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London Life in Shakspere’s Time

It is the purpose of the present paper to give some glimpses of every-day life in the English metropolis in the latter part of the sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth centuries. Our subject will take us from the main highways of history into by-paths illuminated by the popular literature of the time. It is not the grave historian, the statesman, or the philosopher, but rather the common playwright, the ballad-monger, the pamphleteer, whom we must take here as our guides. Yet ere we intrust ourselves to their care it will not be amiss if, with the view of making the clearer what we shall presently have to say, we pause for a moment at the outset to consider some of the more general aspects of the period with which we are to deal.

Looking, then, first of all, at the political conditions of the time, we may describe the history of the reign of Elizabeth as the history of consolidation rather than of superficial change. What strikes us most is not the addition of fresh culture-elements, but the reorganization and expansion of elements already existing. The forces of evolution had turned inward, acting more upon the internal structure than upon the external forms of society. The Wars of the Roses were now things of recollection only, the fierce contentions which the struggle between York and Lancaster had produced having subsided with most of the bitter feelings engendered by them. Save for the collision with Spain, which ended in the defeat of the great Armada, England enjoyed a singular immunity from complications with foreign powers; and an opportunity, freely made use of, was thus offered for the development of foreign trade. The growth of a strong commercial sentiment, consequent on this, acted as a powerful solvent in the dissolution of feudal ideas and the disintegration of feudal forms of life. The conflict was now mainly between opinions—between rival forces of an intellectual and moral character. The power of the upper classes—the representatives of the ancient régime of chivalry—was on the wane; the power of the middle classes—the representatives of the modern régime of commerce—showed corresponding growth. The voice of the people, through their delegates in Parliament, began to be acknowledged by the caution exhibited on sundry critical occasions by the crown; the country at large was growing richer and stronger; the sense of English unity was intensified by the very dangers which menaced the national life; and as men came more and more to recognize their individualities, they demanded greater freedom of thought and speech. “England, alone of European nations,” as Mr. Symonds pointed out, “received the influences of both Renaissance and Reformation simultaneously.” The mighty forces generated by these two movements in combination—one emancipating the reason, the other the conscience, from the trammels of the Middle Ages—told in countless ways upon the masses of society. But with all this—partly, indeed, in consequence of all this—there was a deep-seated restlessness at the very springs of life. The contests of opposing parties were carried on with a fierceness and acerbity of which we know little in these more moderate days; the minds of men were set at variance and thrown into confusion by a thousand distracting issues; and, unrealized as yet in all their significance and power, those Titanic religious and political agencies were beginning to take shape which were by and by to rend English society to its very core.

When we turn from the political character of the age to the moral character of the people, we find it difficult to avoid having recourse to a series of antitheses, after the familiar manner of Macaulay, so violent and surprising are the contrasts, so diverse the component qualities which analysis everywhere brings to light. The age was virile in its power, its restlessness, its amazing energy and fertility; it was virile, too, in its unrestraint, its fierceness, its licentiousness and brutality. Men gloried in their newly conquered freedom, and in that wider knowledge of the world which had been opened up to them by the study of the past, by the scientific researches of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, by the discoveries of Amerigo Vespucci, Columbus, Jenkinson, Willoughby, Drake. National feeling was strong; the national pulse beat high. Yet, in spite of Protestantism and an open Bible, it was essentially a pagan age; in spite of its Platonism and Euphuism, a coarse and sensual one. You had only to scratch the superficial polish to find the old savagery beneath. Your smiling and graceful courtier would discourse of Seneca and Aristotle, but he would relish the obscenest jest and act his part in the grossest intrigue. Your young gallant would turn an Italian sonnet, or “tune the music of an ever vain tongue,” but within an hour he might have been found in all the blood and filth and turmoil of the cockpit or the bear-ring. The unseemliest freedom prevailed throughout society—amidst the noble ladies in immediate attendance upon the queen, and thence all down the social scale. Laws were horribly brutal, habits revoltingly rude. All the powerful instincts of a fresh, buoyant, self-reliant, ambitious, robust, sensuous manhood had burst loose, finding expression now in wild extravagance, indulgence, animalism, now in great effort on distant seas, now in the mighty utterances of the drama; for these things were but different facets of the same national character. Still, with all its gigantic prodigality of energy, with all its untempered misuse of genius and power, the English Renaissance kept itself free from many of the worst features of the Spanish and Italian revivals. It was all very well for Benvenuto Cellini to call the English “wild beasts.” Deep down beneath the casuistry and Euphuism, beneath the artificiality and the glittering veneer, beneath the coarseness and the brutalism, there was ever to be found that which was lacking in the Southern character—a stern, hardy, tough-fibred moral sense, which in that critical period of disquietude and upheaval formed indeed the very sheet-anchor of the nation’s hopes. It must never be forgotten that it was this age of new-found freedom, and of that license which went with it like its shadow, that produced such types of magnificent manhood as Raleigh, strong “the fierce extremes of good and ill to brook”; as Spenser, sweetest and purest of poets and of men; as Sidney, whom that same Spenser might well describe as “the most noble and virtuous gentleman, most worthy of all titles, both of learning and chivalry”; as Shakspere, whom, all slanders notwithstanding, we, like his own close friends, still think and speak of as our “Gentle Will.”

