A Day with William Shakespeare

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Byron May Clarissa Gillington. A Day with William Shakespeare

A DAY WITH WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

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IT was early on a bright June morning of the year 1599. The household of Christopher Mountjoy, the wig-maker, at the corner of Silver Street in Cripplegate, was already up and astir. Mountjoy, his wife and daughter, and his apprentice, Stephen Bellott, were each refreshing themselves with a hasty mouthful – one could not term it breakfast – before beginning their day's work. For town wig-makers were busy folk, then as now. Every fashionable dame wore "transformations," and some noble ladies, like the late Queen of Scots and – breathe it low – the great Elizabeth herself, changed the colour of their tresses every day.

Breakfast, in 1599, was a rite "more honoured in the breach than in the observance." Most people, having supped with exceeding heartiness the previous night, ignored breakfast altogether: especially as dinner would occur some time between 10 and 12 a.m. Those who could not go long without food had no idea of a regular sit-down meal during that precious morning hour which "has a piece of gold in its mouth." They contented themselves with beaten-up eggs in muscadel wine, as now the Mountjoy family; who, being of French origin, boggled somewhat at the only alternative – a very English one – small ale and bread-and-butter.

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"Carnations and streaked gillyflowers," and all the lovely company of the garden, were a joy to him; and equally so the wild flowers in woodlands where "the wild thyme grows, And oxlips and the nodding violet blows," over which the south wind breathes softly, "stealing and giving odour." Beneath the tangled woodbines and musk-roses, the poet could linger in fantasy, if not in fact, – in dream, if not in deed. A passionate enjoyment of wild nature distinguished him pre-eminently above all his town-bred compeers. Trees and birds and forest brooks, but flowers especially, claimed an equal place with music in his affections. Beauty of sight and sound appealed, with magic power, to the man on whom the robuster joys failed to make any permanent mark. For towards all the salient characteristics of the Elizabethan age, – the volcanic vigour, the incandescent longing for adventure, the magnificent dare-devilry of seamanship, the fierce and splendid valour, inciting men to desperate deeds, – William Shakespeare was strangely impassive and unimpressionable. The wave of Elizabethan ardour surged past, and left him not even sprinkled by its spray. He was quite content to go on clothing with new flesh – glowing and Giorgione-like – the antique bones of old romances; to infuse new life into forgotten mediæval episodes, crudely treated by his predecessors, the men who supplied stock plays for travelling companies. He preferred some ardent love-scene in the rich, dim gardens of Verona to all the opulent possibilities of the New World: some pageantry in Venice or in Athens to any present splendour of the Elizabethan court. He secretly revelled, with conscious and justifiable pride, in pouring forth imperial passages of words, reverberant with rolling sound; but frequently, for the sheer pleasure of musical effect, as it would seem, he introduced those exquisite lyrics, – bird-like in their careless spontaneity, flower-like in their grace and daintiness, – which float like flakes of thistledown above his plays. These songs say all that need be said: they condense into a few swift words the essential spirit of a whole drama. So in Othello:

"My mother had a maid call'd Barbara," says Desdemona, standing unwittingly upon the threshold of death,

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