Travel, foreign, Shakespeare’s ridicule of, 42 and n
‘Troilus and Cresseid,’ 227
Troilus and Cressida: allusion to the strife between adult and
boy actors, 217
date of production, 217 225
the quarto and folio editions, 226 227
treatment of the theme, 227 228
the endeavour to treat the play as the poet’s
contribution to controversy between Jonson and Marston and Dekker, 228 n
plot drawn from Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Cresseid
and Lydgate’s ‘Troy Book,’ 227
For editions see Section xix. (Bibliography),
301-25
‘Troy Book,’ Lydgate’s, 227
True Tragedie of Richard III, The, an anonymous play, 63 301
True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henry the Sixt, as it was sundrie times acted by the Earl of Pembroke his servants, The, 59
Turbervile, George, use of the word ‘sonnet’ by, 427 n 2
Twelfth Night: description of a betrothal, 23 n
indebtedness to the story of ‘Apollonius and
Silla,’ 53
date of production, 209
allusion to the ‘new map,’ 209 210 n 1
produced at Middle Temple Hall, 210
Manningham’s description of, 210
probable source of the story, 210
For editions see Section xix. (Bibliography),
301-25
Twiss, F., 364 n
Two Gentlemen of Verona: allusion to Valentine travelling from
Verona to Milan by sea, 43
date of production, 52
probably an adaptation, 53
source of the story, 53
farcical drollery, 53
first publication, 53
influence of Lyly, 62
satirical allusion to sonnetteering, 107 108
resemblance of it to All’s Well that Ends Well,
163
For editions see Section xix. (Bibliography),
301-25
Two Noble Kinsmen, The: attributed to Fletcher and
Shakespeare, 259
and n
Massinger’s alleged share in its production, 259
plot drawn from Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s
Tale,’ 260
Twyne, Lawrence, the story of Pericles in the ‘Patterne of Painfull Adventures’ by, 244
Tyler, Mr. Thomas, on the sonnets, 129 n 406 n 415 n
U
Ulrici, ‘Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art’ by, 345
V
Variorum editions of Shakespeare, 322 323 362
Vautrollier, Thomas, the London printer, 32
Venesyon Comedy, The, produced by Henslowe at the Rose, 69
‘Venus and Adonis:’ published in 1593, 74
dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, 74 126
its imagery and general tone, 75
the influence of Ovid, 75
and of Lodges ‘Scillaes Metamorphosis,’ 75 and n 2
the motto, 75 and n 1
eulogies bestowed upon it, 78 79
early editions, 79 299 300
Verdi, operas by, 352
Vere, Lady Elizabeth, 378
Vernon, Mistress Elizabeth, 379
Versification, Shakespeare’s, 49 and n 50
Vigny, Alfred de, version of Othello by, 351
Villemain, recognition of the poet’s greatness by, 350
Virginia Company, 381
Visor, William, in Henry IV, member of a family at Woodmancote, 168
Voltaire, strictures on the poet by, 348 349
Voss, J. H., German translation of Shakespeare by, 344
W
Walden, Lord, Campion’s sonnet to, 140
Wales, Henry, Prince of, the Earl of Nottingham’s company of players taken into the patronage of, 231 n
Walker, William, the poet’s godson, 276
Walker, W. Sidney, on Shakespeare’s versification, 49 n
Walley, Henry, printer, 226
Warburton, Bishop, revised version of Pope’s edition of Shakespeare by, 318 319
Ward, Dr. A. W., 365
Ward, Rev. John, on the poet’s annual expenditure, 203
on the visits of Drayton and Jonson to New Place before the
poet’s death, 271
his account of the poet, 361
Warner, Richard, 364
Warner, William, the probable translator of the Menæchmi, 54
Warren, John, 300
Warwickshire: prevalence of the surname Shakespeare, 1 2
a position of the Arden family, 6
Queen Elizabeth’s progress on the way to Kenilworth,
17
Watchmen in the poet’s plays, 31 62
Watkins, Richard, printer, 393
Watson, Thomas, 61
the passage on Time in his ‘Passionate Centurie of
