as that traditional enthusiasm for
literary and other intellectual interests, which in other periods
of our national life have been habitually associated with the
universities. The occasional ‘brawls' in the streets by gentlemen
of the inns of court, like those of their democratic antipodes, the
city 'prentices, were demonstrations of self-reliance as well as of
youthful spirits. To the Elizabethan regular drama, whose be-
ginnings the inns of court had nurtured, and to some of whose
masterpieces they had extended a cordial welcome, as well as to
the lesser growths of the masque and cognate devices, these
societies stood in relations of enduring intimacy.
1 Cf. Sturge, L. J. , ‘Webster and the Law: a Parallel,' in Shakespeare Jahrbuch,
vol. XXII (1906); where it is pointed out that Webster, like Shakespeare, displays :
very extensive and, generally speaking, accurate knowledge both of the theory and
practice of the law, and the construction of the plot of The Dutchesse of Malfy is cited as
a striking instance of the extent of Webster's legal knowledge. The writer cites the
observation of Sidney Lee, in his Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century, that
Ben Jonson and Spenser, Massinger and Webster, employed law terms with no less
frequency and facility than Shakespeare, though none of them was engaged in the
legal profession. It would, perbaps, be fanciful to ascribe the predilection for trial
soenes, which the Elizabethan bequeathed to the later English drama, to anything
more than a sure instinct for dramatio effect.
See, on this head, the section The Lawyer'-perhaps the most instructive of
all the sections in Hubert Hall's Society in the Elizabethan Age.
3 In the letter from England,' to her three daughters, Cambridge, Oxford, Indes of
Court, appended to Polimanteia (Cambridge, 1595), while the inns of court are
acquitted of disrespect towards the universities, and of having, received some of
their children and. . . made them wanton, the Inns are admonished not to regard their
training as sufficient without that of their elder sisters. '
* In his English Dramatic Literature, vol. II, p. 223, note 7, the present writer has
cited a passage from 'A Player' in Earle's Microcosmographie (1628), which suggests a
very natural secondary reason for the interest taken in the acting drama by members
of the inns of court : ‘Your Inns of Court men were undone but for the player); hee
6
## p. 369 (#393) ############################################
The Medical Profession
369
1
d:
ris!
The physician's profession, about this time, was being dis-
entangled, on the one hand, from that of the clergyman, with
which of old it had been frequently combined, and, on the other,
from the trade of the apothecary-a purveyor of many things
besides drugs, who was more comfortably and fashionably housed
in London 1 than was his fellow at Mantua--and from that of the
barber, who united to his main functions those of dentist and yet
others, announced by his long pole, painted red? The pretensions
of both physicians and surgeons to a knowledge of which they fell
far short were still a subject of severe censures ; but little or
nothing was said in or outside the profession against what was
still the chief impediment to the progress of medical science—its
intimate association with astrology. The physician took every
care to preserve the dignity which lay at the root of much of his
power, attiring himself in the furred gown and velvet cap of his
doctor's degree, and riding about the streets, like his predecessor
in the Middle Ages, with long foot-cloths hanging down by the side
of his horse or mule. The education of physicians was carried
on much like that of lawyers, with care and comfort, and seems,
at least sometimes, to have been deemed a suitable stage in the
complete training of a gentleman. The scientific and practical
value of the medical training of the day is a theme beyond the
purpose of this sketch. Medical treatment, in many respects, was
oldfashioned in no flattering sense of the term ; in the case of
new diseases, it was savage; in the case of mental disease,
barbarous'a dark house and a whip? '
It is unnecessary to make a more than passing reference here
to another profession, which in the Elizabethan age already
existed, although it might be said to have only recently come into
ܐ ܬܐ
! *
Groen
6
is their chiefe Guest and imployment, and the sole businesse that makes them
Afternoones men. '
1 See The Merry Wives, act iii, sc. 3: 'these lisping hawthorn-buds that. . . smell
like Bucklersbury in simple time. '
? On this subject, see Vatke, T. , 1. 8. p. 172. A dentist-barber appears in Lyly's
Midas.
3 So, in the pious Joseph Halle's The Chyrurgens Book.
• An honest, though futile, attempt to distinguish between true and false, valuable
and frustrate,' astrology is made in Polimanteia, & curious tract printed at
Cambridge in 1595.
5 Cf. The Alchemist, act 1, sc. 1, where Subtle takes care to appear in this costume.
6 Paul Hentzner (u. 8. p. 31) asserts that in the fifteen colleges within and without
the city of London. members of the young nobility, gentry and others, are educated,
and chiefly in the study of physio ; for very few apply themselves to that of the law;
they are allowed a very good table, and silver cups to drink out of. '
? As You Like It, act III, sc. 2, ad fin.
E. L. V. CH. XIV.
24
## p. 370 (#394) ############################################
370 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
1
existence. The general conditions which affected the publication
of books, and, with it, the exercise of the profession of author,
have been discussed in a previous volume and more will be said
in a later chapter as to the special conditions of the writing of
plays. The number of playwrights who, at the same time, were
stage actors, probably, was by no means so large as has sometimes
been assumed; Miss Sheavyn reckons that, to our knowledge,
not more than nine combined the 'equality' of actor with
authorship? Thus, there was no reason why 'gentlemen and
scholars' should extend to dramatic or other authors as such the
scorn which, at different times, they were wont to manifest for
the profession of the actor, despised by them as, traditionally,
a menial or envied as the well paid and gorgeously apparelled
favourite of the public. Yet the professional author-the man,
that is, who sought to live by his pen, or, at least, to make it
contribute appreciably to his means of earning a livelihood, had
no easy life of it in the Elizabethan age. Patrons were rare
who gave sums of money--especially large sums such as that
which Southampton is held to have bestowed on Shakespeare--or
provided hospitality on a large scale, such as Jonson enjoyed from
lord d'Aubigny; though there may have been other cases of
quasi-hereditary support, such as that granted by the Herberts
to Massinger, or of spontaneous generosity like that extended to
Greene by a successful player. Fewer still were those to whom,
as to Munday and Jonson, the goodwill of city or crown secured an
official salary by the side of their literary earnings. The uni-
versities reserved none of their emoluments for the 'university
wits,' whose flattering dedications were more profitably addressed
to the goodwill of individual magnates. The laborious gains
of proof correcting and the like hardly came into account, as they
had done in the earlier days of the renascence, when such accom-
plishments were still confined to a small number of scholars. It
was more tempting to take to the writing of pamphlets, even if
these often really only hovered on the outskirts of literature,
* See ante, vol. iv, chap. XVIII ( The Book-trade, 1557–1625').
9 See post, vol. vi, chap. x (* The Elizabethan Theatre ').
3 The names given by her are Field, Greene, Heywood (Thomas), Jonson, Peele,
Munday, Rowley (William), Shakespeare and Wilson (Robert). The order is alpha-
betical; but a comparison of the names will show that Miss Sheavyn is right in her
conclusion that it seems to have become in time less usual to unite the two
professions, though Marlowe and Kyd, of the earlier writers, probably never acted. '
See Sheavyn, Phoebe, The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age (p. 93)-
valuable piece of work, of which free use has been made in the text.
• Cl. ante, vol. iv, chap. xvi, and bibl. There is no reason, in the Elizabethan
4
!
1
## p. 371 (#395) ############################################
Authors and their Troubles
371
if not to descend into other depths and enter upon one or more
of the harassing employments of the news factor, the prophetic
almanac maker, the ballad and jig writer, or the craftsman who
composed lascivious verse to suit the taste of his public.
It has been shown abovel that, though the charter of the
Stationers' company was confirmed in the first year of Elizabeth's
reign, and the licensing and censorship of books was instituted
by the injunctions issued in that year, the actual operation of this
censorship did not begin till near the middle of the last decade
but one of the sixteenth century-an epoch of intense public
anxiety. In 1586, when the agitation largely due to Jesuit
missions and their actual or supposed results was at its height
and the so-called 'discovery' of the Babyngton conspiracy was
calling forth wild alarm, the Star chamber issued the decree
which confined printing, with the exception of the two uni-
versities, to the liberties of the city of London, and subjected all
books and pamphlets before publication to the licence of the
archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London. Those
licensing regulations were enforced by the court of High Com-
mission (though the actual process of licensing, in part, was handed
over to particular expert authorities-as, in the case of plays,
to the master of the revels), and the activity of the court was
easily set in motion wherever the interests or susceptibilities of
church or state seemed to call for its interference. The drama,
of course, most frequently and most readily laid itself open to
official suspicion. Thus, on the single occasion of the imminence
of trouble on the part of Essex and his supporters, the authors of
at least two plays, Philotas and Sejanus, were in some danger,
and the performance of a third (Richard II) led to further
official enquiry? As in the days of the early Roman empire, a
class of informers rose into being, called, in Elizabethan parlance,
moralisers' or 'state decipherers,' whose business it was to dis-
cover and denounce passages, situations and even single words
6
6
7
age for distinguishing translators from the general body of authors, among whom
their position was one of honour and distinction. Cf. ante, vol. iv, chap. I.
