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Idle Hours in a Library
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Idle Hours in a Library
By
William Henry Hudson
Professor of English Literature, Stanford University
[Illustration]
William Doxey
At the Sign of the Lark
San Francisco
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1897
WILLIAM DOXEY
THE DOXEY PRESS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
F. E. H.
IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE
DEAR OLD DAYS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Preface
The title of this little volume was chosen because it seems to indicate
a characteristic possessed in common by the otherwise unrelated essays
here brought together. They may all be described in a general way as
holiday tasks—the results of many hours of quiet but rather aimless
browsing among books, and not of special investigations, undertaken with
a view to definite scholastic ends. They are, moreover, as will readily
be seen, completely unacademic in style and intention. Three of the
papers were originally put into shape as popular lectures. The remaining
one—that on the Restoration novelists—was written for a magazine which
appeals not to a special body of students, but to the more general
reading public. The title, hit upon after some little searching, will, I
believe, therefore be accepted as fairly descriptive, and will not, I
hope, be condemned as overfanciful.
A word or two of more detailed explanation may, perhaps, be permitted.
Of the essays on Pepys’s Diary and the “Scenes of Bohemian Life,” I
would simply say that they may be taken to testify to the unfailing
sources of unalloyed enjoyment I have found in these delightful books;
and I should be pleased to think that, while they may renew for some
readers the charm of old associations, they may perhaps send others here
and there for the first time to the works themselves—in which case I
shall be sure of the gratitude of some at least of those into whose
hands this little volume may chance to fall. I can scarcely say as much
as this for the study of Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Manley—for most readers will
be quite as well off if they leave the lucubrations of these two ladies
alone. But in these days we all read novels; and it has seemed to me,
therefore, that my brief account of some of the early experiments in
English fiction may not be altogether lacking in interest and
suggestiveness. Thus, after some hesitation, I decided to find a place
for the authors of “Oroonoko” and “The New Atalantis” in these pages. So
far as the chapter on Shakspere’s London is concerned, it is needless to
do more than indicate the way in which it came to be written. A number
of years ago, while engaged for other purposes in the study of
Elizabethan popular literature, and more especially of the drama of the
period, I began, for my own satisfaction, to jot down, as I lighted upon
them, the more striking references and allusions to manners, customs,
and the social life of the time. I presently found that I had thus
gathered a good deal of miscellaneous material; and it then occurred to
me that, properly organized, my memoranda might be made into an
interesting popular lecture. The lecture was presently prepared, and was
frequently delivered, both in England and in this country. Naturally
enough, the paper can lay no claim to exhaustiveness; it is scrappy,
formless, and sometimes superficial. But the reader of Shakspere may
find it of some value, so far as it goes.
The essay on the Restoration novel is reproduced, greatly changed and
somewhat amplified, from the English magazine, “Time.” The remainder of
the volume has not before been in print.
In such a book as this, it would be pedantic to make a display of
authorities and references, though I hope that any direct indebtedness
has always been duly recorded in the proper place. But I must do myself
the pleasure of adding, that here, as elsewhere in my work, I have
gained more than I can say from the help and encouragement of my wife.
WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON.
_Stanford University, California, 1897_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents
Page
London Life in Shakspere’s Time 1
Pepys and His Diary 65
Two Novelists of the English Restoration 125
A Glimpse of Bohemia 181
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London Life in Shakspere’s Time
------------------------------------------------------------------------
London Life in Shakspere’s Time
It is the purpose of the present paper to give some glimpses of
every-day life in the English metropolis in the latter part of the
sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth centuries. Our subject
will take us from the main highways of history into by-paths illuminated
by the popular literature of the time. It is not the grave historian,
the statesman, or the philosopher, but rather the common playwright, the
ballad-monger, the pamphleteer, whom we must take here as our guides.
Yet ere we intrust ourselves to their care it will not be amiss if, with
the view of making the clearer what we shall presently have to say, we
pause for a moment at the outset to consider some of the more general
aspects of the period with which we are to deal.
Looking, then, first of all, at the political conditions of the time, we
may describe the history of the reign of Elizabeth as the history of
consolidation rather than of superficial change. What strikes us most is
not the addition of fresh culture-elements, but the reorganization and
expansion of elements already existing. The forces of evolution had
turned inward, acting more upon the internal structure than upon the
external forms of society. The Wars of the Roses were now things of
recollection only, the fierce contentions which the struggle between
York and Lancaster had produced having subsided with most of the bitter
feelings engendered by them. Save for the collision with Spain, which
ended in the defeat of the great Armada, England enjoyed a singular
immunity from complications with foreign powers; and an opportunity,
freely made use of, was thus offered for the development of foreign
trade. The growth of a strong commercial sentiment, consequent on this,
acted as a powerful solvent in the dissolution of feudal ideas and the
disintegration of feudal forms of life. The conflict was now mainly
between opinions—between rival forces of an intellectual and moral
character. The power of the upper classes—the representatives of the
ancient _régime_ of chivalry—was on the wane; the power of the middle
classes—the representatives of the modern _régime_ of commerce—showed
corresponding growth. The voice of the people, through their delegates
in Parliament, began to be acknowledged by the caution exhibited on
sundry critical occasions by the crown; the country at large was growing
richer and stronger; the sense of English unity was intensified by the
very dangers which menaced the national life; and as men came more and
more to recognize their individualities, they demanded greater freedom
of thought and speech. “England, alone of European nations,” as Mr.