Such, so far as we are able to sum them up in a few brief sentences, were some of the salient characteristics of the great age of the Virgin Queen—an age, as Dean Church has said, “of vast ambitious adventure, which went to sea, little knowing whither it went, and ill-provided with knowledge or instrument”; but an age of magnificent enterprise and achievement, none the less. And now it is for us to follow down into some of the details of their private, every-day existence the men and women who, to use a suggestive phrase of Goethe’s, were the citizens of this period, and whose little lives shared, no matter in how small and obscure a way, in the movements and destinies of the large world into which they were born.

Just a quarter of a century before Queen Elizabeth’s death, a proclamation was issued, reciting that her Majesty foresaw that “great and manifold inconveniences and mischiefs” were likely to arise “from the access and confluence of the people” to the metropolis, and making certain stringent provisions with a view to keeping down the population of the city. This enactment is useful as showing us that even at that early date—as later on, in the time of Smollett—the enormous growth of London was held to be matter for alarm. London was indeed increasing rapidly in extent, population, wealth, and power; and Lyly was hardly guilty of extravagance when, in his “Euphues,” he wrote of it as a place that “both for the beauty of building, infinite riches, variety of all things,” “excelleth all the cities of the world; insomuch that it may be called the storehouse or mart of all Europe.” Yet we are most of us probably unable without much effort to realize how different was the English metropolis of Elizabeth’s time from the metropolis of the present day.

We have to remember, in the first place, that the London with which we are now concerned was a walled city, and that the territory which lay within the walls—that is, the metropolis proper—represented but a very small portion of what is now included within the civic area. Newgate, Ludgate, Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Cripplegate, and Aldersgate, still mark out and perpetuate by their names the narrow lines of those protecting walls which held snug and secure the mere handful of folk of which London was then composed. At nine o’clock in the evening, when Bow-bell rang, and the voices of the other city churches took up the curfew-strain, the gates were shut for the night, and the citizens retired to their dwellings under the protection of armed watchmen who guarded their slumbers along the walls. Westward from Fleet Street and Holborn, beyond which so much of modern London lies, the city had not then penetrated.

Within and about the walls there were many “fair churches for divine service,” with old St. Paul’s in their midst—the Gothic St. Paul’s of the days before the great fire; and many prisons to help the churches in their philanthropic work. Open spaces were very numerous; trees were everywhere to be seen; fields invaded the most sacred strongholds of commercial activity; conduits and brooks (whereof Lamb’s Conduit Street to-day carries a nominal reminiscence) flowed through every part of the town. The narrow, straggling streets ran hither and thither with no very marked definity of aim; for county councils had not as yet come into existence, and metropolitan improvements were still hidden in the womb of time; and so unsanitary were the general conditions that they were seldom free from epidemic disease. Cheap, with its old cross just opposite the entrance to Wood Street, was a famous spot for trading of all kinds; but there were other localities which had their specialized activities. St. Paul’s, for instance, was the acknowledged quarter for booksellers, as indeed it has continued to be down to the present time. Houndsditch, like the Houndsditch of to-day, and Long Lane in Smithfield, abounded in shops for second-hand clothing—fripperies, as they were called. “He shows like a walking frippery,” says one of the characters in “The City Madam”; while it was in the latter place that Mistress Birdlime in “Westward Ho” speaks of “hiring three liveries.” In St. Martin’s-le-Grand clustered the foreign handicraftsmen of doubtful character, who manufactured copper lace and imitation jewellery; and Watling Street and Birchin Lane were the haunts of the tailors. Then, again, it was in Bucklersbury that the grocers and druggists most did congregate. “Go to Bucklersbury and fetch me two ounces of preserved melons,” says Mistress Tenterhook in “Westward Ho.” Fleet Lane and Pie Corner were so famous for their cook-shops that Anne in “The City Madam” might well exclaim, when the porters enter with their baskets of provisions, that they smell unmistakably of these localities; while to Panyer Alley repaired all true lovers of tripe. Even religious opinions had their special homes. Bloomsbury and Drury Lane, for example, were favorite haunts of Catholics; and the Puritans were particularly strong in Blackfriars. This explains the words put by Webster into the mouth of one of his characters: “We are as pure about the heart as if we dwelt amongst ’em in Blackfriars,” and Doll Common’s description of Face, in “The Alchemist,” as—

