Читать книгу A Life of William Shakespeare with portraits and facsimiles - Sir Sidney Lee - Страница 77

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Meanwhile Shakespeare was gaining personal esteem outside the circles of actors and men of letters. His genius and ‘civil demeanour’ of which Chettle wrote arrested the notice not only of Southampton but of other noble patrons of literature and the drama. His summons to act at Court with the most famous actors of the day at the Christmas of 1594 was possibly due in part to personal interest in himself. Elizabeth quickly showed him special favour. Until the end of her reign his plays were repeatedly acted in her presence. The revised version of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ was given at Whitehall at Christmas 1597, and tradition credits the Queen with unconcealed enthusiasm for Falstaff, who came into being a little later. Under Elizabeth’s successor he greatly strengthened his hold on royal favour, but Ben Jonson claimed that the Queen’s appreciation equalled that of James I. When Jonson wrote in his elegy on Shakespeare of

Those flights upon the banks of Thames

That so did take Eliza and our James,

he was mindful of many representations of Shakespeare’s plays by the poet and his fellow-actors at the palaces of Whitehall, Richmond, or Greenwich during the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign.