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JOHN STANHOPE, one of the gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, writes thus to Lord Talbot, in December, 1589:-"The Queen is so well as, I assure you, six or seven galliards in a morning, besides music and singing, is her ordinary exercise." * letter is dated from Richmond. The magnificent palace which the grandfather of Elizabeth erected upon the ruins of the old palace of the Plantagenets was a favourite residence of the Queen. Here, where she danced her galliards, and made the courts harmonious with her music, she closed her life some ten years after, not quite so deserted as was the great Edward upon the same spot, but the victim, in all probability, of blighted affections and unavailing regrets. Scarcely a vestige is now left of the second palace of Richmond. The splendid towers of Henry VII. have fallen; but the name which he gave to the site endures, and the natural beauty which fixed

* Lodge's "Illustrations," 4to., vol. ii., page 411.

here the old sovereigns of England, and which the people of all lands still come to gaze upon, is something which outlives the works of man, if not the memory of those works. In the Christmas of 1589 the Queen's players would be necessarily busy for the diversion of the Court. The records are lost which would show us at this period what were the precise performances offered to the Queen; and the imperfect registers of the Council, which detail certain payments for plays, do not at this date refer to payments to Shakspere's company. But there can be little doubt that the Lord Chamberlain's servants were more frequently called upon for her Majesty's solace than the Lord Admiral's men, or Lord Strange's men, or the Earl of Warwick's men, to whom payments are recorded at this period. It is impossible that the registers of the Council, as published originally by Chalmers, should furnish a complete account of the theatrical performances at Court; for there is no entry of any payment whatever for such performances, under the Council's warrant, between the 11th of March, 1593, and the 27th of November, 1597. The office-books of the Treasurers of the Chamber exhibit a greater blank at this time. We can have no doubt that the last decade of the sixteenth century was the most brilliant period of the regal patronage of the drama; the period when Shakspere, especially,

"Made those flights upon the banks of Thames"

to which Jonson has so emphatically alluded. That Shakspere was familiar with Richmond we can well believe. He and his fellows would unquestionably, at the

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holiday seasons of Christmas and Shrovetide, be at the daily command of the Lord Chamberlain, and in attendance upon the Court wherever the Queen chose to dwell.

The servants of the household, the ladies waiting upon the Queen, and even the great officers composing the Privy Council, seem to have been in a perpetual state of migration from palace to palace. Elizabeth carried this desire for change of place to an extent that was not the most agreeable to many of her subjects. Her progress from house to house, with a cloud of retainers, was almost ruinous to some who were yet unable to reject the honour. But even the frequent removals of the Court from palace to palace must have been productive of no little annoyance to the grave and the delicate amongst the royal attendants. The palaces were ill-furnished; and whenever the whim of a moment directed a removal, many of the heavier household necessaries had to be carried from palace to palace by barge or waggon. In the time of Henry VIII. we constantly find charges attendant upon these removals.* Gifford infers that in the time of which we are writing the practice was sufficiently common and remarkable to have afforded us one of our most significant and popular words: "To the smutty regiment, who attended the progresses, and rode in the carts with the pots and kettles, which, with every other article of furniture, were then moved from palace to palace, the people, in derision, gave the name of black guards,—a term since become sufficiently familiar, and never properly explained."+ The palaces themselves were most inconveniently adapted for these changes. Wherever the Queen was, there was the seat of government. The Privy Council were in daily attendance upon the Queen; and every public document is dated from the Court. Official business of the most important nature had to be transacted in bedchambers and passages. Lady Mary Sydney, whose husband was Lord President of Wales, writes the most moving letter to an officer of the Lord Chamberlain, to implore him to beg his principal "to have some other room than my chamber for my lord to have his resort unto, as he was wont to have, or else my lord will be greatly troubled when he shall have any matters of dispatch; my lodging, you see, being very little, and myself continually sick, and not able to be much out of my bed.” ‡ A great officer of state being obliged to transact business with his servants and suitors in his sick wife's bedroom, is a tolerable example of the inconvenient arrangements of our old palaces. Perhaps a more striking example of their want of comfort, and even of decent convenience, is to be found in a memorial from the maids of honour, which we have seen in the State Paper Office, humbly requesting that the partition which separates their sleeping-rooms at Windsor from the common passage may be somewhat raised, so as to shut them out from the possible gaze of her Majesty's gallant pages. If Windsor was thus inconvenient as a permanent residence, how must the inconvenience have been doubled when the Queen suddenly migrated there from St. James's, or Somerset Place, or Greenwich? The smaller palaces of Nonsuch and Richmond were probably still less endurable. But they were all the seats of gaiety, throwing a veil over fears and jealousies and feverish ambition. Our business is not with their real tragedies.

