SHAKESPEARE'S LONDON.*

THE object of this fascinating little book is to bring vividly before the mind's eye of the reader the actual surroundings amid which the plays of Shakespeare were conceived, written, and first acted. As all the world knows, the productive years of Shakespeare's life were spent in London, and Mr. Ordish addresses himself especially to the task of correcting a mistaken notion which he apparently believes the majority of people to harbour, that to live in the precinct of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, meant in the reign of Queen Elizabeth very much the same imprisonment in a sordid world of bricks and mortar and smoke as is meant by living there at the present day. As a matter of fact, we doubt very much whether anybody at the level of imaginative culture that takes a critical interest in Shakespeare really does make this mistake. We should say the tendency was rather to exaggerate the modernity of our monster Metro.- polls, and in thinking of London in the olden time to imagine a picturesque city not unlike Winchester or Salisbury in its general characteristics, only with more historical buildings of an imposing and interesting character located in it than either of these towns possess. Our imaginations deal in this way with historical periods ; we eliminate all the sordid detail of the daily life of the mass of people (whose circumstances are always more or less squalid and more or less commonplace) and entirely populate the past with the picturesque and important personages we have made acquaintance with in history and romance. The fact that such dealing with time is very much after the pattern of the poet's method of dealing with all things, makes it no bad pre- paration for the critical study of poets and their surroundings ; and in regard to the topography of old cities, there is no doubt that the way of the imagination brings us roughly near to the e Shelospenre's London : a Study of London in the Ite•ga of Queen Elizabeth.

Ey T. Faincau Ortlieh. London : J. td. 1 ca.t and Co.

truth. Moreover, though Vissoher's "View of London," of which a charmingly reproduced section makes the frontis- piece to Mr. Ordish's volume, may be known to comparatively

few people, yet almost everybody has, somewhere or other, the opportunity of seeing some old print of London, and of getting

from it a general confirmation of the picturesque guesses made by the imagination. We make these remarks, how- ever, not with any intention of suggesting that there was no need for Mr. Ordish's book. Far from it. We do not only want books to correct our intuitions ; the pleasantest books, and often the most profitable, are those that justify them. And this is particularly true in the case of books about Shakespeare, the special function of whose genius it is to interpret, while idealising all the intuitions of common-sense, The interpenetration of Shakespeare's London by influences of the country is one of the points most closely insisted upon :—

" With slight deductions here and there, it might be said that the whole of what is now the County of London was then open country. A man could walk westward along Holborn, and by the time he reached St. Giles's Church, where now is Shaftesbury Avenue, it would be fields. If he went from Holborn up Gray's Inn Lane, by the time he reached King's Cross he would have left London behind him. St. Pancras was a rural village. On the north, if he passed through Cripplegate, a few minutes' walk would take him through the suburbs ; or if he took the mid through Moorgate, by the time ho had passed the Moorfields and left Finsbury fields behind him, he would very soon encounter one of the farm homesteads which supplied the city with agricultural produce. It follows that life in Shakespeare's London was not the distinctive town-life which we associate with the London of to-day. A young man from a pro- vincial town, and used to rural sights and sounds, endowed with the love of nature, would not pine for the green fields at home; he would take a walk into the country Ho would finds forest of Arden on the heights of Hampstead and Highgate ; he could take part in a sheep-shearing celebration at even a less distance. As he walked through the city on business bent, a flock of wild ducks or teal might wing over his head with outstretched necks, taking flight from the marshes on the south between Paris Garden and Lambeth. One of the most delightful features of the city itself, the city within the walls, was the spacious garden attached to most of the ancient houses ; these gardens were well stocked with fruit-trees, and with flower-beds, cultivated for garnishing the chambers' of the citizens' dwellings."

Shakespeare might hear the cuckoo as he sat in his own room, if he really lodged in the precinct of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate ; and if he moved, as he is believed to have done, to the Surrey side of the river, and made his home near the Bear Garden, the song of the nightingale might have come to him as he lay awake at night. And as for wild flowers, a number of very

interesting quotations from Gerard's Herball are brought forward to satisfy us that all the flowers Shakespeare men- tions were to be found within an easy walk in one direction or another from his London lodgings. But—to the substance of the plays—the historical buildings of London and the shipping in the river, with all their associations, mattered more even than the flowers, the woods, and the songs of birds. Shake-

speare was, after all, once a boy like every other man ; and the knowledge of country-life he had abundant opportunity of acquiring before he came to town would have been enough to furnish him with the germs of all his allusions—many as there are—to the sights and sounds of Nature. For all of us the best time for laying in a stock of such impressions is childhood; though all of us have not the poet's imagination that nurses and develops them in after-life. Mr. Ordish reminds us very properly that the London used as the back- ground even to the historical plays was not the London of the periods in which the real events dramatised in the plays happened ; but the London of the day in which Shakespeare lived. And as an instance of this kind of systematic anachronism, he adduces the case of the Boar's Head' tavern in Eastcheap, which was not in existence in the reign of Henry IV., though it was in Elizabeth's reign :-

" Stow, in telling the story of the King's sons supping in East- cheap in 1410, and of the subsequent great debate, between their men and others of the court,' which was appeased by the mayor, sheriffs, and citizens, adds the following note : The King's sons beaten in Eastcheap : there was then no tavern in Eastcheape.' He tells us, however, that ' it had sometime also cooks mixed amongst the butchers, and such others as sold victuals ready dressed of all sorts.' In another place he tells us of the houses at which wine was sold in olden times, but no victuals served. Hence the Boar's Head in Henry IV. was an anachronism ; but what did that matter to Shakespeare's audience, who knew the tavern in Eastcheap ? Surrounded by markets,—the grass market on the north, the fish market on the south, the meat market on the west,—open to the receipt of all commodities from the wharves of Billingsgate eastward of the bridge, this hostelry was in the way to afford excellent entertainment to man and beast. Could we desire better surroundings for honest Jack Falstaff ? And would Shakespeare's audience have missed the wit of thus fitting the character and the locality ? While the groundlings roared at the sallies of the fat knight, the more judicious must have seen in him an epitome of London tavern humour, a genius loci very largely embodied."