1 Ante, vol. iv, pp. 381–2.
3 • Application,' says the dedication of Volpone, “is now given a trade with many,
and there are that profess to have a key for the decyphering of everything. '
Miss Sheavyn (p. 67) has drawn up a list of writers who suffered from the interference
of authorities moved by information of the above or of other sorts; it comprises
the names of Cartwright, Chapman, Daniel, Dekker, Drayton, Fletcher, Heywood,
Holinshed, Jonson, Kyd, Lodge, Marlowe, Marston, Middleton, Munday, Nashe,
Rowlands, Selden, Shakespeare, Smith, Stowe, Stubbes and Wither. Of course, the
24 - 2
## p. 372 (#396) ############################################
372
Political and Social Aspects of the Age
which seemed to betray a dangerous meaning. The spirit of
Jacobean government did not fail to carry further a system con-
genial to its mode of working. Such, in this age, were a few
,
among the troubles of authors-troubles in which dramatists had
more than their share.
The attention bestowed in this period upon the fine arts should
not be overlooked, though it cannot be discussed here. The cultiva-
tion of music, indeed, was one of the most attractive features of
Shakespeare's age and seems to have been common to both sexes!
The subject of Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture has been
already touched upon, but cannot here be pursued further. Paint-
ing, with the exception of miniature painting, was mainly left in
foreign hands. The external conditions of the drama proper were
such that it could owe little or nothing to architect, sculptor or
painter; the achievements of Inigo Jones belong to the history of
the masque?
At the lower end of the social scale, in the Elizabethan age,
a very marked division is observable between those who, more
or less, were moving upward and those whose doom it seemed
to lag behind. The smaller tradesmen and manufacturers of the
towns, though they could not, like the great city merchants, have
any claim to be of the councils of the sovereign or of those
who carried on the government, still found themselves occasionally
chosen to represent in parliament the interests of the communities
in which they lived, though, in the new boroughs established
under the influence of the crown, that influence was powerful in
securing the election of persons belonging to the gentry on whom
it could directly depend. In other ways, too, the industrial element
was asserting its right to the social advantages within its reach;
probably, such a case as that of Gabriel Harvey's father, the rope-
maker of Saffron Walden, who sent not less than four sons to the
neighbouring university, was not a very unusual one in the social
whirligig of time brought its revenges on both sides; and, finally, the Star chamber,
which, in 1634, had ordered the burning of Prynne's Histrio-Mastit, and inflicted
what shame, it could inflict upon the author of that work, was, seven years later, swept
away with the High Commission court, and several other tyrannical tribunals.
i As to Elizabethan music, and its association with the drama, see chap. vi of
vol. IV of this work, cf. also Schelling's chapter, u. 8. When Music and sweet Poetry
agree. As to the favourite composers of the period between 1589 and 1600, see
Lyrical Poems selected from musical publications, 1589-1680, ed. Collier, J. P. , Percy
Soc. Publ. (1844), vol. XIII. See, also, the note of Rockstro, W. , on "The Sixth English
School,' ap. Traill, H. D. , U. s. vol. II, p. 309.
3. Painting and carpentry are the soul of mask' is Ben Jonson's aneer in his
Expostulation with Inigo Jones.
## p. 373 (#397) ############################################
Yeomen. Labourers
373
er
6
6
6
>
bai
&
history of the times? Many yeomen, too, although their class was
supposed to be marked by a definite limit of income, and although
it was customary to address them and their wives as 'goodman' or
'goodwife' instead of 'master' or 'mistress,' were, by their clever-
ness and industry, constantly raising themselves on the social
ladder— buying up poor gentlemen's land, educating their sons
for professions and learning them how to become gentlemen. '
* These were they,' adds Harrison', in picturesque remembrance
of the days of Henry V, that in times past made all France
afraid. ' An admirable dramatic type, dated still further back,
of the stalwart yeomen of whom many an example must have
remained in Elizabethan England, is George-a-Greene, the pinner
of Wakefield, in the play named after him? Hobs the tanner, in
Heywood's Edward IV, may serve as a companion picture of the
honest handicraftsman, imperturbable alike in his good sense and
in his good humour 4.
Neither traders nor yeomen were to be confounded with the
labouring class proper, still a part of the population which Harrison,
as well as Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists, regarded as
proper to be ruled, not to rule others. It has been seen that
their condition during the Elizabethan age and the ensuing period
cannot be described as one of advance, although the social misery
which had resulted from the break-up of the old agrarian system
and the widespread substitution of pasture for tillage abated with
the practical recovery of arable farming. The labouring classes,
generally, remained in a condition of depression, or not far removed
from it. Yet they were not altogether ignored in the working
of the machinery of church and state, labouring men being
occasionally summoned on juries or even chosen to hold office as
churchwardens. But, though it would not be impossible to cite
exceptions in which human sympathy or humorous insight assert
their rights, men and women of this class were usually counted
only by heads, and, as individuals, they failed to interest the
dramatists, who were content to use them as an obscure background
or colourless substratum. It is not just to illustrate the contempt
of the Elizabethan drama for the masses either by satirical
pictures of mobs and popular rebellions, or by particular phrases
1 Marlowe's father was a shoe-maker ; but this, perhaps, is hardly a case in point.
p. 133.
Another, wbich seems to have attained to great popularity, was that of old
Tom Strowd in Day's Blind Beggar of Bednal Green.
4 Dekker's Shomakers Holiday is a genial glorification of the craft, founded on one
of the stories in Thomas Deloney's Gentle Craft (the second title of the play).
BE
1
ទី
2
3
## p. 374 (#398) ############################################
374 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
‘in character' with the personages employing them! But the
want of sympathy towards the inarticulate classes with which
the dramatists, as a body, are chargeable, must indisputably be
regarded as a limitation of the range of their art, which they
only accepted to their own disadvantage.
Wholly distinct from labouring men proper were the serving-
men, whose large numbers in the Elizabethan age are the
subject of frequent comment, and who were a legacy of medieval
times and conditions. Harrison dwells on the 'swarmes of
idle serving-men, who are an evil to everyone<,' and observes
that, while many of them brought their young masters to grief
by their wastefulness, not a few of them fell into bad ways them-
selves, and ended as highway robbers. It was easier to insist,
in the interests of society in general, that the numbers of these
hangers-on should be lessened, when not only was service con-
tinually passed on from generation to generation, but many sons
of yeomen and husbandmen entered into the condition of serving-
men, in order to escape the obligation of military service, and,
generally, to secure easier and more comfortable conditions of life.
On the part of the gentry, the custom of keeping up a large
show of servants was by no means confined to the wealthy, and
the author of that interesting tract The Serving-man's Comfort
draws a humorous picture of the needy Sir Daniel Debet, pacing
the middle walk at St Paul's, with six or seven tall hungry fellows
in attendance.
We pass to a yet different stratum of the population. It is well
known how the most important of the poor laws of Elizabeth®,
1 The queen, e. g. , in Richard II, act 11, sc. 3, addresses the gardener as 'thou
little better thing than earth' (Vatke, u. 8. p. 221).
? Harrison, p.
151, gives a kindly picture of the friendliness and geniality of the
lower classes of his age, which is justly commended by Furnivall. Sympathetic
touches of the same kind are not frequent in the plays of Shakespeare and his fellow
dramatists, though, in the phrase of the old shepherd in The Winter's Tale, they
contain plenty of homely foolery. '
3
p. 135.
• Combining the turbulence of those in Romeo and Juliet with the roguery of those
in Coriolanus. But these do not exhaust Shakespeare's gallery of servants, good, bad
and indifferent.