Love’ elaborated in ‘Venus and Adonis,’ 77 and n 2
his sonnets, 83 427 n 2 428
plagiarisation of Petrarch, 101 n 4 102
foreign origin of his sonnets, 103 n 1 112
his ‘Tears of Fancie,’ 113 n 1 433
‘Weak endings’ in Shakespeare, 49 n
Webbe, Alexander, makes John Shakespeare overseer of his will, 11
Webbe, Robert, buys the Snitterfield property from Shakespeare’s mother, 12 and n
Webster, John, alludes in the White Divel to Shakespeare’s industry, 278 n
Weelkes, Thomas, 182 n
Weever, Thomas: his eulogy of the poet, 179 n
allusion in his ‘Mirror of Martyrs’ to
Antony’s speech at Cæsar’s funeral, 211
Welcombe, enclosure of common fields at, 269 270 and n
‘Westward for Smelts’ and the Merry Wives of Windsor,
172 and n
3
story of Ginevra in, 249
Whateley, Anne, the assumed identification of her with Anne Hathaway, 23 24 and n
Wheler, R. B., 363
Whetstone, George, his Promos and Cassandra, 237
White, Mr. Richard Grant, 325
Whitehall, performances at, 81 82 234 235 and n 241 254 n 264
Wieland, Christopher Martin: his translation of Shakespeare, 343
Wilkins, George, his collaboration with Shakespeare in Timon of
Athens and Pericles, 242 243
his novel founded on the play of Pericles, 244
Wilks, Robert, actor, 335
Will, Shakespeare’s, 203 271 273-276
‘Will’ sonnets, the, 117
Elizabethan meanings of ‘will,’ 416
Shakespeare’s uses of the word, 417
the poet’s puns on the word, 418
play upon ‘wish’ and ‘will,’ 419
interpretation of the word in Sonnets cxxiv.-vi. and
cxliii., 420-26
‘Willobie his Avisa,’ 155-158
Wilmcote, house of Shakespeare’s mother, 6 7
bequest to Mary Arden of the Asbies property at, 7
mortgage of the Asbies property at, 12 26
and ‘Wincot’ in The Taming of the Shrew,
166 167
Wilnecote. See under Wincot
Wilson, Robert, author of The Three Ladies of London, 67
Wilson, Thomas, his manuscript version of ‘Diana,’ 53
Wilton, Shakespeare and his company at, 231 232 411 and n
‘Wilton, Life of Jack,’ by Nash, 385 and n 1
Wincot (in The Taming of the Shrew), its identification, 165 166
‘Windsucker,’ Chapman’s, 135 n
Winter’s Tale, A: at the Globe in 1611, 251
acted at Court, 251 and n
based on Greene’s Pandosto, 251
a few lines taken from the ‘Decameron,’ 251 and n
the presentation of country life, 251
For editions see Section xix. (Bibliography),
305-25
‘Wire,’ use of the word, for women’s hair, 118 and n 2
Wise, J. R., 363
‘Wittes Pilgrimage,’ Davies’s, 441 n 2
Women, excluded from Elizabethan stage, 38 and n 2
in masques at Court, 38 n 2
on the Restoration stage, 334
Women, addresses to, in sonnets, 92 117-20 122 n 123 124 154
Woncot in Henry IV identical with Woodmancote, 168
Wood, Anthony à, on the Earl of Pembroke, 414
Woodmancote. See Woncot
Worcester, Earl of, his company of actors at Stratford, 10 35
under the patronage of Queen Anne of Denmark, 231 n
Worcester, registry of the diocese of, 3 20
Wordsworth, Bishop Charles, on Shakespeare and the Bible, 17 n 1
Wordsworth, William, the poet, on German and French æsthetic criticism, 344 349
Wotton, Sir Henry, on the burning of the Globe Theatre, 260 261 n
Wright, John, bookseller, 90
Wriothesley, Lord, 381
Wroxhall, the Shakespeares of, 3
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, sonnetteering of, 83 95 101 n 4 427
his translations of Petrarch’s sonnets, 104 n 4
Wyman, W. H., 372
Wyndham, Mr. George, on the sonnets, 91 n 110 n
on Antony and Cleopatra, 245 n
on Jacobean typography, 419 n
Y
Yonge, Bartholomew, translation of ‘Diana’ by, 53
Yorkshire Tragedy, The, 180 243 313
Z
Zepheria, a collection of sonnets called, 435
legal terminology in, 32 n 2 435
the praise of Daniel’s ‘Delia’ in, 431 435 436
[vii] Arnold wrote ‘spiritual,’ but the change of epithet is needful to render the dictum thoroughly pertinent to the topic under consideration.