But the genius loci of the whole body of the plays was Shakespeare himself, the Londoner writing for Londoners,

the Elizabethan for Elizabethans, the man of the world for men who knew the world he wrote in, and were quick to "take" the " topical " allusions of the plays—whether or not they sounded the depths of the philosopher or soared to the heights of the poet. Mr. Ordish expounds that theory of recent Shakespearian criticism which makes London and its neigh- bourhood the real scene not only of those parts of the historical plays which are properly located there, but of all the comedies. The Rialto is the Exchange, Venice is the riverside of London, Elyria is England, and so on. The foreign country is almost always, in the phrase that was used by Ben Jonson, only a " fustian country," a stage convention masking English scenes; and the pretence was usually not intended to impose upon the Elizabethan audience, for whom half the amuse- ment of watching a play was to translate its accepted conven- tions back into reality. This theory, however, like other

theories, must not be pushed too far. In Romeo and Juliet the " atmosphere " is distinctly Italian. Mr. Ordish points out that it was partly because all the scenes of Shakespeare's plays were English—and almost all of London—that scenery was so unnecessary. The scene-notices, Eastcheap, Before the Tower, &a., were enough to bring the places designated before the minds of the audience, in whom every local allusion touched a familiar association. But Shakespeare's London

was not only more interpenetrated by the country than our London of to-day. It was more historical and much richer in impressive buildings symbolising the solemnity of religion and the pomp of noble houses :—

" In and around the city were the precincts of dissolved priories and other religious houses ; the chapel or some portion thereof generally served for the purposes of the reformed worship ; for the rest stately ruins, cloisters, garden-walks, grassy slopes, and trees ; here and there portions of the old buildings converted into dwellings, occasionally new houses erected on the garden spaces, in the words of Stow, 'for the lodgings of noblemen, strangers born, and others.' "

The England of pre-Reformation days had not yet passed out of memory :-

" The London which elderly men described to him [Shakespeare] was very little changed from the London of the Plantagenets and the Wars of the Roses. There was the Tower, and the stories of its hapless victims lived on men's tongues as well as in the Chronicles. In various quarters of the city were large houses forsaken or turned into tenements, which had once been the town mansions of nobles whose names figured in these stories, whose descendants had built themselves dwellings outside the walls in more secure times, mostly to the west along the Strand, the Savoy, Whitehall, and Canon Row. This contrast between past and present was vividly suggested to Shakespeare, for to these sumptuous dwellings of the new order the business of his calling would sometimes take him and his fellows, and here he beheld the splendour and pride of circumstance which was the atmosphere of the Elizabethan noble. Strong and new life upon a background of heaped remains of a recent past; this was what greeted Shakespeare on every hand."

The greater part of Mr. Ordish's book is occupied with the reconstruction of the external aspects and conditions of Shakespeare's London. But at the beginning of the chapter on the comedies, he discusses the elements—literary, poetic, and dramatic—that were fused in the Elizabethan drama, and also the purpose with which Shakespeare wrote. He reminds us that " the mental atmosphere of the Elizabethan age was suffused with allegorical thought and imagery. The works of its chief apostle, Edmund Spenser, and, indeed, the poet himself, were well known to Shakespeare." This recog- nition of the influence of Spenser on the work of Shakespeare is particularly interesting ; and seeing how our modern world is captivated by the idea that there is a natural opposition between the moral attitude and the dramatic attitude in art, we rather wish that Mr. Ordish had more fully developed the application of his comparison between the great allegorical

poet and the great dramatic poet of the Elizabethan age. He begs us to remember that a sort of "fantastical in- directness" dominated all the poetry of that age. Spenser cast his thought in the form of allegory. Shakespeare, greater than Spenser in dramatic power, chose the conven- tion of the masque. Poets both, and both keen observers of contemporary life, they wrote with one object, though they used different methods, and that object Shakespeare has himself set forth in Hamlet :—" The purpose of playing, whose end both at first and now, was and is, to hold as t'were, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time, his form and presence." It is curious that while the allegorist of the Elizabethan period is neglected by the mass of modern readers, because they are unable to emancipate themselves from the idea that Spenser is only interesting when you are learned enough to follow the allegory of contemporary history, which is, after all, but the skeleton of the spiritual allegory which makes the immortality of the poem; the ease has been absolutely reversed with the dramatist, and the many enjoy the univ ersality of Shakespeare's grasp of life and character, contentedly leaving the intricacies of the key to the student and the critic. Mr. Ordish does well to remind us that though we may neglect the poetry of Spenser, his influence is with us so long as we read Shakespeare. When we have realised how many-sided, how vividly coloured, how historical, how commercial, how humorous, how tragical, how earnest, and how frivolous was the London life that was the clay upon which Shakespeare wrought, we shall have got little good out of our lesson if we have not realised also how the genius that transformed the clay into poetry was interpenetrated with the conception of that large and ideal Puritanism—that exquisitely beautiful and just moral and spiritual philosophy—which, though it fell to Spenser to fix it for evermore in the scheme of a perfect poem, was the heritage of the whole band of scholars, poets, soldiers, and gentlemen who made the chivalry of the reformed faith in Elizabethan England.