5A Health to the Gentlemanly profession of Servingmen or the Serving-man's
Comfort (1598). In Hazlitt's Inedited Tracts. Serving-men, though some varieties of
them did not escape the satire, may be said to have largely attracted the goodwill
of Elizabethan playwrights, including Shakespeare, who, according to a tradition said
to have been current at Stratford, himself performed the part Adam in As You
Like It.
6 of these and Elizabethan pauperism there is a masterly account by Hewins,
W. A. S. , ap. Traill, H. D. , U. 8. vol. III.
## p. 375 (#399) ############################################
>
Pauperism. Vagabondage 375
passed near the close of her reign (in 1601) and revived in the
first year of James I, made provision for its poor compulsory
upon every parish. The pressure of pauperism was felt through-
out the whole of this period, and already at an early stage of the
queen's reign the principle of the 'old Poor Law' had been
affirmed by legislation, and it had become customary to hold
weekly collections in each parish for the poor who had not
demonstrably fallen into indigence by their own fault. But the
evil continued, and was not diminished by the provisions against
vagabonds, among whom, against the wish of the house of lords,
common players and minstrels had been included in the act of
1572. In describing the great increase of poverty in the land,
Harrison' indignantly repudiates the proposed remedy of stopping
the growth of the population by turning arable into pasture
land-a process by which English rural prosperity had been
impaired in a past too recent to be forgotten. The control
of the spread of poverty and desolation attempted by the
Elizabethan poor laws proved, on the whole, a failure; and
things went on from bad to worse. Hundreds of hamlets were
desolated, and the number of small occupiers steadily dwindled,
till they were almost completely extinguished by the legis-
lation of the reign of Charles II. From this all-important side
of the social life of the country, the drama, as might be sup-
posed, averts its eyes. On the other hand, the more or less vocal
or picturesque phase of poverty which may be described as
beggardom, with the nearly allied developments of vagabondage
and roguery, forms one of the most glaring phenomena of the
age; its griefs and self-advertisement crying aloud for notice.
Harrison, who denounces idle beggars of all sorts as 'thieves
and caterpillars of the commonwealth,' reckons their total
number in England at ten thousand, and, at the same time,
dates the beginning of their trade as falling not yet fully sixty
years back-which seems to point to the dissolution of the
monasteries, though, as a matter of fact, Henry VIII's act as to
beggars and vagabonds was passed as early as 1531. Our guide
then proceeds to comment on twenty-three kinds of vagabonds,
and to discuss the various methods of punishment applied to them
and to the army of 'roges and idle persons' in general, including,
as aforesaid, 'plaiers' and 'minstrells3. ' But there can be
no necessity in this place for more than touching on a topic
2 Hall, H. , Society in the Elizabethan Age, p. 105.
3 Bk 11, chaps, X-XI.
6
1
pp. 212 ff.
## p. 376 (#400) ############################################
376 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
which has always had a fascination of its own for literary ob-
servers and enquirers, and which supplied abundant material to
English comic dramatists, from the authors of Bartholomew Fayre
and The Beggars Bush to their pupil or imitator, the author of
A Joviall Crew1.
And, since the transition from the subject of vagabondage
to that of crime is at all times cruelly facile, a word may be added
as to an aspect of the age which cannot be neglected by the
student of its physiognomy, more particularly as it is recognisable
in its reflection in contemporary English drama. It was by no
means unreasonable for a contemporary such as Harrison to dis-
claim what, to the eyes of Elizabethan England, might have seemed
abnormal either in the character of the crimes which were fre-
quently committed or of the punishments which they entailed.
An examination of the themes of the English domestic tragedies
which in the last decade of the sixteenth century, or thereabouts,
harrowed the feelings of London audiences, bears out the state-
ment that 'horrible, merciles and wilfull murders,' such as are
'not sildome seene on the continent,' were comparatively rare in
contemporary England; the hankering after such sensations be-
longs to a rather later time, when 'revenge' plays had passed
into a more advanced stage, and Tourneur and Webster were
fain to satisfy the appetite of their audiences for exotic horrors.
Again, in the Elizabethan age, it is not difficult to notice, in
the administration of penal justice, indications of a tendency
to avoid an excess of brutal cruelty; various signally inhuman
forms of execution or of bodily suffering or degradation added
to execution were modified or fell out of use. Still, for a
number of crimes regarded as specially heinous, there were
special punishments calculated to excite the sensibilities or
deepen the awe of spectatorsPoisoners and heretics were burnt
to death; and witches were liable to suffer the same punishment
in lieu of death by hanging, the method of execution applied to
felons and all other ordinary criminals. It will be remembered
that but few persons suffered death on the charge of witch-
craft under Elizabeth, and that it was only under the more
rigorous act passed immediately after the accession of James (1604)
that the fury of persecution found full opportunities for raging.
As to the literature of rogues and vagabonds, cf. ante, vol. iv, chap. XVI, and ibid.
bibl. p. 529.
? Torture seems to have been regarded as a practice to which resort should not be
had in ordinary cases; but it was not altogether out of use.
## p. 377 (#401) ############################################
Witchcraft. Moral Standard
377
There cannot, of course, be any sort of pretence that rational views
on the subject of witchcraft and magic obtained in the reign
of Elizabeth, or that the queen herself (who consulted Dee about
Alençon's condition) was more enlightened on this head than other
English men or women. Of the dramatists, it may be roughly
stated that in not a single one of them can be found any suggestion
of a disbelief in the thing itself, even where a fraudulent use of it
is exposed or derided'. On offenders against religious law and
social morality, a variety of formal penalties—in part symbolic,
in part simply degrading—were inflicted, which alike suggest a
desire on the part of the state or society to improve' the
opportunities afforded it; even before the ascendancy of puritan-
ism, there were always practical moralists clamouring for a severer
system of retribution. Yet, at the same time, a great laxity is
observable in enforcing the penalties denounced by the law upon
proved wantonness of life; and it is impossible to escape the
impression that there existed a general consensus, from which even
the clergy only slowly came to express clear dissent, that some
allowance should be made to laymen in the matter of the sins they
were 'inclined to. The whole significance of the licence of the
Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, which, in some respects, reflected
the licence of the age, cannot be fully understood, unless this fact
be borne in mind.
The darker side of the social condition of England in the
Elizabethan age should not be overlooked by those who dwell upon
the high aspirations and great achievements which have cast an
enduring halo round it in the eyes of national historians and their
readers. Nothing can be said here as to the defects--only too
palpable, but not by any means to be construed as evidence of
mere incuria-in the provision made for the protection of the
1 The whole question of the treatment in the Elizabethan age of the superstition of
witchcraft has been left aside as too wide for discussion here. For an account of the
origin of this superstition see ante, vol. II, chap. v; and cf. the note on the Witch-
controversy, with a bibliography of it, in vol. 10, pp. 534–5 (bibliography to chap. XVI).
The present writer has given a summary of the subject, illustrated by references to
those Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas which reflect the sentiments of the age in
reference to it, in his introduction to Marlowe's Dr Faustus (4th ed. ), pp. xlix-lü.
As to Dee, see The Private Diary of Dr John Dee, ed. Halliwell[-Phillipps), J. O. ,
Camden Soc. Publ. , 1842. Though it was abroad that Dee's associate Kelly came to
grief, alchemists ran some risk in England. In The Alchemist, act iv, 8c. 1, Dol Common
warns Sir Epicure Mammon that he
may come to end
The remnant of his days in a loth'd prison
for merely speaking of the philosopher's stone.
## p. 378 (#402) ############################################
378. Political and Social Aspects of the Age
public health against the dangers to which it was exposed, more
especially in London, from the incursions of the plague, and, in
a lesser degree, from those of other diseases? If, however, we
confine ourselves to the moral sphere, the impression left by
an open-eyed survey of the ordinary relations and conditions
of life in this age is one of a dominating violence and turbulence;
and this impression is confirmed by a study of the drama of
which those relations and conditions largely make up the material.
At the same time, this passionate unrest, and the impetus with
which, in the midst of it, the age pressed on to the performance of
its great tasks, explain, in some measure, how they were accom-
plished. The high spirit-often high in death as it had been in
life—which the renascence and reformation ages had infused into
their men and women, of all classes and beliefs, no doubt imparted
something of recklessness to martyrdom as well as of ruthlessness
in the infliction of suffering. But the final cause of this high
spirit was the belief in things worth living for and worth dying
for—a belief which lies at the root of mighty actions, and without
which no nation has ever been great, and no dramatic hero heroic.