[ix] I have already published portions of the papers on Shakespeare’s relations with the Earls of Pembroke and Southampton in the Fortnightly Review (for February of this year) and in the Cornhill Magazine (for April of this year), and I have to thank the proprietors of those periodicals for permission to reproduce my material in this volume.
[x] For an account of its history see p. 295.
[xi] See pp. 309 and 311.
[1a] Camden, Remaines, ed. 1605, p. III; Verstegan, Restitution, 1605.
[1b] Plac. Cor. 7 Edw. I, Kanc.; cf. Notes and Queries, 1st ser. xi.122.
[1c] Cf. the Register of the Guild of St. Anne at Knowle, ed. Bickley, 1894.
[2] See p. 189.
[3a] Cf. Times, October 14, 1895; Notes and Queries, 8th ser. viii. 501; articles by Mrs. Stopes in Genealogical Magazine, 1897.
[3b] Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 1887, ii. 207.
[3c] The purchasing power of money was then eight times what it is now, and this and other sums mentioned should be multiplied by eight in comparing them with modern currency (see p. 197 n). The letters of administration in regard to Richard Shakespeare’s estate are in the district registry of the Probate Court at Worcester, and were printed in full by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps in his Shakespeare’s Tours (privately issued 1887), pp. 44-5. They do not appear in any edition of Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps’s Outlines. Certified extracts appeared in Notes and Queries, 8th ser. xii. 463-4.
[6] French, Genealogica Shakespeareana, pp. 458 seq.; cf. p. 191 infra.
[7] Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 179.
[8] Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, Letter to Elze, 1888.
[9] Cf. Documents and Sketches in Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 377-99.
[10] The Rev. Thomas Carter, in Shakespeare, Puritan and Recusant, 1897, has endeavoured to show that John Shakespeare was a puritan in religious matters, inclining to nonconformity. He deduces this inference from the fact that, at the period of his prominent association with the municipal government of Stratford, the corporation ordered images to be defaced (1562-3) and ecclesiastical vestments to be sold (1571). These entries merely prove that the aldermen and councillors of Stratford strictly conformed to the new religion as by law established in the first years of Elizabeth’s reign. Nothing can be deduced from them in regard to the private religious opinions of John Shakespeare. The circumstance that he was the first bailiff to encourage actors to visit Stratford is, on the other hand, conclusive proof that his religion was not that of the contemporary puritan, whose hostility to all forms of dramatic representations was one of his most persistent characteristics. The Elizabethan puritans, too, according to Guillim’s Display of Heraldrie (1610), regarded coat-armour with abhorrence, yet John Shakespeare with his son made persistent application to the College of Arms for a grant of arms. (Cf. infra, p. 187 seq.)
[12a] The sum is stated to be £4 in one document (Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 176) and £40 in another (ib. p. 179); the latter is more likely to be correct.
[12b] Ib. ii. 238.
[12c] Efforts recently made to assign the embarrassments of Shakespeare’s father to another John Shakespeare of Stratford deserve little attention. The second John Shakespeare or Shakspere (as his name is usually spelt) came to Stratford as a young man in 1584, and was for ten years a well-to-do shoemaker in Bridge Street, filling the office of Master of the Shoemakers’ Company in 1592—a certain sign of pecuniary stability. He left Stratford in 1594 (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, 137-40).
[13] James Russell Lowell, who noticed some close parallels between expressions of Shakespeare and those of the Greek tragedians, hazarded the suggestion that Shakespeare may have studied the ancient drama in a Gracè et Latinè edition. I believe Lowell’s parallelisms to be no more than curious accidents—proofs of consanguinity of spirit, not of any indebtedness on Shakespeare’s part. In the Electra of Sophocles, which is akin in its leading motive to Hamlet, the Chorus consoles Electra for the supposed death of Orestes with the same commonplace argument as that with which Hamlet’s mother and uncle seek to console him. In Electra, are the lines 1171-3:
Θνητου πέφυκας πατρος, Ήλέκτρα, φρονει·
Θνητος δ’ Ορέστης ωστε μη λίαν στένε.