“A rascal, upstart, apocryphal captain,

Whom not a Puritan in Blackfriars will trust.”

And through all this jumble of wealth and dirt, away past the suburbs and into the open country beyond, ran “the famous River Thames”—the “great silent highway,” as it has been called—fed by the Fleet and other forgotten and now hidden streams, and bearing upon its majestic current its hundreds of watermen, its boats, its barges, and its swans. It was spanned by a single bridge, of which Lyly speaks enthusiastically in his “Euphues,” and which is described by the German traveller, Paul Hentzner, as “a bridge of stone, eight hundred feet in length, of wonderful work. It is supported,” this writer continues, “upon twenty piers of square stone, sixty feet high and thirty broad, joined by arches of about twenty feet diameter.” And he adds, touching in a brief sentence upon a characteristic of its structure which must seem particularly curious to modern readers: “The whole is covered on each side with houses, so disposed as to have the appearance of a continued street, not at all of a bridge.”

But if the difference between to-day and three centuries ago is striking enough within the city walls, still more striking does it become as we pass beyond the gates. Fleet Street, where Dr. Johnson was presently to enjoy watching the ceaseless ebb and flow of the great tide of human life, was still suburban; Chancery Lane, with its wide gardens on the eastern side and Lincoln’s Inn enclosure on the western, possessed only a few scattered houses at either end. The Strand—

“That goodly thoroughfare between

The court and city,”

as a Puritan poet called it—was a long country road flanked with noblemen’s houses (“a continual row of palaces, belonging to the chief nobility,” Hentzner says), the gardens of which on the one side ran down to the river, and on the other backed upon the fine open space of pasture-land called Covent (that is, Convent) Garden. At Charing there was an ancient cross, and beyond, wide fields known as the Haymarket, the quiet stretches of St. James’s Park, and the wide country road called Piccadilly, the regular highway to Reading and the west. St. Martin’s Lane ran up between hedgerows and meadows to Tottenham, or Totten Court. In the other direction, towards Westminster, there was the Court, with its Tiltyard, standing where the Horseguards now stand, and beyond this the city of Westminster, with its abbey and great hall, lying in the quiet fields. Just opposite, on the other bank, in an unbroken expanse of country, stood Lambeth Palace, whence a long, lonely road led eastward, through Lambeth Marsh, to the city purlieus on the Surrey side of the water.

What we know as the suburbs of London were then separate villages, to reach which one had to make a tedious journey over open country and along desolate lanes. Finsbury Field was covered with windmills, and there the archers met for practice. Islington was famous, to quote Ben Jonson, for the citizens that went a-ducking—that is, duck-hunting—in its ponds. Pimlico and Holloway were favorite resorts of pleasure-seeking townsfolk on Sunday afternoons. Hoxton and Hampstead and Willesden lay far away in the country; Holborn was a rural highway running through the little village of St. Giles’s towards Oxford; and the Edgeware Road took you away to Tyburn, the spot which has acquired such grim notoriety in the annals of crime. Highway robberies took place at Kentish Town and Hampstead; even the Queen’s Majesty was mobbed by a handful of ruffians in the sequestered neighborhood of Islington, which stood alone among the hills to the north; while no man who valued his life would venture to walk after nightfall, unarmed or unprotected, as far into the country as Hyde Park Corner.

Let us now look a little more closely at the street life of the city which we have thus roughly sketched.