It is impossible to close even this scanty notice of some of the
social characteristics of the Elizabethan age without a more
special reference to its women. For, in the history of western
civilisation (not to venture on applying the remark still more
widely), it is generally the women whose code of manners and of
morals determines the standard of these in any given period of
national life. No doubt, the women of the Elizabethan and
,
Jacobean age, as they appear before us in contemporary drama,
are, primarily, the creatures of the imagination of the dramatists ;
yet it would be idle to ignore the twofold fact, that the presentment
of the women of this period on the stage largely reproduces
actual types, and that the way in which dramatists looked upon
women, their position in life, and their relations to men, was the
way of the world, and the way of the age. Queen Elizabeth was
not the only highly educated English woman of her family or
times; but, though the type, of which the continental renascence
produced many illustrious examples, is never wanting in the society
of the Tudor and Stewart times, it is comparatively rare and
can hardly be said to be a frequent characteristic of their women.
The fashions of intellectual, and mainly literary, refinement which
passed over court and society, from that of Euphuism to that of
1 Concerning this subject, as affecting the history of the drama and stage, see
post, chi ps. x and xiv of vol. vi.
1
## p. 379 (#403) ############################################
Women of the Elizabethan Age 379
.
6
>
Platonic love, were fashions only, to be followed for a season and
then discarded. Far more striking as a distinctive feature is the
virility which many women of the age shared with the great queen-
the high courage, the readiness for action, the indomitable spirit
which no persecution can abate and which the fear of death itself
cannot quench. This quality of fortitude the women of the age
shared with the men, as Portia shared it with Brutus, and to this
they bore testimony with the same readiness on many occasions
and in many places besides the scaffold and the stake. The
German traveller Paul Hentzner, describing England as a sort of
woman's paradise, says of English women that they are as it were
men? '; and, just as we hear that ladies were willing to undergo
with their husbands the toils and exertions of country life (as they
afterwards came to join in its sports), so there was a noble dis-
tinctiveness in the readiness of Elizabethan women to take
their part in the duties and the responsibilities of life at large,
and to defy cavil and criticism in the consciousness of their own
strength and steadfastness. There is not, as has been suggested, an
element of mannishness in the Venetian Portia, or a touch of the
virago in Beatrice: they are women born to play their part in life
and society, and to stand forth amongst its leaders. But here, also, ,
we are in the presence of exceptional personalities, though the
conception remains constant in the English drama, as it did in
English life, to the days of the civil war and beyond.
As to the women of everyday life, there can be no reason for
doubting a close correspondence between many of their character-
istic features in life and on the stage. Their emptiness and
shallowness, due, in part at least, to a defective education which
cared only for imparting a few superficial accomplishments, their
inordinate love of dress and all manner of finery, their hankering
for open admiration and search for it in the open fashion of earlier
times, sitting at their doors during the greater part of the day? ,
or, from the closing years of the reign onwards, under shelter of
the masks which had become the fashion at public places—all
these, and a hundred more, are follies and levities in which
observation and satire have found constant materials for comment
and censure. The looseness and licence of the age form a feature
of its life and character well enough known to students, and were
by no means, as is sometimes supposed, derived altogether, or
perhaps even mainly, from the example of court or town. But a
comparison, from this point of view, between different periods,
1 Cited by Marcks, E. , u. 8. p. 94.
Stubbes's Anatomie of Abuses, p. 87.
## p. 380 (#404) ############################################
380 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
whether or not adjacent to each other, is a hazardous process, and,
in any case, is remote from the purpose of the present chapter.
The dramatic poets discussed in the present volume and in its
successor, at times, preferred to reproduce in their plays what
they found in the scene of life around them; at times, they were
fain to dwell on those aspects of society and its experiences which
seemed most likely to serve as occasions for exciting the emotions
of pity or of horror. The Elizabethan and Jacobean drama would
have been unable, even if it had been willing, to detach itself
altogether from the conditions of things in which it necessarily
found much of its material, and to which it could not but, in many
ways, assimilate the remainder. Neither, again, were its repro-
ductions of manners always correct, nor were the 'problems' of
its actions always those with which the experience of the age was
familiar. But, as a whole, and though it only gradually developed,
and in some respects varied, the methods and processes by which
it worked, this drama remained true to its purposes as an art; and,
in the sphere where its creative power was most signally asserted-
in the invention and delineation of character-its range was un-
surpassed. In many respects, the conditions of the age might
have seemed unfavourable to the production of the most beautiful,
as they are the most enduring, examples of female excellence.
Yet the legend of good women which a historic record of
Shakespeare's age might unfold would not be a nameless tale.
And, together with the sunniest and sweetest, the very noblest
of all feminine types—that of sovereign purity and that of self-
sacrificing love will not be sought for in vain in the Elizabethan
and Jacobean drama ; and he would err who should look for them
only on the Shakespearean heights.
## p. 381 (#405) ############################################
BIBLIOGRAPHIES
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
VOLS. V AND VI
It may be well, withont attempting to do over again part of a task
admirably accomplished by Schelling, F. E. , in the Bibliographical Essay con-
tained in vol. 11 of his Elizabethan Drama, 1558-1642, Boston and New York,
1908, to point out that the bibliographies to the several chapters of the present
volume and its successor repeatedly refer to certain works which more or
less cover the whole of the period in question. These works will ordinarily
be cited in the separate bibliographies by the abbreviations added in italics to
the titles in the following lists.
I. COLLECTIONS OF PLAYS.
(This does not include series of volumes of which each contains the plays,
or a selection from the plays, of a single author. )
Amyot, T. and others. A Supplement to Dodsley's Old English Plays.
4 vols. 1853. (Amyot's Suppl. to Dodsley. )
Bang, W. Materialien zur Kunde des älteren englischen'Dramas. Louvain,
1902, eto. (In progress. ) (Bang's Materialien. )
Brandl, A. Quellen des weltlichen Dramas in England vor Shakespeare.
Vol. Lxxx of Quellen u. Forschungen zur Sprach- u. Culturgesch. d.
German. Völker. Strassburg, 1898. (Brandl's Quellen. )
Bullen, A. H. A Collection of Old English Plays. 4 vols. 1882-5. (Bullen's
Old English Plays. )
Old English Plays. New Series 3 vols. 1887-90. (Bullen's Old
English Plays, N. S. )
Child, F. J. Four Old Plays. Cambridge, Mass. , 1848. (Four Old Plays. )
Collier, J. P. Five Old Plays illustrative of the early Progress of the
English Drama: The Conflict of Conscience; The Three Triumphs of
Love and Fortune; The Three Ladies of London; The Three Lords and
the Three Ladies of London; A Knack to Know a Knave. Ed. for the
Roxburghe Club. 1851. (Five Old Plays. )
Dilke, (Sir) C. W. Old English Plays; being a selection from the early
dramatic writers. 6 vols. 1814-5. (Dilke's 0. E. P. )
Dodsley's Old English Plays. Ed. Hazlitt, W. C. 15 vols. 1874-6. (Hazlitt's
Dodsley. )
Earlier editions:
A Select Collection of Old Plays. [Ed. by R, D. ) 12 vols.
(introduction), and see Vatke, T. , 'Wirthshäuser und Wirthshausleben'in Culturbilder
aus Alt-England. As to 'ordinaries' (the fashionable tables d'hôte of the day), see
the amusing tract The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie, or The Walkes in Powles,
1604 (Percy Soc. Publ. , 1845, vol. v). To the main walk of the great gothic church of
St Paul's, a club open to all—even to those who came only to dine with duke Humphrey
-there are frequent allusions in our dramatists. (Bobadill was a 'Paul's man,' and
Falstaff 'bought Bardolph in Paul's. ' See, also, L. Barry's Ram-Alley, act iv, so. 1,
and Mayne's City. Match, act mi, so. 3. ) These and other features of London life are
described in numerous works of easy access; for a graphic picture of Elizabethan
;
London, drawn with the author's usual felicity of touch, the reader may be referred
to the section ‘Le Pays Anglais' in vol. I of Jusserand's Histoire Littéraire du Peuple
Anglais. Creizenach, vol. iv, part 1, p. 486, goes so far as to assert that, with the
exception of university and school plays, not a single dramatic work of consequence
saw the light of day anywhere else than in London town.
