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The tradition that Shakespeare played these parts is persistent, and I cannot doubt that his allusion to himself was obvious to his audience when he puts into Hamlet's mouth these words :— 'He that plays the King shall be welcome; his majesty shall have tribute of me.' 1

It is almost certain that Mary Fitton, the Queen's Maid of Honour, was on intimate terms with the players in the Lord Chamberlain's (Shakespeare's) Company; for Kempe, who played the Clown's part, seems to have dedicated to her the account of his famous Morris to Norwiche, as he writes, 'to shew my duety to your honourable selfe, whose favour (among other bountifull frends) makes me (despight of this sad world) judge my hart corke and my heeles feathers.' Such an intimacy is intrinsically probable from her relations with Herbert, who 'prosecuted Shakespeare with his favour,' from the custom of the age, and above all from her own fantastic disposition. Elsewhere you read that in the tyme when that Mrs. Fytton was in great favour, and one of her Majestie's maids of honor (and during the tyme yt. the Earle of Pembroke favoured her), she would put off her head tire and tucke upp her clothes, and take a large white cloak, and march

1 Personal allusions were the sauce of every play. Cf. Jonson's Cynthia's Revels (1600) Act v. 2:—

'Amorphus. Is the perfume rich in this jerkin?

Perfumer. Taste, smell; I assure you, sir, pure benjamin, the only spirited scent that ever awaked a Neapolitan nostril.'

Jonson is constantly called 'Benjamen' (Bengemen) in Henslowe's Diary. 2 Entered at Stationers' Hall, 22nd April 1600. The dedication, it is true, gives 'Anne,' almost certainly in error, for Mary Fitton. Anne, so far as we know, was never a Maid of Honour, and can hardly have been one in 1600 since she had married Sir John Newdigate in 1585. See W. Andrews, Bygone Cheshire, p. 150. He quotes Rev. W. A. Harrison.

3 In a document (assigned by Mr. Tyler after a pencil note on it to Oct. 1602). Domestic Addenda, Elizabeth, vol. xxxiv. Mary Fitton suffered from hysteria (Gossip from a Muniment Room, 1897, p. 27).

Herbert succeeded, 1601.

as though she had bene a man to meete her lover, William Herbert.' The inspiration of Shakespeare's laughter-loving heroines in doublet and hose need not, then, have come exclusively from boys playing in women's parts.1

But there are shadows in the hey-day pageantry of this Court which borrowed the trappings and intrigues of the Stage, and something of its tragedies also. In 1601 Southampton is arrested, and Essex dies on the scaffold for the criminal folly of the Rising. In the same spring William Herbert is disgraced and imprisoned, because Mary Fitton is to bear him a child, and he 'utterly renounceth all marriage.' In truth 'twas a dare-devil

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'What sex they are, since strumpets breeches use,

And all men's eyes save Lynceus can abuse.'

* Mr. Tyler (Shakespeare's Sonnets, 1890, p. 56) quotes (1) the postscript of a letter, February 5, 1601, from Sir Robert Cecil to Sir George Carew :—' We have no news but that there is a misfortune befallen Mistress Fitton, for she is proved with child, and the Earl of Pembroke, being examined, confesseth a fact, but utterly renounceth all marriage. I fear they will both dwell in the Tower awhile, for the Queen hath vowed to send them thither' (Calendar of Carew MSS.). (2) A letter in the Record Office from Tobie Matthew to Dudley Carleton, March 25, 1601 :-'I am in some hope of your sister's enlargement shortly, but what will happen with the Erle I cannot tell' (W. E. A. Axon in William Andrews' Bygone Cheshire, 1895). In 1606 (?) Mary's mother writes :-'I take no joye to heer of your sister, nore of that boy, if it had pleased God when I did hear her, that she hade bene beried, it hade saved me from a gret delle of sorow and gryffe, and her ffrom shame, and such shame as never have Cheshyre Woman; worse now than evar, wright no more of her.'-Ibid. Tyler quotes a document of the late Rev. F. C. Fitton copied by his father (b. 1779) from a мs. by Ormerod, author of he History of Cheshire, containing this entry:—

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Mary Fitton
Maid of Honour had

one bastard by Wm.

E. of Pembroke, and
two bastards by Sir
Richard Leveson, Kt.

Capt. Polwhele

2nd husband

This entry is confirmed, though the order of Mary Fitton's marriages is reversed, by an extract, communicated by Lord de Tabley to the Rev. W. A.

age of large morals and high spirits. Sir Nicholas l'Estrange reports that when Sir William Knollys lodged 'at Court, where some of the ladyes and maydes of Honour us'd to friske and hey about in the next room, to his extreme disquiete a nights, though he often warned them of it; at last he getts in one night at their revells, stripps off his shirt, and so with a payre of spectacles on his nose and Aretine in his hand, comes marching in at a posterne door of his owne chamber, reading very gravely, full upon the faces of them.' He enjoyed his joke: 'for he fac'd them and often traverst the roome in this posture above an houre.' As the coarse web of Elizabethan embroidery shows beneath the delicate ornament and between the applied patches of brilliant colour, so in the manners of Elizabeth's Court does a texture, equally coarse, run visibly through the refinements of learning and the bravery of display. Even in the amusements of the Queen, who read Greek and delighted in Poetry, do we find this intermingling of the barbarous, of the 'Gothic' in the contemptuous application of that byword, and also of that unconscious humour which we read into archaic