Symonds pointed out, “received the influences of both Renaissance and
Reformation simultaneously.” The mighty forces generated by these two
movements in combination—one emancipating the reason, the other the
conscience, from the trammels of the Middle Ages—told in countless ways
upon the masses of society. But with all this,—partly, indeed, in
consequence of all this,—there was a deep-seated restlessness at the
very springs of life. The contests of opposing parties were carried on
with a fierceness and acerbity of which we know little in these more
moderate days; the minds of men were set at variance and thrown into
confusion by a thousand distracting issues; and, unrealized as yet in
all their significance and power, those Titanic religious and political
agencies were beginning to take shape which were by and by to rend
English society to its very core.
When we turn from the political character of the age to the moral
character of the people, we find it difficult to avoid having recourse
to a series of antitheses, after the familiar manner of Macaulay, so
violent and surprising are the contrasts, so diverse the component
qualities which analysis everywhere brings to light. The age was virile
in its power, its restlessness, its amazing energy and fertility; it was
virile, too, in its unrestraint, its fierceness, its licentiousness and
brutality. Men gloried in their newly conquered freedom, and in that
wider knowledge of the world which had been opened up to them by the
study of the past, by the scientific researches of Copernicus, Kepler,
and Galileo, by the discoveries of Amerigo Vespucci, Columbus,
Jenkinson, Willoughby, Drake. National feeling was strong; the national
pulse beat high. Yet, in spite of Protestantism and an open Bible, it
was essentially a pagan age; in spite of its Platonism and Euphuism, a
coarse and sensual one. You had only to scratch the superficial polish
to find the old savagery beneath. Your smiling and graceful courtier
would discourse of Seneca and Aristotle, but he would relish the
obscenest jest and act his part in the grossest intrigue. Your young
gallant would turn an Italian sonnet, or “tune the music of an ever vain
tongue,” but within an hour he might have been found in all the blood
and filth and turmoil of the cockpit or the bear-ring. The unseemliest
freedom prevailed throughout society—amidst the noble ladies in
immediate attendance upon the queen, and thence all down the social
scale. Laws were horribly brutal, habits revoltingly rude. All the
powerful instincts of a fresh, buoyant, self-reliant, ambitious, robust,
sensuous manhood had burst loose, finding expression now in wild
extravagance, indulgence, animalism, now in great effort on distant
seas, now in the mighty utterances of the drama; for these things were
but different facets of the same national character. Still, with all its
gigantic prodigality of energy, with all its untempered misuse of genius
and power, the English Renaissance kept itself free from many of the
worst features of the Spanish and Italian revivals. It was all very well
for Benvenuto Cellini to call the English “wild beasts.” Deep down
beneath the casuistry and Euphuism, beneath the artificiality and the
glittering veneer, beneath the coarseness and the brutalism, there was
ever to be found that which was lacking in the Southern character—a
stern, hardy, tough-fibred moral sense, which in that critical period of
disquietude and upheaval formed indeed the very sheet-anchor of the
nation’s hopes. It must never be forgotten that it was this age of
new-found freedom, and of that license which went with it like its
shadow, that produced such types of magnificent manhood as Raleigh,
strong “the fierce extremes of good and ill to brook”; as Spenser,
sweetest and purest of poets and of men; as Sidney, whom that same
Spenser might well describe as “the most noble and virtuous gentleman,
most worthy of all titles, both of learning and chivalry”; as Shakspere,
whom, all slanders notwithstanding, we, like his own close friends,
still think and speak of as our “Gentle Will.”
Such, so far as we are able to sum them up in a few brief sentences,
were some of the salient characteristics of the great age of the Virgin
Queen—an age, as Dean Church has said, “of vast ambitious adventure,
which went to sea, little knowing whither it went, and ill-provided with
knowledge or instrument”; but an age of magnificent enterprise and
achievement, none the less. And now it is for us to follow down into
some of the details of their private, every-day existence the men and
women who, to use a suggestive phrase of Goethe’s, were the citizens of
this period, and whose little lives shared, no matter in how small and
obscure a way, in the movements and destinies of the large world into
which they were born.
* * * * *
Just a quarter of a century before Queen Elizabeth’s death, a
proclamation was issued, reciting that her Majesty foresaw that “great
and manifold inconveniences and mischiefs” were likely to arise “from
the access and confluence of the people” to the metropolis, and making
certain stringent provisions with a view to keeping down the population
of the city. This enactment is useful as showing us that even at that
early date,—as later on, in the time of Smollett,—the enormous growth of
London was held to be matter for alarm. London was indeed increasing
rapidly in extent, population, wealth, and power; and Lyly was hardly
guilty of extravagance when, in his “Euphues,” he wrote of it as a place
that “both for the beauty of building, infinite riches, variety of all
things,” “excelleth all the cities of the world; insomuch that it may be
called the storehouse or mart of all Europe.” Yet we are most of us
probably unable without much effort to realize how different was the
English metropolis of Elizabeth’s time from the metropolis of the
present day.
We have to remember, in the first place, that the London with which we
are now concerned was a walled city, and that the territory which lay
within the walls,—that is, the metropolis proper,—represented but a very
small portion of what is now included within the civic area. Newgate,
Ludgate, Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Cripplegate, and Aldersgate, still mark
out and perpetuate by their names the narrow lines of those protecting
walls which held snug and secure the mere handful of folk of which
London was then composed. At nine o’clock in the evening, when Bow-bell
rang, and the voices of the other city churches took up the
curfew-strain, the gates were shut for the night, and the citizens
retired to their dwellings under the protection of armed watchmen who
guarded their slumbers along the walls. Westward from Fleet Street and
Holborn, beyond which so much of modern London lies, the city had not
then penetrated.
Within and about the walls there were many “fair churches for divine
service,” with old St. Paul’s in their midst—the Gothic St. Paul’s of
the days before the great fire; and many prisons to help the churches in
their philanthropic work. Open spaces were very numerous; trees were
everywhere to be seen; fields invaded the most sacred strongholds of
commercial activity; conduits and brooks (whereof Lamb’s Conduit Street
to-day carries a nominal reminiscence) flowed through every part of the
town. The narrow, straggling streets ran hither and thither with no very
marked definity of aim; for county councils had not as yet come into
existence, and metropolitan improvements were still hidden in the womb
of time; and so unsanitary were the general conditions that they were
seldom free from epidemic disease. Cheap, with its old cross just
opposite the entrance to Wood Street, was a famous spot for trading of
all kinds; but there were other localities which had their specialized
activities. St. Paul’s, for instance, was the acknowledged quarter for
booksellers, as indeed it has continued to be down to the present time.
Houndsditch, like the Houndsditch of to-day, and Long Lane in
Smithfield, abounded in shops for second-hand clothing—_fripperies_, as
they were called. “He shows like a walking frippery,” says one of the
characters in “The City Madam”; while it was in the latter place that
Mistress Birdlime in “Westward Ho” speaks of “hiring three liveries.” In
St. Martin’s-le-Grand clustered the foreign handicraftsmen of doubtful
character, who manufactured copper lace and imitation jewellery; and
Watling Street and Birchin Lane were the haunts of the tailors. Then,
again, it was in Bucklersbury that the grocers and druggists most did
congregate. “Go to Bucklersbury and fetch me two ounces of preserved
melons,” says Mistress Tenterhook in “Westward Ho.” Fleet Lane and Pie
Corner were so famous for their cook-shops that Anne in “The City Madam”
might well exclaim, when the porters enter with their baskets of
provisions, that they smell unmistakably of these localities; while to
Panyer Alley repaired all true lovers of tripe. Even religious opinions
had their special homes. Bloomsbury and Drury Lane, for example, were
favorite haunts of Catholics; and the Puritans were particularly strong
in Blackfriars. This explains the words put by Webster into the mouth of
one of his characters: “We are as pure about the heart as if we dwelt
amongst ’em in Blackfriars,” and Doll Common’s description of Face, in
“The Alchemist,” as—
“A rascal, upstart, apocryphal captain,
Whom not a Puritan in Blackfriars will trust.”
And through all this jumble of wealth and dirt, away past the suburbs
and into the open country beyond, ran “the famous River Thames”—the
“great silent highway,” as it has been called,—fed by the Fleet and
other forgotten and now hidden streams, and bearing upon its majestic
current its hundreds of watermen, its boats, its barges, and its swans.
It was spanned by a single bridge, of which Lyly speaks enthusiastically
in his “Euphues,” and which is described by the German traveller, Paul
Hentzner, as “a bridge of stone, eight hundred feet in length, of
wonderful work. It is supported,” this writer continues, “upon twenty
piers of square stone, sixty feet high and thirty broad, joined by
arches of about twenty feet diameter.” And he adds, touching in a brief
sentence upon a characteristic of its structure which must seem
particularly curious to modern readers: “The whole is covered on each
side with houses, so disposed as to have the appearance of a continued
street, not at all of a bridge.”