Πασιν γαρ ημιν τουτ’ οφείλεται παθειν
(i.e. ‘Remember, Electra, your father whence you sprang is mortal. Mortal, too, is Orestes. Wherefore grieve not overmuch, for by all of us has this debt of suffering to be paid’). In Hamlet (I. ii. 72 sq.) are the familiar sentences:
Thou know’st ’tis common; all that live must die.
But you must know, your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his . . . But to persèver
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness.
Cf. Sophocles’s Œdipus Coloneus, 880: Τοις τοι δικαίοις χα’ βραχυς νικα μέγαν (‘In a just cause the weak vanquishes the strong,’ Jebb), and 2 Henry VI, iii. 233, ‘Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just.’ Shakespeare’s ‘prophetic soul’ in Hamlet (I. v. 40) and the Sonnets (cvii. I) may be matched by the προμαντις θυμος of Euripides’s Andromache, 1075; and Hamlet’s ‘sea of troubles’ (III. i. 59) by the κακων πέλαγος of Æschylus’s Persæ, 443. Among all the creations of Shakespearean and Greek drama, Lady Macbeth and Æschylus’s Clytemnestra, who ‘in man’s counsels bore no woman’s heart’ (γυναικος ανδροβουλον ελπίζον κέαρ, Agamemnon, II), most closely resemble each other. But a study of the points of resemblance attests no knowledge of Æschylus on Shakespeare’s part, but merely the close community of tragic genius that subsisted between the two poets.
[15] Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, 1890, pp. 379 seq.
[16] Cf. Spencer Baynes, ‘What Shakespeare learnt at School,’ in Shakespeare Studies, 1894, pp. 147 seq.
[17a] Bishop Charles Wordsworth, in his Shakespeare’s Knowledge and Use of the Bible (4th edit. 1892), gives a long list of passages for which Shakespeare may have been indebted to the Bible. But the Bishop’s deductions as to the strength of Shakespeare’s piety are strained.
[17b] See p. 161 infra.
[18] Notes of John Dowdall, a tourist in Warwickshire in 1693 (published in 1838).
[21] These conclusions are drawn from an examination of like documents in the Worcester diocesan registry. Many formal declarations of consent on the part of parents to their children’s marriages are also extant there among the sixteenth-century archives.
[23] Twelfth Night, act v. sc. i. ll. 160-4:
A contract of eternal bond of love,
Confirm’d by mutual joinder of your hands,
Attested by the holy close of lips,
Strengthen’d by interchangement of your rings;
And all the ceremony of this compact
Seal’d in my [i.e. the priest’s] function by my testimony.
In Measure for Measure Claudio’s offence is intimacy with the Lady Julia after the contract of betrothal and before the formality of marriage (cf. act i. sc. ii. l. 155, act iv. sc. i. l. 73).
[24] No marriage registers of the period are extant at Temple Grafton to inform us whether Anne Whately actually married her William Shakespeare or who precisely the parties were. A Whateley family resided in Stratford, but there is nothing to show that Anne of Temple Grafton was connected with it. The chief argument against the conclusion that the marriage license and the marriage bond concerned different couples lies in the apparent improbability that two persons, both named William Shakespeare, should on two successive days not only be arranging with the Bishop of Worcester’s official to marry, but should be involving themselves, whether on their own initiative or on that of their friends, in more elaborate and expensive forms of procedure than were habitual to the humbler ranks of contemporary society. But the Worcester diocese covered a very wide area, and was honeycombed with Shakespeare families of all degrees of gentility. The William Shakespeare whom Anne Whately was licensed to marry may have been of a superior station, to which marriage by license was deemed appropriate. On the unwarranted assumption of the identity of the William Shakespeare of the marriage bond with the William Shakespeare of the marriage license, a romantic theory has been based to the effect that ‘Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton,’ believing herself to have a just claim to the poet’s hand, secured the license on hearing of the proposed action of Anne Hathaway’s friends, and hoped, by moving in the matter a day before the Shottery husbandmen, to insure Shakespeare’s fidelity to his alleged pledges.
