Agin of a tanner at Tamworth, who has asked him to supper, thinking that he is the King's butler. Kings like to do this-it is their idea of fun; and the jolly tanner, among other things which he does to entertain his guest, takes part in a song with his daughter and his servant. court, Agincourt!' the three voices ring out, 'know ye not Agincourt?' and even more than the great verse of Shakespeare that homely scene helps us to feel the spirit of the time. You do not get fine writing in a comedy, especially when it is about simple people, and here is a comic writer who thought that song the most natural thing to hear in an English cottage. But Heywood, though he is interesting and amusing, is not a great poet. When Shakespeare tells us of Agincourt, it is as if England herself were speaking to us, and the words will stir the blood of Englishmen as long as our race endures. The famous Duke of Marlborough learned from Shakespeare's plays all the history he knew. We expect our generals to read more history than that; but the Duke had a great lesson-book and the noblest of all teachers. II. SHAKESPEARE'S THEATRE It is not enough to read Shakespeare; you must see him acted. Only in that way will you really understand how great he was. Plays are put on the stage now at great cost, and the scenery is very beautiful. If you go to The Merchant of Venice or Julius Caesar, you will have before you pictures, as true as the stage-painter can make them, of Venice with its seaways and Rome with its marble palaces and temples. In Shakespeare's day the theatre was simpler; the same scene would have done equally well, one day for Venice, and the next for Rome or London. The only difference would be that a board would be hung up to tell you what town it was. The great Sir Philip Sidney laughs at this, and asks 'What child is there that, coming to a play, and seeing "Thebes" written in great letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes?' The answer is that, as the piece went on, the power of a great poet, helped by the playing of a good actor, would make us believe anything: we should forget about the 'old door', keep a sharp eye upon the actors, and think of the play itself, not of the way it was staged. If we had been living in seventeenth-century London, and wished to see a play, we should first of all have looked in the morning at one of the posts on which managers set their bills. When Duke Theseus wants a play at court some papers, or bills, are put into his hands, and he reads one of them A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus (XVIII, iii. 17, 18.) Shakespeare is here making fun of the way in which plays were advertised. Sometimes a title-page reads as if it were one of these bills. In the year 1600 a famous play of Shakespeare was published with this title-'The excellent history of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreme cruelty of Shylock the Jew towards the said Merchant in cutting a just pound of his flesh. And the obtaining of Portia by the choice of three caskets.' With the date and the name of the theatre put in, that would make a very good bill. There were not many theatres in London, and they were just outside the City or on the Surrey side of the Thames. A famous one for us was the Globe, built in 1599 on the Bankside in Southwark, where Barclay's brewery is now; many of Shakespeare's pieces were played there, and he acted there himself. Suppose we were going to the Globe. The performance began early in the afternoon. If we were poor, I expect we should have walked over old London Bridge. But it was the fashion to go by water, and then we should have gone down to some 'stairs' or landing-stage, and looked across the river to see if the silk flag was flying from the roof of the theatre; if so, it meant a performance, and we should have engaged a 'waterman'. A number of old sailors got their living by rowing people over to the places of amusement in what is now South London-not only to the theatres, but also to the Bear Garden in Southwark where bears were baited, and the archery ground of Newington Butts. Rich people took 'a pair of oars' (that is, two boatmen), others a sculler (or one man pulling sculls). We should land near the theatre. everywhere; often it was only a penny, but we read of sixpence as the lowest price, perhaps for a first performance, when the manager put the prices up. We should find ourselves in the 'yard' or 'ground', the cheapest part of the house and open to the sky. It had no seats, and the people stood right up to the stage. They enjoyed themselves with apples, nuts, and bottled ale, and they smoked. They annoyed the actors by cracking the nuts during the play; and sometimes they found another use for the apples than eating them. Vulgar, noisy, excitable -especially on a holiday afternoon when the City apprentices were there-such were the 'groundlings', as they were called; and you can fancy what the poets thought of them. Ben Jonson has a sly cut at them as 'the understanding gentlemen of the ground', as if standing under the stage was the only way they would ever understand anything : that joke would amuse them. Another writer of plays, Thomas Dekker, calls them the 'penny stinkards'; but he did not say that in a play. If he had, all the apples in London would not have been enough to pelt the actors with. There would have been a riot, and if the groundlings had not wrecked the building, they would have given the