But if the difference between to-day and three centuries ago is striking
enough within the city walls, still more striking does it become as we
pass beyond the gates. Fleet Street, where Dr. Johnson was presently to
enjoy watching the ceaseless ebb and flow of the great tide of human
life, was still suburban; Chancery Lane, with its wide gardens on the
eastern side and Lincoln’s Inn enclosure on the western, possessed only
a few scattered houses at either end. The Strand—
“That goodly thoroughfare between
The court and city,”
as a Puritan poet called it—was a long country road flanked with
noblemen’s houses (“a continual row of palaces, belonging to the chief
nobility,” Hentzner says), the gardens of which on the one side ran down
to the river, and on the other backed upon the fine open space of
pasture-land called Covent (that is, Convent) Garden. At Charing there
was an ancient cross, and beyond, wide fields known as the Haymarket,
the quiet stretches of St. James’s Park, and the wide country road
called Piccadilly, the regular highway to Reading and the west. St.
Martin’s Lane ran up between hedgerows and meadows to Tottenham, or
Totten Court. In the other direction, towards Westminster, there was the
Court, with its Tiltyard, standing where the Horseguards now stand, and
beyond this the city of Westminster, with its abbey and great hall,
lying in the quiet fields. Just opposite, on the other bank, in an
unbroken expanse of country, stood Lambeth Palace, whence a long, lonely
road led eastward, through Lambeth Marsh, to the city purlieus on the
Surrey side of the water.
What we know as the suburbs of London were then separate villages, to
reach which one had to make a tedious journey over open country and
along desolate lanes. Finsbury Field was covered with windmills, and
there the archers met for practice. Islington was famous, to quote Ben
Jonson, for the citizens that went a-ducking—that is, duck-hunting—in
its ponds. Pimlico and Holloway were favorite resorts of
pleasure-seeking townsfolk on Sunday afternoons. Hoxton and Hampstead
and Willesden lay far away in the country; Holborn was a rural highway
running through the little village of St. Giles’s towards Oxford; and
the Edgeware Road took you away to Tyburn, the spot which has acquired
such grim notoriety in the annals of crime. Highway robberies took place
at Kentish Town and Hampstead; even the Queen’s Majesty was mobbed by a
handful of ruffians in the sequestered neighborhood of Islington, which
stood alone among the hills to the north; while no man who valued his
life would venture to walk after nightfall, unarmed or unprotected, as
far into the country as Hyde Park Corner.
Let us now look a little more closely at the street life of the city
which we have thus roughly sketched.
There was little of that never-ceasing bustle with which we are
familiar—little of the eternal hurry, the intense strain, the rush and
turmoil of our modern existence; but the buzz of commerce was everywhere
to be heard, telling us that the world was not asleep. The streets were
rough, ill-paved, and narrow, and the appearance of a vehicle in them
was sufficiently rare an occurrence to attract attention; though the
ostentation of the rich in making use of carriages on every possible
occasion was already beginning to be satirized by the writers of the
time—as, for instance, by Massinger in “The City Madam,” and by Cooke in
“Greene’s Tu Quoque.” There were the churches—six score or so of them,
Lyly tells us, within the walls; the inns, with their wide hostleries;
the private houses, built not in long uniform rows, but irregularly, as
though they desired to preserve some traces of personal character. Their
upper stories were frequently built out, and sometimes projected so far
across the narrow streetway that Jonson pictures a lady and her lover
exchanging confidences from the topmost windows of opposite
tenements—“arguing from different premises,” as Dr. Holmes would say.
There, too, were the shops, looking more like booths in a fair, with
their quaint and picturesque signs, and their merchandise exposed to
public gaze on open stalls, while in front of them paced the young
apprentices, besieging the ears of every passer-by with their ceaseless
clamor of “What d’ye lack?” and their long-winded recommendations of the
articles which they had for sale. In Middleton’s “Michaelmas Term” we
have a scene before Quomodo’s shop, and Quomodo himself calling out to
Easy and Shortyard: “Do you hear, sir? What lack you, gentlemen? See,
good kerseys and broadcloths here—I pray you come near.” Many other
passages of similar import might be added. Nor were these the only, or
even the noisiest, symptoms of commercial enterprise. Itinerant vendors
of the Autolycus tribe also patrolled the streets, murdering the Queen’s
English, like their descendants of to-day, as in loud, hoarse voices
they advertised their miscellaneous wares. There were fishwives,
orange-women, and chimney-sweeps, broom-men, hawkers of meat pies and
pepper, of rushes for the floor, of mats, oat-cakes, milk, and coal; and
numerous Irish costermongers (of the kind Face refers to in “The
Alchemist”) who trafficked in fruit and vegetables. In addition to all
these, and to complete the confusion of the streets, there were
mountebanks, jugglers, and ballad-singers, full of strange tricks and
new songs, whereby to attract attention and pick up a few odd coins.
The daily round of existence in the city streets offered, therefore, no
small amount of interest and variety; while from time to time the
ordinary routine was broken in upon by fresh elements of excitement. Now
it might be a splendid procession—perhaps of one of the great livery
companies, purse-proud and ostentatious; perhaps of the newly-installed
Lord Mayor, on his way back from Westminster; perhaps of the Virgin
Queen and her retinue, coming cityward on some state occasion from
Richmond or Whitehall. Now, again, it might be a procession of a very
different kind—a mob following a thief who was going to be put into the
pillory, or a woman of disreputable character who, meeting the fate
dreaded by Doll Common, was carted through the streets to the
accompaniment of a brass band, and amid the cries and hootings of the
populace; or a group of felons who were led out of the city along
Holborn to Tyburn, there to pay the last penalty of the law. Sometimes,
too, there were large gatherings in St. Paul’s churchyard to hear some
famous preacher—like Bishop Jewell—discourse from the steps of the great
cross; and sometimes there were street fights between retainers of rival
houses, or bands of hot-tempered ’prentices belonging to the different
city guilds—fights which generally ended in bloodshed and broken heads.
The ’prentices of the city were indeed notoriously a turbulent tribe,
and they figure in many a brawl and squabble in the plays of the time.
“If he were in London, among the clubs, up went his heels for striking
of a ’prentice,” says Gazet, in Massinger’s “Renegado,” referring in
this phrase to the fact that clubs were habitually kept in the shops
ready for use in the event of any affray. So that the London streets
were not so dull as one might at first suppose; while for the rest there
was plenty of quiet, steady activity from dawn till dusk. Though the
struggle for wealth was not then so keen as it is to-day, and men on the
whole took things more easily, life was full of earnestness and purpose,
and commercial ambition shared the magnificent vigor and energy of the
Elizabethan nature with the fever of adventure and a youthful,
spontaneous, and unabashed delight in the pleasures of sense. Wide roads
were open to the young man of brains and courage, roads which would lead
to place and power. Fortunes were to be made, positions won; and the
’prentice, starting out in his career, had many examples of self-made
and successful men to remind him that the world was all before him where
to choose, and that the future largely depended upon himself. Thus,
though the London of Shakspere’s time was far different from the London
of to-day as regards its commerce, its activities, its habits and daily
life, it was still a thriving city, the object of ambition, the
dreamland of the aspiring youth, the great heart which set the blood
pulsing and dancing through all the arteries of the land.
As for the shops themselves, we must dismiss them with a very few words.
The modern difficulty—the importation of foreign wares, and the
immigration of foreign dealers—was already to the front; and Italian,
French, German, Spanish, and Flemish tradesmen were to be found in
almost every street—each with his peculiar class of custom. Some writers
of the time, like William Stafford, in his “Brief Conceit,” grow violent
over the inroads of these aliens, and roundly proclaim, with Bishop
Hall, that all the vice of the city was to be laid at their doors. But
in the ordinary walks of business the Englishman, in spite of a good
deal of characteristic bluster and grumbling, still held his ground. The
apothecary sold love-charms and philters, tobacco, cane, and pudding, as
well as drugs; but there were regular tobacco merchants, also, whose
shops were of unrivalled splendor. The immense vogue of this novel
luxury is sufficiently shown by the statement made by Barnaby Riche in
“The Honesty of this Age,” that seven thousand shops in London “vented”
tobacco, and by the passing remark of Hentzner, that it was smoked (or
“drunk,” as the phrase then went) everywhere. At the theatre and all
such places of public resort, the pipe was the Englishman’s habitual
companion, and from sundry passages in Jonson, Dekker, Marston, and
other dramatists, we infer that it was sometimes carried even to church.
Among the most noteworthy of the tradesmen of the time were the barbers,
who, be it remembered, were surgeons as well, and would cut your beard
or bleed you, trim your hair or pull out your teeth, with absolute
impartiality. Their shops were the favorite resorts of idlers, as they
had been long since in the days of Lucian; and owing to the immense
attention then paid to hair and beard, the more accomplished among them
drove an enormous trade. Their garrulity was proverbial. “Oh, sir, you
know I am a barber and cannot tittle-tattle,” says Dello, in Lyly’s
“Midas,” in a scene which is full of curious information concerning the
barbers of the time. The Cutbeard of Jonson’s “Silent Woman,” is another
illustration in point. It may be mentioned, as an odd feature of their
establishments, that a lute was commonly kept in readiness for the
amusement of those who might have to wait for attention, as the
newspapers and comic weeklies are kept to-day. “Barbers shall wear thee
on their citterns,” says Rhetias to Coculus, in Ford’s “Lover’s
Melancholy,” referring to the grotesque figureheads by which these
instruments were often decorated.
In the matter of the relations of sellers and purchasers, we may note,
as one of those little touches of nature which make the whole world kin,
that customers, as we learn from more than one old play, often indulged
in the quite modern practice of having half the goods in a shop laid out
for inspection before buying the most trumpery article. Nor, on the
other hand, were the dealers of the time much behind their descendants
of to-day in what are known as the tricks of trade. Adulteration was a
crying evil; some of the methods often employed, for example, for the
“sophistication” of tobacco, will be recalled by all readers of “The
Alchemist.” Another common practice among shopkeepers was that of
darkening their stores to disguise the inferiority of their merchandise.