There was little of that never-ceasing bustle with which we are familiar—little of the eternal hurry, the intense strain, the rush and turmoil of our modern existence; but the buzz of commerce was everywhere to be heard, telling us that the world was not asleep. The streets were rough, ill-paved, and narrow, and the appearance of a vehicle in them was sufficiently rare an occurrence to attract attention; though the ostentation of the rich in making use of carriages on every possible occasion was already beginning to be satirized by the writers of the time—as, for instance, by Massinger in “The City Madam,” and by Cooke in “Greene’s Tu Quoque.” There were the churches—six score or so of them, Lyly tells us, within the walls; the inns, with their wide hostleries; the private houses, built not in long uniform rows, but irregularly, as though they desired to preserve some traces of personal character. Their upper stories were frequently built out, and sometimes projected so far across the narrow streetway that Jonson pictures a lady and her lover exchanging confidences from the topmost windows of opposite tenements—“arguing from different premises,” as Dr. Holmes would say. There, too, were the shops, looking more like booths in a fair, with their quaint and picturesque signs, and their merchandise exposed to public gaze on open stalls, while in front of them paced the young apprentices, besieging the ears of every passer-by with their ceaseless clamor of “What d’ye lack?” and their long-winded recommendations of the articles which they had for sale. In Middleton’s “Michaelmas Term” we have a scene before Quomodo’s shop, and Quomodo himself calling out to Easy and Shortyard: “Do you hear, sir? What lack you, gentlemen? See, good kerseys and broadcloths here—I pray you come near.” Many other passages of similar import might be added. Nor were these the only, or even the noisiest, symptoms of commercial enterprise. Itinerant vendors of the Autolycus tribe also patrolled the streets, murdering the Queen’s English, like their descendants of to-day, as in loud, hoarse voices they advertised their miscellaneous wares. There were fishwives, orange-women, and chimney-sweeps, broom-men, hawkers of meat pies and pepper, of rushes for the floor, of mats, oat-cakes, milk, and coal; and numerous Irish costermongers (of the kind Face refers to in “The Alchemist”) who trafficked in fruit and vegetables. In addition to all these, and to complete the confusion of the streets, there were mountebanks, jugglers, and ballad-singers, full of strange tricks and new songs, whereby to attract attention and pick up a few odd coins.

The daily round of existence in the city streets offered, therefore, no small amount of interest and variety; while from time to time the ordinary routine was broken in upon by fresh elements of excitement. Now it might be a splendid procession—perhaps of one of the great livery companies, purse-proud and ostentatious; perhaps of the newly-installed Lord Mayor, on his way back from Westminster; perhaps of the Virgin Queen and her retinue, coming cityward on some state occasion from Richmond or Whitehall. Now, again, it might be a procession of a very different kind—a mob following a thief who was going to be put into the pillory, or a woman of disreputable character who, meeting the fate dreaded by Doll Common, was carted through the streets to the accompaniment of a brass band, and amid the cries and hootings of the populace; or a group of felons who were led out of the city along Holborn to Tyburn, there to pay the last penalty of the law. Sometimes, too, there were large gatherings in St. Paul’s churchyard to hear some famous preacher—like Bishop Jewell—discourse from the steps of the great cross; and sometimes there were street fights between retainers of rival houses, or bands of hot-tempered ’prentices belonging to the different city guilds—fights which generally ended in bloodshed and broken heads. The ’prentices of the city were indeed notoriously a turbulent tribe, and they figure in many a brawl and squabble in the plays of the time. “If he were in London, among the clubs, up went his heels for striking of a ’prentice,” says Gazet, in Massinger’s “Renegado,” referring in this phrase to the fact that clubs were habitually kept in the shops ready for use in the event of any affray. So that the London streets were not so dull as one might at first suppose; while for the rest there was plenty of quiet, steady activity from dawn till dusk. Though the struggle for wealth was not then so keen as it is to-day, and men on the whole took things more easily, life was full of earnestness and purpose, and commercial ambition shared the magnificent vigor and energy of the Elizabethan nature with the fever of adventure and a youthful, spontaneous, and unabashed delight in the pleasures of sense. Wide roads were open to the young man of brains and courage, roads which would lead to place and power. Fortunes were to be made, positions won; and the ’prentice, starting out in his career, had many examples of self-made and successful men to remind him that the world was all before him where to choose, and that the future largely depended upon himself. Thus, though the London of Shakspere’s time was far different from the London of to-day as regards its commerce, its activities, its habits and daily life, it was still a thriving city, the object of ambition, the dreamland of the aspiring youth, the great heart which set the blood pulsing and dancing through all the arteries of the land.