From about the period of Shakspere's first connection with the stage, and thence with the Court, Henry Lord Hunsdon, the kinsman of Elizabeth, was Lord Chamberlain. It is remarkable, that when Burbage erected the Blackfriars Theatre, in 1576, close by the houses of Lord Hunsdon and of the famous Ratcliffe, Earl of Sussex, Lord Hunsdon was amongst the petitioners against the project of Burbage. But the Earl of Sussex, who was then Lord Chamberlain, did not petition against the erection of a playhouse; and he may therefore be supposed to have approved of it. The opinions, however, of Lord Hunsdon must have undergone some considerable change; for upon his succeeding to the office of Lord Chamberlain upon the death of Sussex,

* See Nicolas's "Privy Purse Expenses of King Henry the Eighth." Note to "Every Man out of his Humour." The letter is given in Malone's "Inquiry," page 91.

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he became the patron of Shakspere's company. They were the Lord Chamberlain's men; or, in other words, the especial servants of the Court. Henry Lord Hunsdon held this office for eleven years, till his death in 1596. Elizabeth bestowed upon him as a residence the magnificent palace of the Protector Somerset. Here, in the halls which had been raised out of the spoliation of the great Priory of St. John of Jerusalem, would the company of Shakspere be frequently engaged. The Queen occasionally made the palace her residence; and it can scarcely be doubted that on these occasions there was revelry upon which the genius of the new dramatic poet, so immeasurably above all his compeers, would bestow a grace which a few years earlier seemed little akin to the spirit of the drama. That palace also is swept away; and the place which once witnessed the stately measure and the brisk galliardwhere Cupids shook their painted wings in the solemn masque-and where, above all, our great dramatic poet may first have produced his "Comedy of Errors," his "Two Gentlemen of Verona," his "Romeo and Juliet," and have been rewarded with smiles and tears, such as seldom were bestowed in the chill regions of state and etiquette, that place now sees the complicated labours of the routine departments of a mighty government constantly progressing in their prosaic uniformity. No contrast can be more striking than the Somerset House of Queen Elizabeth's Lord

Chamberlain, and the Somerset House of Queen Victoria's Commissioners of Stamps and Taxes.

"How chances it they travel?" says Hamlet, speaking of the players—“Their residence, both in reputation and profit, was better both ways." Hamlet's " tragedians of the city" travel because "the boys carry it away." But there were other causes that more than once forced Shakspere's company to disperse, and which affected also every other company. That terrible affliction, the plague, almost invariably broke up the residence of the players. They were in general scattered about the country seeking a precarious maintenance, whilst their terror-stricken families remained in the fated city. In the autumn of 1592 the plague raged in London. Michaelmas term was kept at Hertford; as in 1593 it was at St. Albans. During this long period all the theatres were closed, the Privy Council justly alleging "that infected people, after their long keeping in and before they be cleared of their disease and infection, being desirous of recreation, use to resort to such assemblies, where through heat and throng they infect many sound persons." In the letters of Alleyn the player, which are preserved in Dulwich College, there is one to his wife, of this exact period, being dated from Chelmsford, the 2nd of May, 1593, which exhibits a singular picture of the indignities to which the less privileged players appear to have been subjected:-"I have no news to send thee, but I thank God we are all well, and in health, which I pray God to continue with us in the country, and with you in London. But, mouse, I little thought to hear that which I now hear by you, for it is well known, they say, that you were by my Lord Mayor's officers made to ride in a cart, you and all your fellows, which I am sorry to hear; but you may thank your two supporters, your strong legs I mean, that would not carry you away, but let you fall into the hands of such termagants.” * On the 1st of September, 1592, there was a company of players at Cambridge, and, as it appears, engaged in a contest with the University authorities. On that day the Vice-Chancellor issued a warrant to the constable forbidding the inhabitants to allow the players to occupy any houses, rooms, or yards, for the purpose of exhibiting their interludes, plays, and tragedies. The players, however, disregarded the warrant; for on the 8th of September the Vice-Chancellor complains to the Privy Council that "certain light persons, pretending themselves to be her Majesty's players, &c., did take boldness, not only here to proclaim their interludes (by setting up of writings about our college gates), but also actually at Chesterton to play the same, which is a village within the compass of the jurisdiction granted to us by her Majesty's charter, and situated hard by the plot where Stourbridge fair is kept." The Privy Council does not appear to have been in a hurry to redress the grievance; for ten days afterwards the Vice-Chancellor and various heads of colleges repeated the complaint, alleging that the offenders were supported by Lord North (who resided at Kirtling, near Cambridge), who said “in the hearing as well of the players, as of divers knights and gentlemen of the shire then present," that an order of the Privy Council of 1575, forbidding the performance of plays in the neighbourhood of universities, “ was no perpetuity." It was not till the following year that the Privy Council put an end to this unseemly contest, by renewing the letters of 1575. The company of Shakspere was not, we apprehend, the "certain light persons, pretending themselves to be her Majesty's players." The complaint of the Vice-Chancellor recites that one Dutton was a principal amongst them; and Dutton's company is mentioned in the accounts of the Revels as early as 1572. But for this notice of Dutton we might have concluded that the Queen's players were the company to which Shakspere belonged; and that his acquaintance with Cambridge, its splendid buildings, and its noble institutions, was to be associated with the memory of a dispute that is little creditable to those who

*Collier's "Memoirs of Edward Alleyn," page 24.

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