Читать книгу Shakespeare the Boy - W. J. Rolfe - Страница 10

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But we must now go on to Kenilworth, though we cannot linger long within its dilapidated walls, majestic even in ruin. If, as Scott says, Warwick is the finest example of its kind yet uninjured by time and kept up as a noble residence, Kenilworth is the most stupendous of similar structures that have fallen to decay. It was ancient in Shakespeare's day, having been originally built at the end of the eleventh century. Two hundred years later, in 1266, it was held for six months by the rebellious barons against Henry III. After having passed through sundry hands and undergone divers vicissitudes of fortune, it was given by Elizabeth to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who spent, in enlarging and adorning it, the enormous sum of £60,000—three hundred thousand dollars, equivalent to at least two millions now. Scott, in his novel of Kenilworth, describes it, with no exaggeration of romance—for exaggeration would hardly be possible—as it was then. Its very gate-house, still standing complete, was, as Scott says, "equal in extent and superior in architecture to the baronial castle of many a northern chief"; but this was the mere portal of the majestic structure, enclosing seven acres with its walls, equally impregnable as a fortress and magnificent as a palace.

GATE-HOUSE OF KENILWORTH CASTLE

There were great doings at this castle of Kenilworth in 1575, when Shakespeare was eleven years old, and the good people from all the country roundabout thronged to see them. Then it was that Queen Elizabeth was entertained by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and from July 9th to July 27th there was a succession of holiday pageants in the most sumptuous and elaborate style of the time. Master Robert Laneham, whose accuracy as a chronicler is not to be doubted, though he may have been, as Scott calls him, "as great a coxcomb as ever blotted paper," mentions, as a proof of the earl's hospitality, that "the clock bell rang not a note all the while her highness was there; the clock stood also still withal; the hands stood firm and fast, always pointing at two o'clock," the hour of banquet! The quantity of beer drunk on the occasion was 320 hogsheads, and the total expense of the entertainments is said to have been £1000 ($5000) a day.

John Shakespeare, as a well-to-do citizen of Stratford, would be likely to see something of that stately show, and it is not improbable that he took his son William with him. The description in the Midsummer-Night's Dream (ii. 1. 150) of

"a mermaid on a dolphin's back

Uttering such dulcet and harmonious sounds

That the rude sea grew civil at her song,"

appears to be a reminiscence of certain features of the Kenilworth pageant. The minstrel Arion figured there, on a dolphin's back, singing of course; and Triton, in the likeness of a mermaid, commanded the waves to be still; and among the fireworks there were shooting-stars that fell into the water, like the stars that, as Oberon adds,

"shot madly from their spheres

To hear the sea-maid's music."

When Shakespeare was writing that early play, with its scenes in fairy-land, what more natural than that this youthful visit to what must then have seemed veritable fairy-land should recur to his memory and blend with the creations of his fancy?