This is constantly referred to by contemporary writers. The sturdy
Stubbs attacks the abuse in his “Display of Corruptions.” “They have
their shops and places where they sell their cloth very dark and
obscure,” he writes, referring to the mercers and drapers of his time,
“of purpose to deceive buyers.” Webster, in “The Duchess of Malfi,”
employs this familiar abuse in the turn of a compliment: “This darkening
of your worth is not like that which tradesmen use in the city; their
false lights are to rid bad wares off;” and Quomodo, in “Michaelmas
Term,” boasts, humanly enough, that his shop is not “so dark as some of
his neighbors’.” Again, Brome, in the “City Wit”: “What should the city
do with honesty? Why are your wares gummed? Your shops dark?” In
“Westward Ho” we read that the shop of a linen-draper was generally “as
dark as a room in Bedlam,” and, not to multiply quotations, Middleton,
in “Anything for a Quiet Life,” speaks of shopwares being habitually
“set in deceiving lights.” Colliers, too, were so notorious for short
measure and other crafty practices that Greene, in his “Notable
Discovery of Cosenage,” includes a special “delightful discourse” on
purpose to lay bare their knavery.
The houses were not yet numbered, and all trading establishments were
known by their tokens—great signboards decorating every shop with
strange mottoes and fantastic devices, which took the place of the
advertising media of the present day. Milton, we remember, was born at
the Spread Eagle, in Bread Street, and well on in the eighteenth century
the imprints of publishers still refer to these customary signs; as in
the case of the famous “left-legged Tonson,” who did business at
“Shakespeare’s Head, over against Catherine Street, in the Strand.”
Quotations illustrative of these trading tokens and the part they played
in the commercial life of the time might be indefinitely multiplied; but
we must content ourselves with a single bit of evidence from “The
Alchemist.” Abel Drugger, the young tradesman, is opening a new shop,
and comes to Subtle to take his advice about the choice of a suitable
device. In the one suggested by Subtle, Jonson satirizes the wildly
absurd combinations frequently employed, like the foolish advertisements
of our own century, to attract or compel public attention:—
“He shall have a bel, that’s Abel;
And by it standing one whose name is Dee,
In a rug gown, there’s D and Rug, that’s _drug_;
And right anenst him a dog snarling Er—
There’s Drugger, Abel Drugger—there’s his sign.”
It is hardly necessary to add that though these signs have practically
disappeared from general use, they survive in trademarks and in the odd
and often outlandish trading tokens still to be seen over the doors of
English public houses and inns; though just why public houses should
have kept up a practice otherwise almost universally abandoned since the
numbering of houses came into vogue, it would be difficult to say.
But with the oncoming of the night, silence, for the most part, fell
over the city and its surroundings. There was as yet no public lighting
of the streets, but the good citizens were supposed to do their
individual shares towards illuminating the dark thoroughfares, to insure
which the watchmen, with lanterns and halberts, would pace their solemn
rounds, hoarsely bawling at every doorway, “Lantern and a whole
candle-light! Hang out your lights here!” Writing from Paris in 1620,
and referring to the terrible condition of the streets in the French
capital, Howell says: “This makes one think often of the excellent
nocturnal government of our city of London, where one may pass and
repass securely all hours of the night, if he gives good words to the
watch.” Yet it is to be feared that this patriotic comment puts the
matter in a somewhat too favorable way. The impression one derives from
reading the plays and pamphlets of the time certainly is that the roads
were always more or less dangerous after dark, and that good,
law-abiding townsfolk were best off within doors, or, at all events, in
the immediate neighborhood of their own houses. If they were forced to
go farther afield, they would do well to take a link-boy with them to
guide them with his light, unless they were like Falstaff, who, as we
remember, once told Bardolph that he been saved a thousand marks in
links and torches walking between tavern and tavern, owing to the fiery
and luminous character of the said Bardolph’s nose. A stout ’prentice
boy with a well-weighted club was a desirable companion, too, for those
who valued purses and pates. For the streets were infested by “roaring
boys” and wild young bloods, whose principal amusement, besides fighting
among themselves, was in persecuting quiet citizens, and who came into
almost nightly conflict with the doting old Dogberry watchmen, who
endeavored to cope with them, often with but very slight success. These
are the fine fellows described in Shirley’s “Gamester,”—
“that roar
In brothels, and break windows, fright the streets,
And sometimes set upon innocent bell-men to beget
Discourse for a week’s diet,”
and whom Jonson’s Kastril looked up to with so much admiration and
respect.