? p. 204.
## p. 368 (#392) ############################################
368 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
familiar with its terms and processes! It was with landed property
that litigation, so far as lawyers were called in, seriously concerned
itself; and it was through the management, direct or indirect, of
country estates, and through speculation as well as litigation
respecting them, that fortunes were made and, as already noticed,
county families were founded by Elizabethan lawyers? If we
glance at the other end of the professional ladder, it will appear
that at no time before or since has a legal training been so clearly
recognised as the necessary complement of the school and university
education of a man called upon to play a part in public life. The
inns of court were one of the great social as well as educational
institutions of the Elizabethan and early Stewart period; and
within their walls, in their halls and gardens, in their libraries and
chambers, was pre-eminently fostered that spirit of devoted loyalty
towards the crown, as well as that traditional enthusiasm for
literary and other intellectual interests, which in other periods
of our national life have been habitually associated with the
universities. The occasional ‘brawls' in the streets by gentlemen
of the inns of court, like those of their democratic antipodes, the
city 'prentices, were demonstrations of self-reliance as well as of
youthful spirits. To the Elizabethan regular drama, whose be-
ginnings the inns of court had nurtured, and to some of whose
masterpieces they had extended a cordial welcome, as well as to
the lesser growths of the masque and cognate devices, these
societies stood in relations of enduring intimacy.
1 Cf. Sturge, L. J. , ‘Webster and the Law: a Parallel,' in Shakespeare Jahrbuch,
vol. XXII (1906); where it is pointed out that Webster, like Shakespeare, displays :
very extensive and, generally speaking, accurate knowledge both of the theory and
practice of the law, and the construction of the plot of The Dutchesse of Malfy is cited as
a striking instance of the extent of Webster's legal knowledge. The writer cites the
observation of Sidney Lee, in his Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century, that
Ben Jonson and Spenser, Massinger and Webster, employed law terms with no less
frequency and facility than Shakespeare, though none of them was engaged in the
legal profession. It would, perbaps, be fanciful to ascribe the predilection for trial
soenes, which the Elizabethan bequeathed to the later English drama, to anything
more than a sure instinct for dramatio effect.
See, on this head, the section The Lawyer'-perhaps the most instructive of
all the sections in Hubert Hall's Society in the Elizabethan Age.
3 In the letter from England,' to her three daughters, Cambridge, Oxford, Indes of
Court, appended to Polimanteia (Cambridge, 1595), while the inns of court are
acquitted of disrespect towards the universities, and of having, received some of
their children and. . . made them wanton, the Inns are admonished not to regard their
training as sufficient without that of their elder sisters. '
* In his English Dramatic Literature, vol. II, p. 223, note 7, the present writer has
cited a passage from 'A Player' in Earle's Microcosmographie (1628), which suggests a
very natural secondary reason for the interest taken in the acting drama by members
of the inns of court : ‘Your Inns of Court men were undone but for the player); hee
6
## p. 369 (#393) ############################################
The Medical Profession
369
1
d:
ris!
The physician's profession, about this time, was being dis-
entangled, on the one hand, from that of the clergyman, with
which of old it had been frequently combined, and, on the other,
from the trade of the apothecary-a purveyor of many things
besides drugs, who was more comfortably and fashionably housed
in London 1 than was his fellow at Mantua--and from that of the
barber, who united to his main functions those of dentist and yet
others, announced by his long pole, painted red? The pretensions
of both physicians and surgeons to a knowledge of which they fell
far short were still a subject of severe censures ; but little or
nothing was said in or outside the profession against what was
still the chief impediment to the progress of medical science—its
intimate association with astrology. The physician took every
care to preserve the dignity which lay at the root of much of his
power, attiring himself in the furred gown and velvet cap of his
doctor's degree, and riding about the streets, like his predecessor
in the Middle Ages, with long foot-cloths hanging down by the side
of his horse or mule. The education of physicians was carried
on much like that of lawyers, with care and comfort, and seems,
at least sometimes, to have been deemed a suitable stage in the
complete training of a gentleman. The scientific and practical
value of the medical training of the day is a theme beyond the
purpose of this sketch. Medical treatment, in many respects, was
oldfashioned in no flattering sense of the term ; in the case of
new diseases, it was savage; in the case of mental disease,
barbarous'a dark house and a whip? '
It is unnecessary to make a more than passing reference here
to another profession, which in the Elizabethan age already
existed, although it might be said to have only recently come into
ܐ ܬܐ
! *
Groen
6
is their chiefe Guest and imployment, and the sole businesse that makes them
Afternoones men. '
1 See The Merry Wives, act iii, sc. 3: 'these lisping hawthorn-buds that. . . smell
like Bucklersbury in simple time. '
? On this subject, see Vatke, T. , 1. 8. p. 172. A dentist-barber appears in Lyly's
Midas.
3 So, in the pious Joseph Halle's The Chyrurgens Book.
• An honest, though futile, attempt to distinguish between true and false, valuable
and frustrate,' astrology is made in Polimanteia, & curious tract printed at
Cambridge in 1595.
5 Cf. The Alchemist, act 1, sc. 1, where Subtle takes care to appear in this costume.
6 Paul Hentzner (u. 8. p. 31) asserts that in the fifteen colleges within and without
the city of London. members of the young nobility, gentry and others, are educated,
and chiefly in the study of physio ; for very few apply themselves to that of the law;
they are allowed a very good table, and silver cups to drink out of. '
? As You Like It, act III, sc. 2, ad fin.
E. L. V. CH. XIV.
24
## p. 370 (#394) ############################################
370 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
1
existence. The general conditions which affected the publication
of books, and, with it, the exercise of the profession of author,
have been discussed in a previous volume and more will be said
in a later chapter as to the special conditions of the writing of
plays. The number of playwrights who, at the same time, were
stage actors, probably, was by no means so large as has sometimes
been assumed; Miss Sheavyn reckons that, to our knowledge,
not more than nine combined the 'equality' of actor with
authorship? Thus, there was no reason why 'gentlemen and
scholars' should extend to dramatic or other authors as such the
scorn which, at different times, they were wont to manifest for
the profession of the actor, despised by them as, traditionally,
a menial or envied as the well paid and gorgeously apparelled
favourite of the public. Yet the professional author-the man,
that is, who sought to live by his pen, or, at least, to make it
contribute appreciably to his means of earning a livelihood, had
no easy life of it in the Elizabethan age. Patrons were rare
who gave sums of money--especially large sums such as that
which Southampton is held to have bestowed on Shakespeare--or
provided hospitality on a large scale, such as Jonson enjoyed from
lord d'Aubigny; though there may have been other cases of
quasi-hereditary support, such as that granted by the Herberts
to Massinger, or of spontaneous generosity like that extended to
Greene by a successful player. Fewer still were those to whom,
as to Munday and Jonson, the goodwill of city or crown secured an
official salary by the side of their literary earnings. The uni-
versities reserved none of their emoluments for the 'university
wits,' whose flattering dedications were more profitably addressed
to the goodwill of individual magnates. The laborious gains
of proof correcting and the like hardly came into account, as they
had done in the earlier days of the renascence, when such accom-
plishments were still confined to a small number of scholars. It
was more tempting to take to the writing of pamphlets, even if
these often really only hovered on the outskirts of literature,
* See ante, vol. iv, chap. XVIII ( The Book-trade, 1557–1625').
9 See post, vol. vi, chap. x (* The Elizabethan Theatre ').
3 The names given by her are Field, Greene, Heywood (Thomas), Jonson, Peele,
Munday, Rowley (William), Shakespeare and Wilson (Robert). The order is alpha-
betical; but a comparison of the names will show that Miss Sheavyn is right in her
conclusion that it seems to have become in time less usual to unite the two
professions, though Marlowe and Kyd, of the earlier writers, probably never acted. '
See Sheavyn, Phoebe, The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age (p. 93)-
valuable piece of work, of which free use has been made in the text.
• Cl. ante, vol. iv, chap. xvi, and bibl. There is no reason, in the Elizabethan
4
!
