For Charles discouraged the practice for any but the most serious offences. The Spaniards, whose dignified manners commended themselves to his tastes, considered duelling vulgar, and put it down by the weight of a public opinion more potent than regulations. If the ruffling young gallants of the Inns of Court were too prone to pick a quarrel, and too ready to display their prowess with the sword, the manners of the Court and those who frequented it well deserved the epithet urbane.

CHAPTER III

THE PLAY

Of all the amusements which London offered so liberally to pleasure-seekers, none was more highly esteemed than the play, and no wonder when such a galaxy of talent, with Shakespeare in its midst, held the stage. For a half century past a wonderful development of the drama had been taking place, which found its culmination in the production of Hamlet at the Globe in 1602, the year before the death of Queen Elizabeth. Many things contributed to this; the Reformation with its secularising of life, the Renaissance with its humanist conceptions as well as with the classical models it brought within reach, the widening of the horizon, the thrill of vivid selfconscious life, the individualism, if by individualism we mean personal initiative, which characterised 'the spacious 'times of great Elizabeth,' all helped on the movement; life itself had grown dramatic, and it reflected itself upon the stage as, in our own more introspective days, it reflects itself in the novel.

The stage had always been popular, but for long it had been entirely in the service of religion. In days when few read, the best way of teaching Bible stories was by the presentation of mysteries and miracle plays, which were soon followed by moralities in which symbolical characters of virtues and vices were represented. These were at first acted by the priests themselves, but later by the children-that is, by the choirs or monastery

By degrees these plays guilds, who kept their

schools attached to the church. passed into the hands of the companies of paid actors, and managed the entertainments for Corpus Christi and other great festivals, until the Reformation put down such observances. The dramatic spirit, however, was bound to find an outlet, and stories from history or adaptations from the classics begin to make their appearance. Translations from the plays of Seneca became very popular, but soon an independent school of English comedy arose, and opened with Ralph Royster Doyster by Nicholas Udall, an Eton

master.

By Shakespeare's time Kyd, Lilly, Peele, Greene, and Marlowe had all written or were writing for the stage. Shakespeare's own work belongs, indeed, half to the sixteenth century, but it was in the opening of the seventeenth that it arrived at its completeness, and until the Civil War it held the stage in undisputed preeminence. Round about him stood a band of dramatic writers enough to shed glory on any other age; there were Beaumont and Fletcher, who shone in idyllic fancy, in graceful pastoral conceptions; there was Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's rival in learning and in industry; there were Webster and Tourneur, who were at their best in what Symonds has described as the Tragedy of Blood. Yet Shakespeare excels all these in the amazing breadth of his view of life, which includes tragedy and comedy, romance and farce; he can give us clown or lover, fool or philosopher, a Touchstone or an Imogen, a Jaques or a Romeo, a Falstaff or a Hamlet, each with the same unerring touch. No less does he excel in the genius which fires these creations with life; not only with 'the very form and body of the time,' but with the reality which holds its own through all change of time. Put upon the stage the White Devil, Every Man in his Humour, the Tragedy of Edward III., or The Faithful Shepherdess, you will be interested, but you will feel that

it is a revival; but Shakespeare is never revived, for while human nature is what it is his work cannot die.

Those must have been stirring days for play-goers. How much we wish that the dramatic critic had been in existence that we might read some account of the first

night of Hamlet. That Shakespeare's work was very highly esteemed among his fellow-dramatists, we gather as much from the restless jealousy Ben Jonson from time to time betrayed as from the praise they continually lavish upon it. Laborious, painstaking, learned as Jonson was, and inordinately greedy of praise and ambitious of making his way with great men, it must have sometimes vexed his soul to see genius soar while talent painfully climbed. In the learning of the schools he knew himself Shakespeare's superior; the great dramatist had, said he,

small Latin and less Greek,' and it annoyed him to see himself so easily passed in the school of life. It is always a trial to plodding industry to see genius sweep ahead, and the ease and fulness of the great poet's inspiration was a thing no pains could rival. So sometimes Jonson spoke sneeringly of the man who never 'blotted a line,' and inferred that his own work was to be taken more seriously; but no doubt he spoke his true mind in the lines which he wrote when the poet's work was done and the rivalry quenched in death, 'To the memory of my beloved Master William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us.' There is a very genuine ring about

Soul of the age!

The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
My Shakspeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little farther off to make thee room:
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still, while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.

Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!

Jonson's own attitude towards his rival we can very well understand from Drummond's description of him :'He is a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner ' and scorner of others; given rather to losse a friend than a jest; jealous of every word and action of those about 'him (especiallie after drink, which is one of the elements in which he liveth); a dissembler of ill parts which raigne in him, a bragger of some good, that he wanteth; 'thinketh nothing well but what either he himself or 'some of his friends or countrymen hath said or done; 'he is passionately kynde or angry; careless either to 'gaine or keep; vindictive, but if he be well answered, at ' himself. For any religion, as being versed in both. 'Interpreteth best sayings and deedes often to the worst. Oppressed with his fantasie, which hath ever mastered 'his reason, a general disease in many Poets. His 'inventions are smooth and easie, but above all he 'excelleth in a Translation. When his play of a Silent 'Woman was first acted, there was found verses after on 'the stage against him, concluding that that play was 'well named the Silent Woman, there was never one man 'to say Plaudite to it.'

This rather uncharitable sketch sets before us the irritable self-centred man who carped at the supremacy which all the time his judgment endorsed. Shakespeare does not seem to have resented if he were aware of Jonson's strictures; his large-minded genial nature won him friendships among the dramatists, among his fellowactors, and with his patron, the Earl of Southampton; between whom and himself, even if the much-disputed identification of the sonnets is set aside, a very warm personal relation seems to have existed. Good fellowship must have been wonderfully fostered by those meetings at the Mermaid, where both dramatists and actors resorted, and which have been immortalised by Beaumont in lines which, well known as they are, one cannot but quote in this place :