* * * * *
I could not hope by any series of thumbnail sketches to conjure up the
manifold details of the daily life of Elizabethan London as one finds it
portrayed in the plays of Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, Cooke, and the
strange pamphlets of Nash and Greene. But we must not linger over these
street scenes. It is ample time that we should pass on to consider a
little the various classes which went to make up the population of the
metropolis in the days of which we speak.
In the common relationships of class with class the age of Elizabeth
differed widely from our own. Sociability was one of the main
characteristics of the time, and this the guild life of the larger towns
did much to foster. In the places of common resort—in the tavern, the
theatre, at St. Paul’s Walk, or the Archery Ground at Finsbury, men
daily met their neighbors and brother-citizens, and rubbed shoulders and
chopped opinions with a warmth and open-heartedness which, if they had
little of modern propriety, also knew little of modern restraint.
Moreover, London was not then the vast, overgrown, incoherent city which
it has since become, and its inhabitants still took that personal
interest in one another’s doings, and felt, to some extent at any rate,
that sense of family sympathy which, though they are common traits of
provincial town life, are characteristic of the metropolis no longer.
Nevertheless, the classes remained absolutely distinct, cut off from one
another by chasms of custom and interest, and even law, which were
never, save with the rarest exceptions, bridged over. The enactments
which had been promulgated at the beginning of the reign to fix with
rigid certainty the special garbs of the various ranks of the community,
are sufficient to show to what extent the caste system, with its
attendant prejudices and conventions, was still rooted deep in English
life. The young ’prentice might haply make a fortune, and reach a
position of great civic distinction. This much was open to him; but for
his helpmeet in life he looked no higher than his master’s daughter. The
successful merchant might even reach the Lord Mayor’s bench, but he was
still a citizen, and laid no claim to set his foot within the charmed
circle of gentle life. This condition of things is illustrated again and
again in the plays of the time, as in Middleton’s “City Madam” and
Dekker’s “Shoemaker’s Holiday.” There was practically no overlapping of
interests, no intermingling of class with class. Money could do much,
but it could not, as it will at present, purchase an entrance into the
most select society; nor, in the matrimonial market of that day, was a
coronet ever knocked down for a dower. But this is only one side of the
question. If there was little class sympathy, there was little class
rivalry also. Society was more diffuse than it is to-day—held together
less firmly, but with less of the friction which is a necessary
preliminary to that readjustment of social arrangements which the
industrial movements of the modern world are tending slowly to bring
about. The classes touched externally, but that was all. In spirit they
stood aloof—each content to go its own way, to live its own life, but
each, for the most part, equally ready to let the others freely do the
same.
Of the various classes which went to the making of the population of
Shakspere’s London, two only will here demand attention—the gentry and
the citizens. Of course, within both of these great groups there were
many grades, but time will not allow us to subdivide. Of course, too,
beyond and outside these altogether, lay the seething mass of
miscellaneous humanity—the vast fringe of the population—which then, as
now, formed so dark and so dangerous an unabsorbed element in the city’s
general life. Threads from this dingy and tangled social frilling were
sometimes caught up and woven for picturesque purposes into the pattern
of the plays of the time. But the epic of the submerged tenth was as yet
undreamed of; and all this side of Elizabethan civilization must for the
present be left out of view.
The citizens lived for the most part at their shops or places of
business; the gentlefolk were more distributed. Some still had their
habitations in the commercial portions of the city, and those of them
who regularly lived in the country and came to town during
term-time—which then constituted the London season,—were often content
to find temporary lodging over some druggist’s or barber’s shop. But the
exodus of the gentry and courtiers from the centres of trade and labor
was already beginning, and the aristocratic neighborhoods were
admittedly outside the walls. In “Greene’s Tu Quoque” when Lionel Nash
is knighted, he delivers up his store to his head ’prentice, and
announces his intention of moving the next day into the Strand; which
may be taken as showing that for the retired tradesman,—and still more,
therefore, for the gentleman or courtier,—a residence well removed from
the city was deemed the proper thing.
It is difficult to speak in general terms of the houses of the time,
since, naturally enough, the comfort and luxury of the domestic
arrangements varied considerably as one passed up or down the social
scale. A few broad statements may, however, be made. In the average
dwelling the ceilings were covered with plaster of Paris, and the inner
walls wainscoted and tapestried; the tapestry being worked with
landscapes and figures often of a very elaborate character. This
explains Lyly’s simile in “Midas”—“like arras, full of device.” Enough
space was left for any one to hide between the arras and the wall—a
fact, it will be remembered, frequently made use of by the Elizabethan
dramatists, as by Webster in “The Duchess of Malfi,” where Cariola
conceals herself behind the hanging to overhear what goes on between the
Duchess and Antonio; and by Shakspere in “Henry the Fourth,” where
Falstaff goes to sleep and has his pocket picked; and even more notably
in the famous rat-killing scene in “Hamlet.” In addition, pictures were
often used for decoration, and when valuable were protected by curtains.