As for the shops themselves, we must dismiss them with a very few words. The modern difficulty—the importation of foreign wares, and the immigration of foreign dealers—was already to the front; and Italian, French, German, Spanish, and Flemish tradesmen were to be found in almost every street—each with his peculiar class of custom. Some writers of the time, like William Stafford, in his “Brief Conceit,” grow violent over the inroads of these aliens, and roundly proclaim, with Bishop Hall, that all the vice of the city was to be laid at their doors. But in the ordinary walks of business the Englishman, in spite of a good deal of characteristic bluster and grumbling, still held his ground. The apothecary sold love-charms and philters, tobacco, cane, and pudding, as well as drugs; but there were regular tobacco merchants, also, whose shops were of unrivalled splendor. The immense vogue of this novel luxury is sufficiently shown by the statement made by Barnaby Riche in “The Honesty of this Age,” that seven thousand shops in London “vented” tobacco, and by the passing remark of Hentzner, that it was smoked (or “drunk,” as the phrase then went) everywhere. At the theatre and all such places of public resort, the pipe was the Englishman’s habitual companion, and from sundry passages in Jonson, Dekker, Marston, and other dramatists, we infer that it was sometimes carried even to church.

Among the most noteworthy of the tradesmen of the time were the barbers, who, be it remembered, were surgeons as well, and would cut your beard or bleed you, trim your hair or pull out your teeth, with absolute impartiality. Their shops were the favorite resorts of idlers, as they had been long since in the days of Lucian; and owing to the immense attention then paid to hair and beard, the more accomplished among them drove an enormous trade. Their garrulity was proverbial. “Oh, sir, you know I am a barber and cannot tittle-tattle,” says Dello, in Lyly’s “Midas,” in a scene which is full of curious information concerning the barbers of the time. The Cutbeard of Jonson’s “Silent Woman,” is another illustration in point. It may be mentioned, as an odd feature of their establishments, that a lute was commonly kept in readiness for the amusement of those who might have to wait for attention, as the newspapers and comic weeklies are kept to-day. “Barbers shall wear thee on their citterns,” says Rhetias to Coculus, in Ford’s “Lover’s Melancholy,” referring to the grotesque figureheads by which these instruments were often decorated.

In the matter of the relations of sellers and purchasers, we may note, as one of those little touches of nature which make the whole world kin, that customers, as we learn from more than one old play, often indulged in the quite modern practice of having half the goods in a shop laid out for inspection before buying the most trumpery article. Nor, on the other hand, were the dealers of the time much behind their descendants of to-day in what are known as the tricks of trade. Adulteration was a crying evil; some of the methods often employed, for example, for the “sophistication” of tobacco, will be recalled by all readers of “The Alchemist.” Another common practice among shopkeepers was that of darkening their stores to disguise the inferiority of their merchandise. This is constantly referred to by contemporary writers. The sturdy Stubbs attacks the abuse in his “Display of Corruptions.” “They have their shops and places where they sell their cloth very dark and obscure,” he writes, referring to the mercers and drapers of his time, “of purpose to deceive buyers.” Webster, in “The Duchess of Malfi,” employs this familiar abuse in the turn of a compliment: “This darkening of your worth is not like that which tradesmen use in the city; their false lights are to rid bad wares off;” and Quomodo, in “Michaelmas Term,” boasts, humanly enough, that his shop is not “so dark as some of his neighbors’.” Again, Brome, in the “City Wit”: “What should the city do with honesty? Why are your wares gummed? Your shops dark?” In “Westward Ho” we read that the shop of a linen-draper was generally “as dark as a room in Bedlam,” and, not to multiply quotations, Middleton, in “Anything for a Quiet Life,” speaks of shopwares being habitually “set in deceiving lights.” Colliers, too, were so notorious for short measure and other crafty practices that Greene, in his “Notable Discovery of Cosenage,” includes a special “delightful discourse” on purpose to lay bare their knavery.

The houses were not yet numbered, and all trading establishments were known by their tokens—great signboards decorating every shop with strange mottoes and fantastic devices, which took the place of the advertising media of the present day. Milton, we remember, was born at the Spread Eagle, in Bread Street, and well on in the eighteenth century the imprints of publishers still refer to these customary signs; as in the case of the famous “left-legged Tonson,” who did business at “Shakespeare’s Head, over against Catherine Street, in the Strand.” Quotations illustrative of these trading tokens and the part they played in the commercial life of the time might be indefinitely multiplied; but we must content ourselves with a single bit of evidence from “The Alchemist.” Abel Drugger, the young tradesman, is opening a new shop, and comes to Subtle to take his advice about the choice of a suitable device. In the one suggested by Subtle, Jonson satirizes the wildly absurd combinations frequently employed, like the foolish advertisements of our own century, to attract or compel public attention:—

“He shall have a bel, that’s Abel;

And by it standing one whose name is Dee,

In a rug gown, there’s D and Rug, that’s drug;

And right anenst him a dog snarling Er—

There’s Drugger, Abel Drugger—there’s his sign.”

