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The amusements of the age were often rough, but certainly more moral than they were later; and although the theatres were denounced by such reformers as Stubbes as seminaries of vice, and disapproved by Harrison; they were better than after the Restoration, when the plays of Shakespeare were out of fashion. The Londoners went for amusement to the Bankside, or South Side of the Thames, where were the famous Paris Gardens, much used as a rendezvous by gallants; and there were the places for bear and bull baiting; and there were the theatres–the Paris Gardens, the Swan, the Rose, the Hope, and the Globe. The pleasure-seekers went over usually in boats, of which there were said to be four thousand plying between banks; for there was only one bridge, and that was crowded with houses. All distinguished visitors were taken over to see the gardens and the bears baited by dogs; the queen herself went, and perhaps on Sunday, for Sunday was the great day, and Elizabeth is said to have encouraged Sunday sports, she had been (we read) so much hunted on account of religion! These sports are too brutal to think of; but there are amusing accounts of lion-baiting both by bears and dogs, in which the beast who figures so nobly on the escutcheon nearly always proved himself an arrant coward, and escaped away as soon as he could into his den, with his tail between his legs. The spectators were once much disgusted when a lion and lioness, with the dog that pursued them, all ran into the den, and, like good friends, stood very peaceably together looking out at the people.

The famous Globe Theatre, which was built in 1599, was burned in 1613, and in the fire it is supposed were consumed Shakespeare’s manuscripts of his plays. It was of wood (for use in summer only), octagon shaped, with a thatched roof, open in the centre. The daily performance here, as in all theatres, was at three o’clock in the afternoon, and boys outside held the horses of the gentlemen who went in to the play. When theatres were restrained, in 1600, only two were allowed, the Globe and the Fortune, which was on the north side, on Golden Lane. The Fortune was fifty feet square within, and three stories high, with galleries, built of wood on a brick foundation, and with a roof of tiles. The stage was forty-three feet wide, and projected into the middle of the yard (as the pit was called), where the groundlings stood. To one of the galleries admission was only twopence. The young gallants used to go into the yards and spy about the galleries and boxes for their acquaintances. In these theatres there was a drop-curtain, but little or no scenery. Spectators had boxes looking on the stage behind the curtain, and they often sat upon the stage with the actors; sometimes the actors all remained upon the stage during the whole play. There seems to have been great familiarity between the audience and the actors. Fruits in season, apples, pears, and nuts, with wine and beer, were carried about to be sold, and pipes were smoked. There was neither any prudery in the plays or the players, and the audiences in behavior were no better than the plays.

The actors were all men. The female parts were taken usually by boys, but frequently by grown men, and when Juliet or Desdemona was announced, a giant would stride upon the stage. There is a story that Kynaston, a handsome fellow, famous in female characters, and petted by ladies of rank, once kept Charles I. waiting while he was being shaved before appearing as Evadne in “The Maid’s Tragedy.” The innovation of women on the stage was first introduced by a French company in 1629, but the audiences would not tolerate it, and hissed and pelted the actresses off the stage. But thirty years later women took the place they have ever since held; when the populace had once experienced the charm of a female Juliet and Ophelia, they would have no other, and the rage for actresses ran to such excess at one time that it was a fashion for women to take the male parts as well. But that was in the abandoned days of Charles II. Pepys could not control his delight at the appearance of Nell Gwynne, especially “when she comes like a young gallant, and hath the motions and carriage of a spark the most that ever I saw any man have. It makes me, I confess, admire her.” The acting of Shakespeare himself is only a faint tradition. He played the ghost in “Hamlet,” and Adam in “As You Like It.” William Oldys says (Oldys was an antiquarian who was pottering about in the first part of the eighteenth century, picking up gossip in coffee-houses, and making memoranda on scraps of paper in book-shops) Shakespeare’s brother Charles, who lived past the middle of the seventeenth century, was much inquired of by actors about the circumstances of Shakespeare’s playing. But Charles was so old and weak in mind that he could recall nothing except the faint impression that he had once seen “Will” act a part in one of his own comedies, wherein, being to personate a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and drooping and unable to walk that he was forced to be supported and carried by another person to a table, at which he was seated among some company who were eating, and one of them sang a song. And that was Shakespeare!