[25a] Twelfth Night, act ii. sc. iv. l. 29:
Let still the woman take
An elder than herself; so wears she to him,
So sways she level in her husband’s heart.
[25b] Tempest, act iv. sc. i. ll. 15-22:
If thou dost break her virgin knot before
All sanctimonious ceremonies may
With full and holy rite be minister’d,
No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow; but barren hate,
Sour-ey’d disdain, and discord, shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it both.
[26] Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 11-13.
[27] Cf. Ellacombe, Shakespeare as an Angler, 1883; J. E. Harting, Ornithology of Shakespeare, 1872. The best account of Shakespeare’s knowledge of sport is given by the Right Hon. D. H. Madden in his entertaining and at the same time scholarly Diary of Master William Silence: a Study of Shakespeare and Elizabethan Sport, 1897.
[28] Cf. C. Holte Bracebridge, Shakespeare no Deerstealer, 1862; Lockhart, Life of Scott, vii. 123.
[30] Cf. W. J. Thoms, Three Notelets on Shakespeare, 1865, pp. 16 seq.
[31a] Cf. Hales, Notes on Shakespeare, 1884, pp. 1-24.
[31b] The common assumption that Richard Burbage, the chief actor with whom Shakespeare was associated, was a native of Stratford is wholly erroneous. Richard was born in Shoreditch, and his father came from Hertfordshire. John Heming, another of Shakespeare’s actor-friends who has also been claimed as a native of Stratford, was beyond reasonable doubt born at Droitwich in Worcestershire. Thomas Greene, a popular comic actor at the Red Bull Theatre early in the seventeenth century, is conjectured to have belonged to Stratford on no grounds that deserve attention; Shakespeare was in no way associated with him.
[32a] Blades, Shakspere and Typography, 1872.
[32b] Cf. Lord Campbell, Shakespeare’s Legal Acquirements, 1859. Legal terminology abounded in all plays and poems of the period, e.g. Barnabe Barnes’s Sonnets, 1593, and Zepheria, 1594 (see Appendix IX.)
[32c] Commonly assigned to Theophilus Cibber, but written by Robert Shiels and other hack-writers under Cibber’s editorship.
[38a] The site of the Blackfriars Theatre is now occupied by the offices of the ‘Times’ newspaper in Queen Victoria Street, E.C.
[38b] Cf. Exchequer Lay Subsidies City of London, 146/369, Public Record Office; Notes and Queries, 8th ser. viii. 418.
[38c] Shakespeare alludes to the appearance of men or boys in women’s parts when he makes Rosalind say laughingly to the men of the audience in the epilogue to As you like it, ‘If I were a woman, I would kiss as many,’ etc. Similarly, Cleopatra on her downfall in Antony and Cleopatra, V. ii. 220 seq., laments:
the quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us . . . and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness.
Men taking women’s parts seem to have worn masks. Flute is bidden by Quince play Thisbe ‘in a mask’ in Midsummer Night’s Dream (I. ii. 53). In French and Italian theatres of the time women seem to have acted publicly, but until the Restoration public opinion in England deemed the appearance of a woman on a public stage to be an act of shamelessness on which the most disreputable of her sex would hardly venture. With a curious inconsistency ladies of rank were encouraged at Queen Elizabeth’s Court, and still more frequently at the Courts of James I and Charles I, to take part in private and amateur representations of masques and short dramatic pageants. During the reign of James I scenic decoration, usually designed by Inigo Jones, accompanied the production of masques in the royal palaces, but until the Restoration the public stages were bare of any scenic contrivance except a front curtain opening in the middle and a balcony or upper platform resting on pillars at the back of the stage, from which portions of the dialogue were sometimes spoken, although occasionally the balcony seems to have been occupied by spectators (cf. a sketch made by a Dutch visitor to London in 1596 of the stage of the Swan Theatre in Zur Kenntniss der altenglischen Bühne von Karl Theodor Gaedertz. Mit der ersten authentischen innern Ansicht der Schwans Theater in London, Bremen, 1888). Sir Philip Sidney humorously described the spectator’s difficulties in an Elizabethan playhouse, where, owing to the absence of stage scenery, he had to imagine the bare boards to present in rapid succession a garden, a rocky coast, a cave, and a battlefield (Apologie for Poetrie, p. 52). Three flourishes on a trumpet announced the beginning of the performance, but a band of fiddlers played music between the acts. The scenes of each act were played without interruption.