It is hardly necessary to add that though these signs have practically disappeared from general use, they survive in trademarks and in the odd and often outlandish trading tokens still to be seen over the doors of English public houses and inns; though just why public houses should have kept up a practice otherwise almost universally abandoned since the numbering of houses came into vogue, it would be difficult to say.

But with the oncoming of the night, silence, for the most part, fell over the city and its surroundings. There was as yet no public lighting of the streets, but the good citizens were supposed to do their individual shares towards illuminating the dark thoroughfares, to insure which the watchmen, with lanterns and halberts, would pace their solemn rounds, hoarsely bawling at every doorway, “Lantern and a whole candle-light! Hang out your lights here!” Writing from Paris in 1620, and referring to the terrible condition of the streets in the French capital, Howell says: “This makes one think often of the excellent nocturnal government of our city of London, where one may pass and repass securely all hours of the night, if he gives good words to the watch.” Yet it is to be feared that this patriotic comment puts the matter in a somewhat too favorable way. The impression one derives from reading the plays and pamphlets of the time certainly is that the roads were always more or less dangerous after dark, and that good, law-abiding townsfolk were best off within doors, or, at all events, in the immediate neighborhood of their own houses. If they were forced to go farther afield, they would do well to take a link-boy with them to guide them with his light, unless they were like Falstaff, who, as we remember, once told Bardolph that he been saved a thousand marks in links and torches walking between tavern and tavern, owing to the fiery and luminous character of the said Bardolph’s nose. A stout ’prentice boy with a well-weighted club was a desirable companion, too, for those who valued purses and pates. For the streets were infested by “roaring boys” and wild young bloods, whose principal amusement, besides fighting among themselves, was in persecuting quiet citizens, and who came into almost nightly conflict with the doting old Dogberry watchmen, who endeavored to cope with them, often with but very slight success. These are the fine fellows described in Shirley’s “Gamester,”—

“that roar

In brothels, and break windows, fright the streets,

And sometimes set upon innocent bell-men to beget

Discourse for a week’s diet,”

and whom Jonson’s Kastril looked up to with so much admiration and respect.

I could not hope by any series of thumbnail sketches to conjure up the manifold details of the daily life of Elizabethan London as one finds it portrayed in the plays of Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, Cooke, and the strange pamphlets of Nash and Greene. But we must not linger over these street scenes. It is ample time that we should pass on to consider a little the various classes which went to make up the population of the metropolis in the days of which we speak.

In the common relationships of class with class the age of Elizabeth differed widely from our own. Sociability was one of the main characteristics of the time, and this the guild life of the larger towns did much to foster. In the places of common resort—in the tavern, the theatre, at St. Paul’s Walk, or the Archery Ground at Finsbury, men daily met their neighbors and brother-citizens, and rubbed shoulders and chopped opinions with a warmth and open-heartedness which, if they had little of modern propriety, also knew little of modern restraint. Moreover, London was not then the vast, overgrown, incoherent city which it has since become, and its inhabitants still took that personal interest in one another’s doings, and felt, to some extent at any rate, that sense of family sympathy which, though they are common traits of provincial town life, are characteristic of the metropolis no longer. Nevertheless, the classes remained absolutely distinct, cut off from one another by chasms of custom and interest, and even law, which were never, save with the rarest exceptions, bridged over. The enactments which had been promulgated at the beginning of the reign to fix with rigid certainty the special garbs of the various ranks of the community, are sufficient to show to what extent the caste system, with its attendant prejudices and conventions, was still rooted deep in English life. The young ’prentice might haply make a fortune, and reach a position of great civic distinction. This much was open to him; but for his helpmeet in life he looked no higher than his master’s daughter. The successful merchant might even reach the Lord Mayor’s bench, but he was still a citizen, and laid no claim to set his foot within the charmed circle of gentle life. This condition of things is illustrated again and again in the plays of the time, as in Middleton’s “City Madam” and Dekker’s “Shoemaker’s Holiday.” There was practically no overlapping of interests, no intermingling of class with class. Money could do much, but it could not, as it will at present, purchase an entrance into the most select society; nor, in the matrimonial market of that day, was a coronet ever knocked down for a dower. But this is only one side of the question. If there was little class sympathy, there was little class rivalry also. Society was more diffuse than it is to-day—held together less firmly, but with less of the friction which is a necessary preliminary to that readjustment of social arrangements which the industrial movements of the modern world are tending slowly to bring about. The classes touched externally, but that was all. In spirit they stood aloof—each content to go its own way, to live its own life, but each, for the most part, equally ready to let the others freely do the same.