magistrates, who disliked plays, a good excuse for interfering and saying that the theatre was dangerous and ought to be closed. If we did not like the 'ground', we could pay more and go into the galleries-' the twopenny room' at the top, not very convenient for seeing, or the lower galleries, sixpence or a shilling, or at most half-a-crown. But suppose we had a new suit of silk and velvet and a showy feather and a gold chain, we should like a more striking position than the galleries. In some theatres we could go on the stage and sit there while the performance went on ! Entering the theatre by the stage-door and passing through the 'tiring-house' or actors' dressing-room, we should step out on the stage, call for a stool (price sixpence or a shilling) and sit down at the side; then we should take out our pipes and tobacco (three kinds of tobacco, for that was the height of fashion, and two pipes); next we should get a flint and really 'strike' a light, and after all this fuss settle down to criticize, puffing smoke through our noses rather than our mouths. We could also show off by making a face, spitting and crying 'Filthy!' after a good bit of acting, and finally annoy the poet by walking out before the play was over to prove that we could stand no more of it. It is time to look at the stage itself. In the year 1596 a Dutchman named John de Witt visited London, made notes of what he saw, and sketched the Swan Theatre on the Bankside, then new, and, he says, the finest in London. We have a copy which one of his friends made of this sketch; it is the frontispiece of this book. The stage comes out into the 'yard' and rests on strong supports of timber. Acting is going on in front. The back part is covered over by a tiled roof resting on two large pillars; this was called 'the heavens' or 'the shadow'. Actors often wore very rich dresses, and this space would be useful if a shower came on suddenly. At the back of all is the 'tiring-house'; it has two doors below, and people are looking out from a five-pillared gallery above. Over the 'heavens' is a kind of attic from the top of which floats the flag of the Swan; at a small door is an actor blowing a trumpet. Below, on either side of the stage, are the entrances to the galleries.1 Just before a play began, a trumpet was sounded three times; this explains the trumpeter at the top. After the 'third sounding' an actor wearing a black cloak would come in and speak the 'prologue' or first speech. In the sketch, however, a scene is shown: a lady is sitting on a bench, with her waiting-woman behind her, and a man coming to them. We do not know the scene, but we may imagine, from the way in which he is walking, that it is a comedy. The two doors in the background are often mentioned in old plays. They were very useful, on that simple stage, to show that the people entering belonged to different parties. You will see in A King's Defiance (the second piece in this book) that the British King, Queen, and Lords enter 'at one door', the Roman Ambassador and his Attendants 'at another'. So in 1 The Latin words in the picture mean-planities sive arena, the ground or yard; proscenium, the front part of the stage; mimorum aedes, the actors' house; ingressus, the entrance to the galleries; orchestra, the chief seats; porticus, the gallery; and tectum, the roof. Cassius would go out by the opposite door to that by which he entered, and would take some of the Citizens with him. But what is the gallery above the doors? It was used for the scenes which are said to take place 'above' or 'aloft'. In the play of King Henry VI, Joan of Arc relieves Orleans. She drives off the English soldiers : 'A short alarum, then enter the town with soldiers' (that is, she goes in at one of the doors below). The English general Talbot makes a short speech, and then 'Enter on the walls' Joan with French lords and soldiers. She would reappear in the gallery. In the next act Talbot recovers the lost ground: 'Enter Talbot, Bedford, Burgundy with scaling-ladders.' They put the ladders up at three different points: 'I'll to yond corner,' says Bedford; 'And I to this,' says Burgundy; 'And here will Talbot mount.' They go up, followed by their men; the sentinel gives the alarm; the English raise their war-cry, 'St. George' and 'A Talbot'. And then, 'The French leap over the walls in their shirts. Enter several ways the Bastard of Orleans, Alençon, and Reignier, half ready, and half unready' (that is, some men dressed, others not). Some would drop from the opening, others no doubt come down by the ladders, and others rush through both the doors; giving altogether a very good idea of hopeless confusion. In Brutus and Caesar again, when Brutus and Antony 'ascend' or 'go up' and speak from the 'pulpit' (XIII. iv, 11. 11, 62), each actor would pass out from the stage and reappear 'above'. But where is the curtain ? There was no drop-scene in front of the stage, such as we have now, but an inner curtain was used for what they called 'discovered' scenes. In Henry VIII, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk come to see the King; the Lord Chamberlain tells them it is 'a most unfit time to disturb him', and leaves them. 'Exit Lord Chamberlain' is the stage-note, 'and the King draws the curtain and sits reading pensively.' Suffolk remarks how sad he looks, and the King, as if, when he pulled the curtain, they had stepped into his private room, storms at them for coming in, and says he |