1
## p. 371 (#395) ############################################
Authors and their Troubles
371
if not to descend into other depths and enter upon one or more
of the harassing employments of the news factor, the prophetic
almanac maker, the ballad and jig writer, or the craftsman who
composed lascivious verse to suit the taste of his public.
It has been shown abovel that, though the charter of the
Stationers' company was confirmed in the first year of Elizabeth's
reign, and the licensing and censorship of books was instituted
by the injunctions issued in that year, the actual operation of this
censorship did not begin till near the middle of the last decade
but one of the sixteenth century-an epoch of intense public
anxiety. In 1586, when the agitation largely due to Jesuit
missions and their actual or supposed results was at its height
and the so-called 'discovery' of the Babyngton conspiracy was
calling forth wild alarm, the Star chamber issued the decree
which confined printing, with the exception of the two uni-
versities, to the liberties of the city of London, and subjected all
books and pamphlets before publication to the licence of the
archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London. Those
licensing regulations were enforced by the court of High Com-
mission (though the actual process of licensing, in part, was handed
over to particular expert authorities-as, in the case of plays,
to the master of the revels), and the activity of the court was
easily set in motion wherever the interests or susceptibilities of
church or state seemed to call for its interference. The drama,
of course, most frequently and most readily laid itself open to
official suspicion. Thus, on the single occasion of the imminence
of trouble on the part of Essex and his supporters, the authors of
at least two plays, Philotas and Sejanus, were in some danger,
and the performance of a third (Richard II) led to further
official enquiry? As in the days of the early Roman empire, a
class of informers rose into being, called, in Elizabethan parlance,
moralisers' or 'state decipherers,' whose business it was to dis-
cover and denounce passages, situations and even single words
6
6
7
age for distinguishing translators from the general body of authors, among whom
their position was one of honour and distinction. Cf. ante, vol. iv, chap. I.
1 Ante, vol. iv, pp. 381–2.
3 • Application,' says the dedication of Volpone, “is now given a trade with many,
and there are that profess to have a key for the decyphering of everything. '
Miss Sheavyn (p. 67) has drawn up a list of writers who suffered from the interference
of authorities moved by information of the above or of other sorts; it comprises
the names of Cartwright, Chapman, Daniel, Dekker, Drayton, Fletcher, Heywood,
Holinshed, Jonson, Kyd, Lodge, Marlowe, Marston, Middleton, Munday, Nashe,
Rowlands, Selden, Shakespeare, Smith, Stowe, Stubbes and Wither. Of course, the
24 - 2
## p. 372 (#396) ############################################
372
Political and Social Aspects of the Age
which seemed to betray a dangerous meaning. The spirit of
Jacobean government did not fail to carry further a system con-
genial to its mode of working. Such, in this age, were a few
,
among the troubles of authors-troubles in which dramatists had
more than their share.
The attention bestowed in this period upon the fine arts should
not be overlooked, though it cannot be discussed here. The cultiva-
tion of music, indeed, was one of the most attractive features of
Shakespeare's age and seems to have been common to both sexes!
The subject of Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture has been
already touched upon, but cannot here be pursued further. Paint-
ing, with the exception of miniature painting, was mainly left in
foreign hands. The external conditions of the drama proper were
such that it could owe little or nothing to architect, sculptor or
painter; the achievements of Inigo Jones belong to the history of
the masque?
At the lower end of the social scale, in the Elizabethan age,
a very marked division is observable between those who, more
or less, were moving upward and those whose doom it seemed
to lag behind. The smaller tradesmen and manufacturers of the
towns, though they could not, like the great city merchants, have
any claim to be of the councils of the sovereign or of those
who carried on the government, still found themselves occasionally
chosen to represent in parliament the interests of the communities
in which they lived, though, in the new boroughs established
under the influence of the crown, that influence was powerful in
securing the election of persons belonging to the gentry on whom
it could directly depend. In other ways, too, the industrial element
was asserting its right to the social advantages within its reach;
probably, such a case as that of Gabriel Harvey's father, the rope-
maker of Saffron Walden, who sent not less than four sons to the
neighbouring university, was not a very unusual one in the social
whirligig of time brought its revenges on both sides; and, finally, the Star chamber,
which, in 1634, had ordered the burning of Prynne's Histrio-Mastit, and inflicted
what shame, it could inflict upon the author of that work, was, seven years later, swept
away with the High Commission court, and several other tyrannical tribunals.
i As to Elizabethan music, and its association with the drama, see chap. vi of
vol. IV of this work, cf. also Schelling's chapter, u. 8. When Music and sweet Poetry
agree. As to the favourite composers of the period between 1589 and 1600, see
Lyrical Poems selected from musical publications, 1589-1680, ed. Collier, J. P. , Percy
Soc. Publ. (1844), vol. XIII. See, also, the note of Rockstro, W. , on "The Sixth English
School,' ap. Traill, H. D. , U. s. vol. II, p. 309.
3. Painting and carpentry are the soul of mask' is Ben Jonson's aneer in his
Expostulation with Inigo Jones.
## p. 373 (#397) ############################################
Yeomen. Labourers
373
er
6
6
6
>
bai
&
history of the times? Many yeomen, too, although their class was
supposed to be marked by a definite limit of income, and although
it was customary to address them and their wives as 'goodman' or
'goodwife' instead of 'master' or 'mistress,' were, by their clever-
ness and industry, constantly raising themselves on the social
ladder— buying up poor gentlemen's land, educating their sons
for professions and learning them how to become gentlemen. '
* These were they,' adds Harrison', in picturesque remembrance
of the days of Henry V, that in times past made all France
afraid. ' An admirable dramatic type, dated still further back,
of the stalwart yeomen of whom many an example must have
remained in Elizabethan England, is George-a-Greene, the pinner
of Wakefield, in the play named after him? Hobs the tanner, in
Heywood's Edward IV, may serve as a companion picture of the
honest handicraftsman, imperturbable alike in his good sense and
in his good humour 4.
Neither traders nor yeomen were to be confounded with the
labouring class proper, still a part of the population which Harrison,
as well as Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists, regarded as
proper to be ruled, not to rule others. It has been seen that
their condition during the Elizabethan age and the ensuing period
cannot be described as one of advance, although the social misery
which had resulted from the break-up of the old agrarian system
and the widespread substitution of pasture for tillage abated with
the practical recovery of arable farming. The labouring classes,
generally, remained in a condition of depression, or not far removed
from it. Yet they were not altogether ignored in the working
of the machinery of church and state, labouring men being
occasionally summoned on juries or even chosen to hold office as
churchwardens. But, though it would not be impossible to cite
exceptions in which human sympathy or humorous insight assert
their rights, men and women of this class were usually counted
only by heads, and, as individuals, they failed to interest the
dramatists, who were content to use them as an obscure background
or colourless substratum. It is not just to illustrate the contempt
of the Elizabethan drama for the masses either by satirical
pictures of mobs and popular rebellions, or by particular phrases
1 Marlowe's father was a shoe-maker ; but this, perhaps, is hardly a case in point.
p. 133.
Another, wbich seems to have attained to great popularity, was that of old
Tom Strowd in Day's Blind Beggar of Bednal Green.
4 Dekker's Shomakers Holiday is a genial glorification of the craft, founded on one
of the stories in Thomas Deloney's Gentle Craft (the second title of the play).
BE
1
ទី
2
3
## p. 374 (#398) ############################################
374 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
‘in character' with the personages employing them! But the
want of sympathy towards the inarticulate classes with which
the dramatists, as a body, are chargeable, must indisputably be
regarded as a limitation of the range of their art, which they
only accepted to their own disadvantage.
Wholly distinct from labouring men proper were the serving-
men, whose large numbers in the Elizabethan age are the
subject of frequent comment, and who were a legacy of medieval
times and conditions. Harrison dwells on the 'swarmes of
idle serving-men, who are an evil to everyone<,' and observes
that, while many of them brought their young masters to grief
by their wastefulness, not a few of them fell into bad ways them-
selves, and ended as highway robbers. It was easier to insist,
in the interests of society in general, that the numbers of these
hangers-on should be lessened, when not only was service con-
tinually passed on from generation to generation, but many sons
of yeomen and husbandmen entered into the condition of serving-
men, in order to escape the obligation of military service, and,
generally, to secure easier and more comfortable conditions of life.