Of the various classes which went to the making of the population of Shakspere’s London, two only will here demand attention—the gentry and the citizens. Of course, within both of these great groups there were many grades, but time will not allow us to subdivide. Of course, too, beyond and outside these altogether, lay the seething mass of miscellaneous humanity—the vast fringe of the population—which then, as now, formed so dark and so dangerous an unabsorbed element in the city’s general life. Threads from this dingy and tangled social frilling were sometimes caught up and woven for picturesque purposes into the pattern of the plays of the time. But the epic of the submerged tenth was as yet undreamed of; and all this side of Elizabethan civilization must for the present be left out of view.

The citizens lived for the most part at their shops or places of business; the gentlefolk were more distributed. Some still had their habitations in the commercial portions of the city, and those of them who regularly lived in the country and came to town during term-time—which then constituted the London season—were often content to find temporary lodging over some druggist’s or barber’s shop. But the exodus of the gentry and courtiers from the centres of trade and labor was already beginning, and the aristocratic neighborhoods were admittedly outside the walls. In “Greene’s Tu Quoque” when Lionel Nash is knighted, he delivers up his store to his head ’prentice, and announces his intention of moving the next day into the Strand; which may be taken as showing that for the retired tradesman—and still more, therefore, for the gentleman or courtier—a residence well removed from the city was deemed the proper thing.

It is difficult to speak in general terms of the houses of the time, since, naturally enough, the comfort and luxury of the domestic arrangements varied considerably as one passed up or down the social scale. A few broad statements may, however, be made. In the average dwelling the ceilings were covered with plaster of Paris, and the inner walls wainscoted and tapestried; the tapestry being worked with landscapes and figures often of a very elaborate character. This explains Lyly’s simile in “Midas”—“like arras, full of device.” Enough space was left for any one to hide between the arras and the wall—a fact, it will be remembered, frequently made use of by the Elizabethan dramatists, as by Webster in “The Duchess of Malfi,” where Cariola conceals herself behind the hanging to overhear what goes on between the Duchess and Antonio; and by Shakspere in “Henry the Fourth,” where Falstaff goes to sleep and has his pocket picked; and even more notably in the famous rat-killing scene in “Hamlet.” In addition, pictures were often used for decoration, and when valuable were protected by curtains. “I yet but draw the curtain; now to the picture,” says Monticelso in Webster’s “White Devil”; and, again, “We will draw the curtain and show you the picture,” says Olivia in “Twelfth Night,” as she removes her veil. The halls were lighted by candelabras or torch-bearers, and watch-lights, or night-lights, were in common use. At the foot of the master’s bed, rolled under during the day and drawn out at night, was a truckle-bed for his page. “Well, go thy ways for as sweet a breasted page as ever lay at his master’s feet in a truckle-bed,” says Dondolo in Middleton’s “More Dissemblers Besides Women.” The tables had flaps, and the floors were strewn with rushes, for carpets were as yet unknown. These rushes were renewed for fresh-comers. “Strangers have green rushes, while daily guests are not worth a rush,” says Lyly, in “Sapho and Phao”—a remark in which, by the way, we are reminded of the origin of one of our familiar phrases. Brick was costly, and the buildings were mostly of wood; but a new fashion was just coming in—that of employing well-constructed stoves in place of the open, smoky fireplaces hitherto general. The houses were now, too, provided with glass for the windows, which had not been the case a hundred years before, horn or wicker lattice-work having been used for the purpose. But this new notion was opposed by William Stafford, who saw in it the symptom of growing fondness for what he contemptuously called foreign nick-nacks. Chimneys, too, of which some years before there had been a few specimens only in every large town, were now general in the ordinary dwellings of the middle classes. The old wooden platters were giving way to pewter, which, though still rare, was gradually coming into use. Tin spoons also were making their appearance. China, gold, and silver plate were to be seen on the tables of the wealthy, and Venetian glass was sometimes employed, though, as this was very expensive, many people still drank from their mugs of burnt stone. Instead of the straw bundle and log on which people had formerly been content to sleep, proper sheets, pillows, and bolsters were now employed; not, however, without incurring the ridicule or the wrath of lovers of the good old times and moralists of severe complexion. “What makes us so weak as we now are?” demands Sir Lionel, in “Greene’s Tu Quoque,” abusing the new generation with all the vigor of a hale old man. “A feather bed! What so unapt for exercise? A feather bed! What breeds such pains and aches in our bones? Why, a feather bed!” Yet houses were so scantily furnished that uninvited or unexpected guests often used to bring their own stools with them, a practice referred to by Massinger in his “Unnatural Combat,” where he speaks of those who, “like unbidden guests, bring their own stools.” Many of the household arrangements, especially in the way of sanitation, were from our own point of view still crude and primitive enough. But the age of Elizabeth, as regards domestic economy generally, was distinctly a period of progress, and we have only to compare the sixteenth century with the centuries which went before, to sympathize with old Harrison, when, dealing with this very matter, he exclaims in a kind of fervent rapture—“God be thankt for his good gifts!”

