Venus and Adonis at once became popular, and edition followed edition during a series of years. In the dedication Shakespeare promises that if his poem should please the earl, he would take advantage of all idle hours to prepare some "graver labour" for his patron's honour. This graver labour, the Lucrece, followed in 1594; graver because of its tragic theme, and its celebration of the wronged, yet triumphant, purity of woman. It is dedicated to Southampton in words of loyal affection: "What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours"; and a reference to favours received proves that the regard and esteem were not on Shakespeare's side alone. "There is", says Rowe, "one instance so singular in the magnificence of this patron of Shakespeare's, that, if I had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir William D'Avenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I should not have ventured to have inserted; that my Lord Southampton at one time gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to". It is supposed that the purchase was that of the large house named New Place in the centre of the town of Stratford-on-Avon, which Shakespeare bought for £60 in the spring of 1597, a gabled house of brick, resting on stone foundations, with a baywindow on the garden side. Report—if this be so— exaggerated the amount of Southampton's gift, but even sixty pounds in the days of Elizabeth was a very considerable sum of money.

§ 12. In December, 1594, Shakespeare appeared in

two comedies before Queen Elizabeth at Greenwich Palace. Two eminent actors of his company, that known as the Lord Chamberlain's servants, Richard Burbage, the tragedian, and Kemp, a popular comedian, were associated with him on this occasion.1 The queen, who had a keen eye for merit, honoured Shakespeare and his art. Ben Jonson in his memorial lines prefixed to the First Folio speaks of those "flights" of the "Swan of Avon "

upon the bankes of Thames,

That so did take Eliza, and our Iames.

Shakespeare's company repeatedly performed before the queen at Richmond Palace, at Greenwich Palace, at Whitehall. In the Christmas holidays of 1597 her Majesty witnessed a performance of Love's Labour's Lost in its revised form, "newly corrected and augmented". Next Christmas three plays were given at Whitehall, among them probably The Merry Wives of Windsor, by Elizabeth's express desire. It is a well-known tradition that the queen was so highly entertained by Falstaff, as seen in the two parts of King Henry IV., that she commanded the dramatist to continue the character for one play more, and show the fat knight in love. That bright comedy of English rural life, The >Merry Wives, is said to have been the work of a fortnight. At times, by special arrangement, Shake

1 Halliwell-Phillipps's statement as to the companies to which Shakespeare belonged previously to his joining the Lord Chamberlain's servants deserves to be quoted: "It would appear not altogether unlikely that the poet was one of Lord Strange's actors in March, 1592; one of Lord Pembroke's a few months later; and that he joined the company of the Earl of Sussex in or before January, 1594". But on this subject see especially Mr. Fleay's A Chronicle History of the Life and Work of William Shakespeare.

speare's plays were performed for the grave lawyers of the Inns of Court in their mirth-loving hours of leisure. On Innocents' Day, 1594, the day after Shakespeare's performance before the queen at Greenwich, The Comedy of Errors was presented before a distinguished company in the hall of Gray's Inn; there had been some confusion and disturbance in the earlier part of the evening, which ceased while the spectators watched the entanglements of the twins of Syracuse and Ephesus; ever afterwards that night of Dec. 28, 1594, was remembered as the Night of Errors. Early in February, 1601-2, the benchers of the Middle Temple witnessed in their hall (which still exists) a performance of that delightful comedy Twelfth Night; the law student John Manningham records the fact in his diary, and tells us of his diversion at the odd figure of the deluded Malvolio. But of these occasional performances by Shakespeare's company the most remarkable were two which took place in the preceding year. On February 8th, 1601, the Earl of Essex, accompanied by Shakespeare's patron, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and Roger Manhers, Earl of Rutland, made their rash revolt in the streets of London. On the preceding afternoon, by special arrangement between the conspirators and the Lord Chamberlain's servants, "a play of the deposing and killing of King Richard" [i.e. possibly Shakespeare's King Richard II.] was represented at the Globe Theatre.1 It was not a new play, and

1 Shakespeare's play was already in print, but the earlier quartos— those published in Elizabeth's reign-do not contain the deposition scene, lines 154-318 of act iv. Sc. I.

ROYAL PATRONAGE.

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the actors, to provide against loss if the attendance should be small, required that the sum of forty shillings should be added by their employers to whatever might be taken at the door. Less than two years previously, in this same Globe Theatre, Shakespeare's lines in honour of Essex, then her Majesty's representative in Ireland, had been delivered as part of the prologue to the last act of King Henry V. The unfortunate earl was executed on February 25. Perhaps to make an outward show of equanimity, Elizabeth spent the evening before his execution in witnessing at Richmond Palace a dramatic performance by the same company of actors who, a few days previously, had been employed to prepare the minds of the Londoners for the treasonable outbreak of the doomed favourite. When the queen died, in 1603, it was noticed in print by Henry Chettle, the former editor of Greene's pamphlet, that Shakespeare did not join in the poetical lamentations of the time.

§ 13. James I. had not been many days in London before he granted a license to the members of Shakespeare's company to enact plays both in town and in the provinces. In December, 1603, while the king was a visitor at Wilton, the seat of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, they received a call to perform before the royal party. The editors of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays (1623), in the dedication of that volume, addressing William Herbert and his brother Philip, Earl of Montgomery, refer to the great favour which these patrons of art had shown both to the author of the plays and the plays themselves. When his Majesty's long-delayed (789)

C

state entry into London took place, Shakespeare and his fellows appeared in the king's train: "each of them was presented with four yards and a half of scarlet cloth, the usual dress allowance to players belonging to the household. The poet and his colleagues were termed the king's servants, and took rank at court amongst the Grooms of the Chamber." We have records (copied for Malone) of the performance by the king's servants at Whitehall of Othello (Nov. 1, 1604), of Measure for Measure (Dec. 26, 1604), and of King Lear (Dec. 26, 1606). The lines in Measure for Measure (ii. 4. 24-30) which describe the troubles of a king occasioned by the over-demonstrative loyalty of his admiring subjects, and those in Macbeth which tell of the cure of the king's-evil by the royal touch, are supposed to have been meant as compliments to King James.

During the summer and early autumn months the players often itinerated. Thus in the summer of 1597 Shakespeare's company travelled through Sussex and Kent; on Sept. 3rd they acted at Dover, where, as Halliwell-Phillipps has observed, the author of Lear might have seen the samphire gatherers on the cliff, which may have served as model for Edgar's imaginary precipice. They turned westward in that year, reached Bristol, and performed at Marlborough and Bath. In the autumn of 1605 they travelled to Barnstaple, and before returning to town acted before the mayor and corporation of Oxford. In that city of spires and

1 Halliwell-Phillipps: Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, vol. i. p. 212.

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