On the part of the gentry, the custom of keeping up a large
show of servants was by no means confined to the wealthy, and
the author of that interesting tract The Serving-man's Comfort
draws a humorous picture of the needy Sir Daniel Debet, pacing
the middle walk at St Paul's, with six or seven tall hungry fellows
in attendance.
We pass to a yet different stratum of the population. It is well
known how the most important of the poor laws of Elizabeth®,
1 The queen, e. g. , in Richard II, act 11, sc. 3, addresses the gardener as 'thou
little better thing than earth' (Vatke, u. 8. p. 221).
? Harrison, p.
151, gives a kindly picture of the friendliness and geniality of the
lower classes of his age, which is justly commended by Furnivall. Sympathetic
touches of the same kind are not frequent in the plays of Shakespeare and his fellow
dramatists, though, in the phrase of the old shepherd in The Winter's Tale, they
contain plenty of homely foolery. '
3
p. 135.
• Combining the turbulence of those in Romeo and Juliet with the roguery of those
in Coriolanus. But these do not exhaust Shakespeare's gallery of servants, good, bad
and indifferent.
5A Health to the Gentlemanly profession of Servingmen or the Serving-man's
Comfort (1598). In Hazlitt's Inedited Tracts. Serving-men, though some varieties of
them did not escape the satire, may be said to have largely attracted the goodwill
of Elizabethan playwrights, including Shakespeare, who, according to a tradition said
to have been current at Stratford, himself performed the part Adam in As You
Like It.
6 of these and Elizabethan pauperism there is a masterly account by Hewins,
W. A. S. , ap. Traill, H. D. , U. 8. vol. III.
## p. 375 (#399) ############################################
>
Pauperism. Vagabondage 375
passed near the close of her reign (in 1601) and revived in the
first year of James I, made provision for its poor compulsory
upon every parish. The pressure of pauperism was felt through-
out the whole of this period, and already at an early stage of the
queen's reign the principle of the 'old Poor Law' had been
affirmed by legislation, and it had become customary to hold
weekly collections in each parish for the poor who had not
demonstrably fallen into indigence by their own fault. But the
evil continued, and was not diminished by the provisions against
vagabonds, among whom, against the wish of the house of lords,
common players and minstrels had been included in the act of
1572. In describing the great increase of poverty in the land,
Harrison' indignantly repudiates the proposed remedy of stopping
the growth of the population by turning arable into pasture
land-a process by which English rural prosperity had been
impaired in a past too recent to be forgotten. The control
of the spread of poverty and desolation attempted by the
Elizabethan poor laws proved, on the whole, a failure; and
things went on from bad to worse. Hundreds of hamlets were
desolated, and the number of small occupiers steadily dwindled,
till they were almost completely extinguished by the legis-
lation of the reign of Charles II. From this all-important side
of the social life of the country, the drama, as might be sup-
posed, averts its eyes. On the other hand, the more or less vocal
or picturesque phase of poverty which may be described as
beggardom, with the nearly allied developments of vagabondage
and roguery, forms one of the most glaring phenomena of the
age; its griefs and self-advertisement crying aloud for notice.
Harrison, who denounces idle beggars of all sorts as 'thieves
and caterpillars of the commonwealth,' reckons their total
number in England at ten thousand, and, at the same time,
dates the beginning of their trade as falling not yet fully sixty
years back-which seems to point to the dissolution of the
monasteries, though, as a matter of fact, Henry VIII's act as to
beggars and vagabonds was passed as early as 1531. Our guide
then proceeds to comment on twenty-three kinds of vagabonds,
and to discuss the various methods of punishment applied to them
and to the army of 'roges and idle persons' in general, including,
as aforesaid, 'plaiers' and 'minstrells3. ' But there can be
no necessity in this place for more than touching on a topic
2 Hall, H. , Society in the Elizabethan Age, p. 105.
3 Bk 11, chaps, X-XI.
6
1
pp. 212 ff.
## p. 376 (#400) ############################################
376 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
which has always had a fascination of its own for literary ob-
servers and enquirers, and which supplied abundant material to
English comic dramatists, from the authors of Bartholomew Fayre
and The Beggars Bush to their pupil or imitator, the author of
A Joviall Crew1.
And, since the transition from the subject of vagabondage
to that of crime is at all times cruelly facile, a word may be added
as to an aspect of the age which cannot be neglected by the
student of its physiognomy, more particularly as it is recognisable
in its reflection in contemporary English drama. It was by no
means unreasonable for a contemporary such as Harrison to dis-
claim what, to the eyes of Elizabethan England, might have seemed
abnormal either in the character of the crimes which were fre-
quently committed or of the punishments which they entailed.
An examination of the themes of the English domestic tragedies
which in the last decade of the sixteenth century, or thereabouts,
harrowed the feelings of London audiences, bears out the state-
ment that 'horrible, merciles and wilfull murders,' such as are
'not sildome seene on the continent,' were comparatively rare in
contemporary England; the hankering after such sensations be-
longs to a rather later time, when 'revenge' plays had passed
into a more advanced stage, and Tourneur and Webster were
fain to satisfy the appetite of their audiences for exotic horrors.
Again, in the Elizabethan age, it is not difficult to notice, in
the administration of penal justice, indications of a tendency
to avoid an excess of brutal cruelty; various signally inhuman
forms of execution or of bodily suffering or degradation added
to execution were modified or fell out of use. Still, for a
number of crimes regarded as specially heinous, there were
special punishments calculated to excite the sensibilities or
deepen the awe of spectatorsPoisoners and heretics were burnt
to death; and witches were liable to suffer the same punishment
in lieu of death by hanging, the method of execution applied to
felons and all other ordinary criminals. It will be remembered
that but few persons suffered death on the charge of witch-
craft under Elizabeth, and that it was only under the more
rigorous act passed immediately after the accession of James (1604)
that the fury of persecution found full opportunities for raging.
As to the literature of rogues and vagabonds, cf. ante, vol. iv, chap. XVI, and ibid.
bibl. p. 529.
? Torture seems to have been regarded as a practice to which resort should not be
had in ordinary cases; but it was not altogether out of use.
## p. 377 (#401) ############################################
Witchcraft. Moral Standard
377
There cannot, of course, be any sort of pretence that rational views
on the subject of witchcraft and magic obtained in the reign
of Elizabeth, or that the queen herself (who consulted Dee about
Alençon's condition) was more enlightened on this head than other
English men or women. Of the dramatists, it may be roughly
stated that in not a single one of them can be found any suggestion
of a disbelief in the thing itself, even where a fraudulent use of it
is exposed or derided'. On offenders against religious law and
social morality, a variety of formal penalties—in part symbolic,
in part simply degrading—were inflicted, which alike suggest a
desire on the part of the state or society to improve' the
opportunities afforded it; even before the ascendancy of puritan-
ism, there were always practical moralists clamouring for a severer
system of retribution. Yet, at the same time, a great laxity is
observable in enforcing the penalties denounced by the law upon
proved wantonness of life; and it is impossible to escape the
impression that there existed a general consensus, from which even
the clergy only slowly came to express clear dissent, that some
allowance should be made to laymen in the matter of the sins they
were 'inclined to. The whole significance of the licence of the
Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, which, in some respects, reflected
the licence of the age, cannot be fully understood, unless this fact
be borne in mind.
The darker side of the social condition of England in the
Elizabethan age should not be overlooked by those who dwell upon
the high aspirations and great achievements which have cast an
enduring halo round it in the eyes of national historians and their
readers. Nothing can be said here as to the defects--only too
palpable, but not by any means to be construed as evidence of
mere incuria-in the provision made for the protection of the
1 The whole question of the treatment in the Elizabethan age of the superstition of
witchcraft has been left aside as too wide for discussion here. For an account of the
origin of this superstition see ante, vol. II, chap. v; and cf. the note on the Witch-
controversy, with a bibliography of it, in vol. 10, pp. 534–5 (bibliography to chap. XVI).
The present writer has given a summary of the subject, illustrated by references to
those Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas which reflect the sentiments of the age in
reference to it, in his introduction to Marlowe's Dr Faustus (4th ed. ), pp. xlix-lü.
As to Dee, see The Private Diary of Dr John Dee, ed. Halliwell[-Phillipps), J. O. ,
Camden Soc. Publ. , 1842. Though it was abroad that Dee's associate Kelly came to
grief, alchemists ran some risk in England. In The Alchemist, act iv, 8c. 1, Dol Common
warns Sir Epicure Mammon that he
may come to end
The remnant of his days in a loth'd prison
for merely speaking of the philosopher's stone.
