It view of Their amusements, as prescribed by statute, CH. 1. consisted in training themselves as soldiers. In the prohibitions of the statutes we see also what their amusements were inclined to be. But besides the bowles and the claish,' field sports, fishing, shooting, hunting, were the delight of every one, and although the forest laws were The forest laws, and terrible, they served only to enhance the excite- the English ment by danger. Then, as now, no English them. peasant could be convinced that there was any moral crime in appropriating the wild game. was an offence against statute law, but no offence against natural law; and it was rather a trial of skill between the noble who sought to monopolize a right which seemed to be common to all, and those who would succeed, if they could, in securing their own share of it. The Robin Hood ballads reflect the popular feeling and breathe the warm genial spirit of the old greenwood adventurers. If deer-stealing was a sin, it was more than compensated by the risk of the penalty to which those who failed submitted, when no other choice was left. They did not always submit, as the old northern poem shows of Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudislee, with its most immoral moral; yet I suppose there was never pedant who could resist the spell of those ringing lines, or refuse with all his heart to wish the rogues success, and confusion to the honest men. taste for But the English peasantry had pleasures of English less ambiguous propriety, and less likely to mis- the drama. lead our sympathies. The chroniclers have given CH. I. us many accounts of the masques and plays which were acted in the court, or in the castles of the noblemen. Such pageants were but the most splendid expression of a taste which was national and universal. As in ancient Greece, generations before the rise of the great dramas of Athens, itinerant companies wandered from village to village, carrying their stage furniture in their little carts, and acted in their booths and tents the grand stories of the mythology; so in EngThe my land the mystery players haunted the wakes and tery plays. fairs, and in barns or taverns, taprooms, or in the farmhouse kitchen, played at saints and angels, and transacted on their petty stage the drama of the Christian faith. To us, who can measure the effect of such scenes only by the impression which they would now produce upon ourselves, these exhibitions can seem but unspeakably profane; they were not profane when tendered in simplicity, and received as they were given. They were no more profane than those quaint, monastic illuminations which formed the germ of Italian art; and as out of the illuminations arose those paintings which remain unapproached and unapproachable in their excellence, so out of the mystery plays arose the English drama, represented in its final completeness by the creations of a poet who, it now begins to be supposed, stands alone among mankind. We allow ourselves to think of Shakspeare or of Raphael or of Phidias, as having accomplished their work by the power of their own individual genius; but greatness like theirs is never more than the highest degree of an excellence which prevails widely round it, and CH. I. forms the environment in which it grows. No single mind in single contact with the facts of nature could have created out of itself a Pallas, a Madonna, or a Lear; such vast conceptions are the growth of ages, the creations of a nation's spirit; and artist and poet, filled full with the power of that spirit, have but given them form, and nothing more than form. Nor would the form itself have been attainable by any isolated talent. No genius can dispense with experience; the aberrations of power, unguided or ill-guided, are ever in proportion to its intensity, and life is not long enough to recover from inevitable mistakes. Noble conceptions already existing, and a noble school of execution which will launch mind and hand at once upon their true courses, are indispensable to transcendent excellence; and Shakspeare's plays were as much the offspring of the long generations who had pioneered his road for him, as the discoveries of Newton were the offspring of those of Copernicus. No great general ever arose out of a nation of cowards; no great statesman or philosopher out of a nation of fools; no great artist out of a nation of materialists; no great dramatist except when the drama was the passion of the people. Acting was the especial amusement of the Eng- All great lish, from the palace to the village green. It was dramatic, the result and expression of their power over themselves, and power over circumstances. They them." were troubled with no subjective speculations; no social problems vexed them with which they nations are because life is simple to CA. I. were unable to deal; and in the exuberance of vigour and spirits they were able, in the strict and literal sense of the word, to play with the Progress of materials of life. The mystery plays came first; the art. wickshire hamlets. next the popular legends; and then the great figures of English history came out upon the stage, or stories from Greek and Roman writers; or sometimes it was an extemporized allegory. Shakspeare himself has left us many pictures of the village drama. Doubtless he had seen many The War a Bottom in the old Warwickshire hamlets; many a Sir Nathaniel playing 'Alissander,' and finding himself a little o'erparted.' He had been with Snug the joiner, Quince the carpenter, and Flute the bellows-mender, when a boy we will not question, and acted with them, and written their parts for them; had gone up with them in the winter's evenings to the Lucy's Hall before the sad trouble with the deer-stealing; and afterwards, when he came to London and found his way into great society, he had not failed to see Polonius. Polonius burlesquing Cæsar on the stage, as in his proper person Polonius burlesqued Sir William Cecil. The strolling players in Hamlet might be met at every country wake or festival; it was the direction in which the especial genius of the people delighted to revel. As I desire in this chapter not only to relate what were the habits of the people, but to illustrate them also, within such compass as I can allow myself, I shall transcribe out of Hall* a description of a *Page 735, quarto edition. play which was acted by the boys of St. Paul's CH. I. School, in 1527, at Greenwich, adding some particulars, not mentioned by Hall, from another source. It is a good instance of the fantastic splendour with which exhibitions of this kind were got up, and it possesses also a melancholy interest of another kind, as showing how little the wisest among us can foresee our own actions, or assure ourselves that the convictions of to-day will alike be the convictions of to-morrow. The occasion was the despatch of a French embassy to England, when Europe was outraged by the Duke of Bourbon's capture of Rome, when the children of Francis I. were prisoners in Spain, and Henry, with the full energy of his fiery nature, was flinging himself into a quarrel with Charles V. as the champion of the Holy See. Greenwich At the conclusion of a magnificent supper Scene at 'the king led the ambassadors into the great in 1527. chamber of disguisings; and in the end of the same chamber was a fountain, and on one side was a hawthorne tree, all of silk, with white flowers, and on the other side was a mulberry tree full of fair berries, all of silk. On the top of the hawthorne were the arms of England, compassed with the collar of the ordert of St. Michael, and in the top of the mulberry tree stood the arms of France within a garter. The fountain was all of white marble, graven and chased; the bases of the * The Personages, Dresses, and Properties of a Mystery Play, acted at Greenwich, by command of Henry VIII. Rolls House MS. + Hall says 'collar of the garter of St. Michael,' which, however, I venture to correct. |