[40a] Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps’s Visits of Shakespeare’s Company of Actors to the Provincial Cities and Towns of England (privately printed, 1887). From the information there given, occasionally supplemented from other sources, the following imperfect itinerary is deduced:
1593. Bristol and Shrewsbury.
1594. Marlborough.
1597. Faversham, Bath, Rye, Bristol, Dover and Marlborough.
1603. Richmond (Surrey), Bath, Coventry, Shrewsbury, Mortlake, Wilton House.
1604. Oxford.
1605. Barnstaple and Oxford.
1606. Leicester, Saffron Walden, Marlborough, Oxford, Dover and Maidstone.
1607. Oxford.
1608. Coventry and Marlborough.
1609. Hythe, New Romney and Shrewsbury.
1610. Dover, Oxford and Shrewsbury.
1612. New Romney.
1613. Folkestone, Oxford and Shrewsbury.
1614. Coventry.
[40b] Cf. Knight’s Life of Shakespeare (1843), p. 41; Fleay, Stage, pp. 135-6.
[41a] The favour bestowed by James VI on these English actors was so marked as to excite the resentment of the leaders of the Kirk. The English agent, George Nicolson, in a (hitherto unpublished) despatch dated from Edinburgh on November 12, 1599, wrote: ‘The four Sessions of this Town (without touch by name of our English players, Fletcher and Mertyn [i.e. Martyn], with their company), and not knowing the King’s ordinances for them to play and be heard, enacted [that] their flocks [were] to forbear and not to come to or haunt profane games, sports, or plays.’ Thereupon the King summoned the Sessions before him in Council and threatened them with the full rigour of the law. Obdurate at first, the ministers subsequently agreed to moderate their hostile references to the actors. Finally, Nicolson adds, ‘the King this day by proclamation with sound of trumpet hath commanded the players liberty to play, and forbidden their hinder or impeachment therein.’ MS. State Papers, Dom. Scotland, P. R. O. vol. lxv. No. 64.
[41b] Fleay, Stage, pp. 126-44.
[41c] Cf. Duncan’s speech (on arriving at Macbeth’s castle of Inverness):
This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.
Banquo. This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his lov’d mansionry, that the heaven’s breath
Smells wooingly here. (Macbeth, 1. vi. 1-6).
[42a] Cf. Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany, 1865; Meissner, Die englischen Comödianten zur Zeit Shakespeare’s in Oesterreich, Vienna, 1884; Jon Stefansson on ‘Shakespeare at Elsinore’ in Contemporary Review, January 1896; Notes and Queries, 5th ser. ix. 43, and xi. 520; and M. Jusserand’s article in the Nineteenth Century, April 1898, on English actors in France.
[42b] Cf. As you like it, IV. i. 22-40.
[43a] Cf. Elze, Essays, 1874, pp. 254 seq.
[43b] ‘Quality’ in Elizabethan English was the technical term for the ‘actor’s profession.’
[43c] Aubrey’s Lives, ed. Andrew Clark, ii. 226.
[44a] Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 121; Mrs. Stopes in Jahrbuck der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, 1896, xxxii. 182 seq.
[44b] Scourge of Folly, 1610, epigr. 159.
[47] One of the many crimes laid to the charge of the dramatist Robert Greene was that of fraudulently disposing of the same play to two companies. ‘Ask the Queen’s players,’ his accuser bade him in Cuthbert Cony-Catcher’s Defence of Cony-Catching, 1592, ‘if you sold them not Orlando Furioso for twenty nobles [i.e. about £7], and when they were in the country sold the same play to the Lord Admiral’s men for as many more.’