Turning from the houses themselves to the home life of the time, we may notice that in the establishments of the ancient nobility the arrangements were still on a large and almost regal scale, savoring yet, in spite of the slow movements conspicuous throughout society, of the feudalism which was now on the wane, and the old customs which, in an age of transition, were gradually being left behind. In the greater households a number of young gentlemen of good family, usually the younger sons of knights and esquires, continued to offer personal service as in former days. Beneath these were the retainers, so-called, who, not living in the house or being liable to any menial duty, attended their lord on occasions of public ceremony; while, in the third place, there were the servants proper, who formed actual portions of the establishment, and on whom its various duties devolved. These were headed by the steward, under whose control was the common herd of serving men and women and pages. With these must be reckoned the poor tutor, passing rich on five marks a year, who sat below the salt, and, as Hall’s satire shows, had to endure all kinds of indignity. And, finally, there was the jester, the privileged personage of the household, who could say and do things on which no one else would venture. “There is no slander in an allowed fool, though he do nothing but rail,” says Olivia in “Twelfth Night”; while the melancholy Jaques, speaking of his desire to assume the motley dress, protests:—

“I must have liberty

Withal, as large a charter as the wind,

To blow on whom I please; for so fools have.”

Thus the jester was able to find in his wit and position an excuse generally, though not invariably, sufficient to cover every freedom taken with master or guests. But in Shakspere’s time this ancient and long-famous appurtenance to the larger households was already passing out of existence, a fact to which the dramatist himself makes reference in “As You Like It”: “Since the little wit that fools have was silenced, the little foolery that wise men have makes the greater show.”

But when we pass from these huge and ostentatious establishments to the dwellings of the middle and trading classes, we find the transitional character of the period far more marked. Evidences of domestic development and improvement reveal themselves on every side. The essential traits of mediævalism were gradually disappearing; and with the steady realization on the part of the commercial elements in the community of their increasing importance in the complex life of the time, there went many significant changes, indicating the slow collapse of the old régime and the consolidation of society upon its modern foundations.

Nevertheless, in the internal policy and arrangement of the Elizabethan household there was still much that would strike a present-day observer as remarkable—for the older spirit still made itself felt, though ancient forms were passing away. For instance, the relations existing between the head of the house and those about him and dependent upon him, if no longer what they were a hundred years before, had not yet begun to assume their distinguishing modern characteristics. The position of servant, ’prentice, or journeyman still partook of a certain suggestion of servitude, which it has required many years of social evolution to wear partially away. Our nineteenth-century notion of contract based upon terms something like equal, at least in theory—of so much money paid in return for such and such services rendered—had not yet established itself; and while the understanding between employer and employed was gradually acquiring more and more of a commercial quality, it had not by any means lost all its personal implications. The ’prentices of the time, for example, were something more and something less than those occupying analogous positions in our own days. They belonged to the establishment, lived with their master, ate at his table, formed part of the family; yet at the same time wore coats of blue—the color which everywhere symbolized servitude, and even constituted, as we know from “The City Madam” and other plays, the livery of Bridewell. They not only were their master’s assistants in the work of the shop; they furnished him also a kind of body-guard, or retinue—for on occasions when he had to make excursions after dark they went with him, bearing torches or lanterns to light the way, and stout clubs, for use in case of sudden assault. But the personal character of such relationships is perhaps most fully shown in the fact that masters and mistresses dealt out corporal punishment to their servants, a universal practice, which, as Chamberlayne tells us in his “Survey,” was expressly sanctioned by law. In Heywood’s “English Traveller,” young Geraldine accounts for the circumstance that Bess, Mrs. Winscott’s maid, tells slanderous stories about her, by the supposition that—