Harrison, from 'a very large (elephant) folio of Cheshire Genealogies with coloured arms, thus :

:

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Some years later Mary's mother writes to her daughter Anne that Polewhele 'is a veri knave, and taketh the disgrace off his wyff and all her ffryndes to make the world thynk hym worthy of her and that she dessarved no better.' Also about 1606-7 Mary's aunt, wife of Sir Francis Fitton, denounces her niece as the vyles woman under the sun.' Mary was baptized at Gawesworth, June 24, 1578, so that her age was 22-23 in March 1601. Cf. also Lady Newdigate-Newdegate's Gossip from a Muniment Room, 1897.

art.

'Her Majesty is very well,' writes Rowland White (12th May 1600); this Day she appointes to see a Frenchman doe Feates upon a Rope, in the Conduit Court. To-morrow she hath commanded the Beares, the Bull and the Ape, to be baited in the Tiltyard. Upon Wednesday she will have solemne Dawncing.' An archaic smile is graven on the faces above the ruff of this Renaissance Cynthia, and our Ninth Muse is also our 'Good Queen Bess,' own daughter to 'Bluff King Hal.' Sometimes she proceeded somewhat drastically to adjust her several diversions:-'On 25th July 1591 the Privy Council wrote to the Lord Mayor directing the suppression of plays on Sundays and on Thursdays, because it interfered with bear-baiting, which was maintained for Her Majesty's pleasure, if occasion require.'1 This singular ground was but one, and certainly the least, of many, for interfering with the Theatres. They shut automatically whenever the number of plague-cases reached a statutory limit; and they were closed, I have surmised, for political reasons, and also, more than once, for handling religious controversies.

VI

Soon after Shakespeare's advent, the Martin Marprelate controversy, begun in 1588, overflowed from the press to the stage.3 Shakespeare, without doubt, saw Martin, the pseudonymous persona of the Reformers, caricatured by their antagonists, with a cock's comb, an ape's face, a wolf's belly, and a cat's claws,1

1 Fleay from Chalmers's Apology, p. 379.

:

• The pamphlets are alluded to by Shakespeare. Nash, in Strange News, etc., January 12, 1593, p. 194, mentions Lyly's Almond for a Parrot, and bids Gabriel (Harvey) respice funem. Cf. Comedy of Errors, iv. 4:—

Dro. E. Mistress, Respice funem, or rather, the prophecy like the parrot, 'Beware the rope's end.'-FLEAY.

* Before August 1589. Arber, Introduction to Martin Marprelate. Fleay, History of the Stage, p. 92.

Lyly's Pap with a Hatchet, about September 1589.-Arber.

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the better to scratch the face of Divinity; he also saw 'blood and humour' taken from him, on the very boards 2 perhaps, of the theatre in which he played. These astounding products of religious intolerance, coupled with the prevailing taste for mountebank bear-fighting, led to the staying of all plays in the City by the Lord Mayor (Harte) at the instance of Lord Walsingham acting on representations from Tilney, Master of the Revels. The Admiral's players and Lord Strange's-i.e., Shakespeare and his colleagues-were summoned and inhibited. But Lord Strange's company contumaciously shifted its venue, and played that afternoon at the Cross Keys; so two of the players were committed to the Counter and prohibited till further On the death of Ferdinando Lord Strange, Shakespeare and his colleagues joined the Chamberlain's Company.5 And, in July 1597, they, with other companies, were again in difficulties, probably of a like origin. The Privy Council, acting on a letter from the Lord Mayor, directed the Justices of Surrey and Middlesex 'nerest to London,' to prohibit all plays within London or about the city,' and to 'pluck down' the theatres alleging 'the lewd matters handled on the stage' as the first ground for such action. The city fathers had com

1 Nash, Pasquil's Return, October 1589.

2 Nash, Countercuffe to Martin Junior, August 1589.

3 Fleay.

4 Lyly, Pap with a Hatchet, September 1589:-'Would these comedies (against Martin) might be allowed to be played that are penned.'—Fleay, The English Drama, ii. 39.

5 Mr. Fleay, in his Index lists of Actors, places Shakespeare in Leicester's Company, 1587-9; in Lord Strange's, 1589-93; in the Chamberlain's, 15941603. From his list of Companies it appears that on the death of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, July 22, 1596, who had been Chamberlain since 1585, George Carey, Lord Hunsdon, took over the Company under his own name until, on the 27th April 1597, he succeeded Lord Chamberlain Brook, who died the 5th of the preceding March. He kept on the Company as Chamberlain from then till 1603.

6 Halliwell, Illustrations, p. 21, quoting 'Registers of the Privy Council.'

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