[48] The playhouse authorities deprecated the publishing of plays in the belief that their dissemination in print was injurious to the receipts of the theatre. A very small proportion of plays acted in Elizabeth’s and James I’s reign consequently reached the printing press, and most of them are now lost. But in the absence of any law of copyright publishers often defied the wishes of the owner of manuscripts. Many copies of a popular play were made for the actors, and if one of these copies chanced to fall into a publisher’s hands, it was habitually issued without any endeavour to obtain either author’s or manager’s sanction. In March 1599 the theatrical manager Philip Henslowe endeavoured to induce a publisher who had secured a playhouse copy of the comedy of Patient Grissell by Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton to abandon the publication of it by offering him a bribe of £2. The publication was suspended till 1603 (cf. Henslowe’s Diary, p. 167). As late as 1633 Thomas Heywood wrote of ‘some actors who think it against their peculiar profit to have them [i.e. plays] come into print.’ (English Traveller, pref.)
[49] W. S. Walker in his Shakespeare’s Versification, 1854, and Charles Bathurst in his Difference in Shakespeare’s Versification at different Periods of his Life, 1857, were the first to point out the general facts. Dr. Ingram’s paper on ‘The Weak Endings’ in New Shakspere Society’s Transactions (1874), vol. i., is of great value. Mr. Fleay’s metrical tables, which first appeared in the same society’s Transactions (1874), and have been reissued by Dr. Furnivall in a somewhat revised form in his introduction to Gervinus’s Commentaries and in his Leopold Shakspere, give all the information possible.
[51] The hero is the King of Navarre, in whose dominions the scene is laid. The two chief lords in attendance on him in the play, Biron and Longaville, bear the actual names of the two most strenuous supporters of the real King of Navarre (Biron’s later career subsequently formed the subject of two plays by Chapman, The Conspiracie of Duke Biron and The Tragedy of Biron, which were both produced in 1605). The name of the Lord Dumain in Love’s Labour’s Lost is a common anglicised version of that Duc de Maine or Mayenne whose name was so frequently mentioned in popular accounts of French affairs in connection with Navarre’s movements that Shakespeare was led to number him also among his supporters. Mothe or La Mothe, the name of the pretty, ingenious page, was that of a French ambassador who was long popular in London; and, though he left England in 1583, he lived in the memory of playgoers and playwrights long after Love’s Labour’s Lost was written. In Chapman’s An Humourous Day’s Mirth, 1599, M. Le Mot, a sprightly courtier in attendance on the King of France, is drawn from the same original, and his name, as in Shakespeare’s play, suggests much punning on the word ‘mote.’ As late as 1602 Middleton, in his Blurt, Master Constable, act ii. scene ii. line 215, wrote:
Ho God! Ho God! thus did I revel it
When Monsieur Motte lay here ambassador.
Armado, ‘the fantastical Spaniard’ who haunts Navarre’s Court, and is dubbed by another courtier ‘a phantasm, a Monarcho,’ is a caricature of a half-crazed Spaniard known as ‘fantastical Monarcho’ who for many years hung about Elizabeth’s Court, and was under the delusion that he owned the ships arriving in the port of London. On his death Thomas Churchyard wrote a poem called Fantasticall Monarcho’s Epitaph, and mention is made of him in Reginald Scott’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584, p. 54. The name Armado was doubtless suggested by the expedition of 1588. Braggardino in Chapman’s Blind Beggar of Alexandria, 1598, is drawn on the same lines. The scene (Love’s Labour’s Lost, V. ii. 158 sqq.) in which the princess’s lovers press their suit in the disguise of Russians follows a description of the reception by ladies of Elizabeth’s Court in 1584 of Russian ambassadors who came to London to seek a wife among the ladies of the English nobility for the Tsar (cf. Horsey’s Travels, ed. E. A. Bond, Hakluyt Soc.) For further indications of topics of the day treated in the play, see A New Study of “Love’s Labour’s Lost,”’ by the present writer, in Gent. Mag, Oct. 1880; and Transactions of the New Shakspere Society, pt. iii. p. 80*. The attempt to detect in the schoolmaster Holofernes a caricature of the Italian teacher and lexicographer, John Florio, seems unjustified (see p. 85 n).