“I yet but draw the curtain; now to the picture,” says Monticelso in
Webster’s “White Devil”; and, again, “We will draw the curtain and show
you the picture,” says Olivia in “Twelfth Night,” as she removes her
veil. The halls were lighted by candelabras or torch-bearers, and
watch-lights, or night-lights, were in common use. At the foot of the
master’s bed, rolled under during the day and drawn out at night, was a
truckle-bed for his page. “Well, go thy ways for as sweet a breasted
page as ever lay at his master’s feet in a truckle-bed,” says Dondolo in
Middleton’s “More Dissemblers Besides Women.” The tables had flaps, and
the floors were strewn with rushes, for carpets were as yet unknown.
These rushes were renewed for fresh-comers. “Strangers have green
rushes, while daily guests are not worth a rush,” says Lyly, in “Sapho
and Phao”—a remark in which, by the way, we are reminded of the origin
of one of our familiar phrases. Brick was costly, and the buildings were
mostly of wood; but a new fashion was just coming in—that of employing
well-constructed stoves in place of the open, smoky fireplaces hitherto
general. The houses were now, too, provided with glass for the windows,
which had not been the case a hundred years before, horn or wicker
lattice-work having been used for the purpose. But this new notion was
opposed by William Stafford, who saw in it the symptom of growing
fondness for what he contemptuously called foreign nick-nacks. Chimneys,
too, of which some years before there had been a few specimens only in
every large town, were now general in the ordinary dwellings of the
middle classes. The old wooden platters were giving way to pewter,
which, though still rare, was gradually coming into use. Tin spoons also
were making their appearance. China, gold, and silver plate were to be
seen on the tables of the wealthy, and Venetian glass was sometimes
employed, though, as this was very expensive, many people still drank
from their mugs of burnt stone. Instead of the straw bundle and log on
which people had formerly been content to sleep, proper sheets, pillows,
and bolsters were now employed; not, however, without incurring the
ridicule or the wrath of lovers of the good old times and moralists of
severe complexion. “What makes us so weak as we now are?” demands Sir
Lionel, in “Greene’s Tu Quoque,” abusing the new generation with all the
vigor of a hale old man. “A feather bed! What so unapt for exercise? A
feather bed! What breeds such pains and aches in our bones? Why, a
feather bed!” Yet houses were so scantily furnished that uninvited or
unexpected guests often used to bring their own stools with them, a
practice referred to by Massinger in his “Unnatural Combat,” where he
speaks of those who, “like unbidden guests, bring their own stools.”
Many of the household arrangements, especially in the way of sanitation,
were from our own point of view still crude and primitive enough. But
the age of Elizabeth, as regards domestic economy generally, was
distinctly a period of progress, and we have only to compare the
sixteenth century with the centuries which went before, to sympathize
with old Harrison, when, dealing with this very matter, he exclaims in a
kind of fervent rapture—“God be thankt for his good gifts!”
Turning from the houses themselves to the home life of the time, we may
notice that in the establishments of the ancient nobility the
arrangements were still on a large and almost regal scale, savoring yet,
in spite of the slow movements conspicuous throughout society, of the
feudalism which was now on the wane, and the old customs which, in an
age of transition, were gradually being left behind. In the greater
households a number of young gentlemen of good family, usually the
younger sons of knights and esquires, continued to offer personal
service as in former days. Beneath these were the retainers, so-called,
who, not living in the house or being liable to any menial duty,
attended their lord on occasions of public ceremony; while, in the third
place, there were the servants proper, who formed actual portions of the
establishment, and on whom its various duties devolved. These were
headed by the steward, under whose control was the common herd of
serving men and women and pages. With these must be reckoned the poor
tutor, passing rich on five marks a year, who sat below the salt, and,
as Hall’s satire shows, had to endure all kinds of indignity. And,
finally, there was the jester, the privileged personage of the
household, who could say and do things on which no one else would
venture. “There is no slander in an allowed fool, though he do nothing
but rail,” says Olivia in “Twelfth Night”; while the melancholy Jaques,
speaking of his desire to assume the motley dress, protests:—
“I must have liberty
Withal, as large a charter as the wind,
To blow on whom I please; for so fools have.”
Thus the jester was able to find in his wit and position an excuse
generally, though not invariably, sufficient to cover every freedom
taken with master or guests. But in Shakspere’s time this ancient and
long-famous appurtenance to the larger households was already passing
out of existence, a fact to which the dramatist himself makes reference
in “As You Like It”: “Since the little wit that fools have was silenced,
the little foolery that wise men have makes the greater show.”
But when we pass from these huge and ostentatious establishments to the
dwellings of the middle and trading classes, we find the transitional
character of the period far more marked. Evidences of domestic
development and improvement reveal themselves on every side. The
essential traits of mediævalism were gradually disappearing; and with
the steady realization on the part of the commercial elements in the
community of their increasing importance in the complex life of the
time, there went many significant changes, indicating the slow collapse
of the old _régime_ and the consolidation of society upon its modern
foundations.