## p. 378 (#402) ############################################
378. Political and Social Aspects of the Age
public health against the dangers to which it was exposed, more
especially in London, from the incursions of the plague, and, in
a lesser degree, from those of other diseases? If, however, we
confine ourselves to the moral sphere, the impression left by
an open-eyed survey of the ordinary relations and conditions
of life in this age is one of a dominating violence and turbulence;
and this impression is confirmed by a study of the drama of
which those relations and conditions largely make up the material.
At the same time, this passionate unrest, and the impetus with
which, in the midst of it, the age pressed on to the performance of
its great tasks, explain, in some measure, how they were accom-
plished. The high spirit-often high in death as it had been in
life—which the renascence and reformation ages had infused into
their men and women, of all classes and beliefs, no doubt imparted
something of recklessness to martyrdom as well as of ruthlessness
in the infliction of suffering. But the final cause of this high
spirit was the belief in things worth living for and worth dying
for—a belief which lies at the root of mighty actions, and without
which no nation has ever been great, and no dramatic hero heroic.
It is impossible to close even this scanty notice of some of the
social characteristics of the Elizabethan age without a more
special reference to its women. For, in the history of western
civilisation (not to venture on applying the remark still more
widely), it is generally the women whose code of manners and of
morals determines the standard of these in any given period of
national life. No doubt, the women of the Elizabethan and
,
Jacobean age, as they appear before us in contemporary drama,
are, primarily, the creatures of the imagination of the dramatists ;
yet it would be idle to ignore the twofold fact, that the presentment
of the women of this period on the stage largely reproduces
actual types, and that the way in which dramatists looked upon
women, their position in life, and their relations to men, was the
way of the world, and the way of the age. Queen Elizabeth was
not the only highly educated English woman of her family or
times; but, though the type, of which the continental renascence
produced many illustrious examples, is never wanting in the society
of the Tudor and Stewart times, it is comparatively rare and
can hardly be said to be a frequent characteristic of their women.
The fashions of intellectual, and mainly literary, refinement which
passed over court and society, from that of Euphuism to that of
1 Concerning this subject, as affecting the history of the drama and stage, see
post, chi ps. x and xiv of vol. vi.
1
## p. 379 (#403) ############################################
Women of the Elizabethan Age 379
.
6
>
Platonic love, were fashions only, to be followed for a season and
then discarded. Far more striking as a distinctive feature is the
virility which many women of the age shared with the great queen-
the high courage, the readiness for action, the indomitable spirit
which no persecution can abate and which the fear of death itself
cannot quench. This quality of fortitude the women of the age
shared with the men, as Portia shared it with Brutus, and to this
they bore testimony with the same readiness on many occasions
and in many places besides the scaffold and the stake. The
German traveller Paul Hentzner, describing England as a sort of
woman's paradise, says of English women that they are as it were
men? '; and, just as we hear that ladies were willing to undergo
with their husbands the toils and exertions of country life (as they
afterwards came to join in its sports), so there was a noble dis-
tinctiveness in the readiness of Elizabethan women to take
their part in the duties and the responsibilities of life at large,
and to defy cavil and criticism in the consciousness of their own
strength and steadfastness. There is not, as has been suggested, an
element of mannishness in the Venetian Portia, or a touch of the
virago in Beatrice: they are women born to play their part in life
and society, and to stand forth amongst its leaders. But here, also, ,
we are in the presence of exceptional personalities, though the
conception remains constant in the English drama, as it did in
English life, to the days of the civil war and beyond.
As to the women of everyday life, there can be no reason for
doubting a close correspondence between many of their character-
istic features in life and on the stage. Their emptiness and
shallowness, due, in part at least, to a defective education which
cared only for imparting a few superficial accomplishments, their
inordinate love of dress and all manner of finery, their hankering
for open admiration and search for it in the open fashion of earlier
times, sitting at their doors during the greater part of the day? ,
or, from the closing years of the reign onwards, under shelter of
the masks which had become the fashion at public places—all
these, and a hundred more, are follies and levities in which
observation and satire have found constant materials for comment
and censure. The looseness and licence of the age form a feature
of its life and character well enough known to students, and were
by no means, as is sometimes supposed, derived altogether, or
perhaps even mainly, from the example of court or town. But a
comparison, from this point of view, between different periods,
1 Cited by Marcks, E. , u. 8. p. 94.
Stubbes's Anatomie of Abuses, p. 87.
## p. 380 (#404) ############################################
380 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
whether or not adjacent to each other, is a hazardous process, and,
in any case, is remote from the purpose of the present chapter.
The dramatic poets discussed in the present volume and in its
successor, at times, preferred to reproduce in their plays what
they found in the scene of life around them; at times, they were
fain to dwell on those aspects of society and its experiences which
seemed most likely to serve as occasions for exciting the emotions
of pity or of horror. The Elizabethan and Jacobean drama would
have been unable, even if it had been willing, to detach itself
altogether from the conditions of things in which it necessarily
found much of its material, and to which it could not but, in many
ways, assimilate the remainder. Neither, again, were its repro-
ductions of manners always correct, nor were the 'problems' of
its actions always those with which the experience of the age was
familiar. But, as a whole, and though it only gradually developed,
and in some respects varied, the methods and processes by which
it worked, this drama remained true to its purposes as an art; and,
in the sphere where its creative power was most signally asserted-
in the invention and delineation of character-its range was un-
surpassed. In many respects, the conditions of the age might
have seemed unfavourable to the production of the most beautiful,
as they are the most enduring, examples of female excellence.
Yet the legend of good women which a historic record of
Shakespeare's age might unfold would not be a nameless tale.
And, together with the sunniest and sweetest, the very noblest
of all feminine types—that of sovereign purity and that of self-
sacrificing love will not be sought for in vain in the Elizabethan
and Jacobean drama ; and he would err who should look for them
only on the Shakespearean heights.
## p. 381 (#405) ############################################
BIBLIOGRAPHIES
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
VOLS. V AND VI
It may be well, withont attempting to do over again part of a task
admirably accomplished by Schelling, F. E. , in the Bibliographical Essay con-
tained in vol. 11 of his Elizabethan Drama, 1558-1642, Boston and New York,
1908, to point out that the bibliographies to the several chapters of the present
volume and its successor repeatedly refer to certain works which more or
less cover the whole of the period in question. These works will ordinarily
be cited in the separate bibliographies by the abbreviations added in italics to
the titles in the following lists.
I. COLLECTIONS OF PLAYS.
(This does not include series of volumes of which each contains the plays,
or a selection from the plays, of a single author. )
Amyot, T. and others. A Supplement to Dodsley's Old English Plays.
4 vols. 1853. (Amyot's Suppl. to Dodsley. )
Bang, W. Materialien zur Kunde des älteren englischen'Dramas. Louvain,
1902, eto. (In progress. ) (Bang's Materialien. )
Brandl, A. Quellen des weltlichen Dramas in England vor Shakespeare.
Vol. Lxxx of Quellen u. Forschungen zur Sprach- u. Culturgesch. d.
German. Völker. Strassburg, 1898. (Brandl's Quellen. )
Bullen, A. H. A Collection of Old English Plays. 4 vols. 1882-5. (Bullen's
Old English Plays. )
Old English Plays. New Series 3 vols. 1887-90. (Bullen's Old
English Plays, N. S. )
Child, F. J. Four Old Plays. Cambridge, Mass. , 1848. (Four Old Plays. )
Collier, J. P. Five Old Plays illustrative of the early Progress of the
English Drama: The Conflict of Conscience; The Three Triumphs of
Love and Fortune; The Three Ladies of London; The Three Lords and
the Three Ladies of London; A Knack to Know a Knave. Ed. for the
Roxburghe Club. 1851. (Five Old Plays. )
Dilke, (Sir) C. W. Old English Plays; being a selection from the early
dramatic writers. 6 vols. 1814-5. (Dilke's 0. E. P. )
Dodsley's Old English Plays. Ed. Hazlitt, W. C. 15 vols. 1874-6. (Hazlitt's
Dodsley. )
Earlier editions:
A Select Collection of Old Plays. [Ed. by R, D. ) 12 vols.
