Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 2.djvu/325

 ii s. vni, OCT. is, 1913.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

SOURCE OF QUOTATION WANTED (11 S. viii. 169, 214). 2. " Qui fatetur per quern profecerit, reddit mutuum ; qui non fatetur, fur est." This is a slightly altered form of the Elder Pliny's remark in the Preface to his 'Natural History, 5 sections 21 and 23 :

" Est eniiu benignum (ut arbitror) et plenum ingenui pudoris fateri per quos profeceris, .... Obnoxii profecto animi et infelicis ingenii est deprehendi in furto malle quam mutuum reddere."

EDWABD BENSLY.

MEW FAMILY (11 S. vii. 249). Elizeus Mewe and Hester Hamlet were married at All Hallows,. London Wall, 19 March, 1611/12. ALFRED SYDNEY LEWIS.

Library, Constitutional Club, W.C.

THE LORD OF BURLEIGH AND SARAH HOGGINS (11 S. vii. 61, .83, 143, 166, 204; viii. 6). At US. vii. 62, mention is made of the brother of Sarah Hoggins, Thomas, a captain in the 84th Regiment, who died about 1810. I noticed recently in a history of the 85th King's Light Infantry, by " One of Them " (Spottis- woode), reviewed in The Morning Post, 17 July last, that Capt. Thomas Hoggins was killed in a duel in the vicinity of Brabourne Lees, near Ashford, Kent. I believe that he was in the 85th, and not 84th, Regiment. R. J. FYNMORE.

Sandgate.

Burbage and Shakespeare' ft Stage. By Mrs. C. C.

Stopes. (Alexander Moring.)

LET us get over at once such unfavourable criticism as we feel bound to pass upon this excellent piece of work. The author sets out with acknowledging that, at the end, her labours were hurried, and also that she is not a good proof- reader. These admissions must, to a large extent, disarm her critics, and yet it is impossible to avoid expressing regret that the care and enthusi- asm which Mrs. Stopes expended in the collection of her materials were not more fully carried over into the business of arranging them. No doubt every book of this sort is, of necessity, a collec- tion of scraps extremely precious things, but ^1 ill scraps ; yet it is not, for all that, inevitable that these should be presented to the reader as a scrap-heap, however shining. The Burbages are emphatically worth a real biography, i.e., an account in which, by co-ordination and due fusion of parts, their personalities are rendered at least as important in the effect of the whole familiarity with her subject which alone makes such treatment possible ; but, whether from hurry or from the intensity of her delight in detail, she has almost entirely swamped the men themselves in their external fortunes.
 * is their circumstances. Mrs. Stopes has that last

So much being said, we may turn to the far- more pleasant duty of praise. The introductory pages of the first chapter the brief setting out of the scene upon which James Burbage stepped to play his part are among the most skilful in. the book. There follows a serried history, closely documented, of the progress of the profession of actors, from the days when they played precari- ously where chance and the authorities permitted^ to the rise, in the Liberty of Shoreditch, of that sturdy, round, wooden building, fit to resist an, earthquake, work of Burbage the whilom joiner,, which was the first " Theatre." Mrs. Stopes feels certain that this was rushed up in a much shorter time than is commonly supposed much of it his own handiwork, lighter work upon it being- done by the company, eager to be playing as soon. as possible in a house of their own. All London tumultuously flocked to it, despite the warnings of preachers, and, till the authorities interfered,, without care for the plague. The frequent recurrence of the plague a feature of the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries which is perhaps seldom sufficiently prominent in our imagination of them caused the Theatre again and again to be closed for months together, occasioning heavy loss.

Yet, troublesome as this was, Burbage's success was brilliant enough soon to raise up- for him a rival. In the same Liberty, on another part of the old Holywell Priory Grounds in which the Theatre stood, rose before long the Curtain, which, if in the eyes of posterity it has- but a slight claim to interest beside the Theatre,, maintained itself, in a more even prosperity than Burbage could win for his house, through the divers vicissitudes of the time. Burbage, in fact, was cursed with the heavy additional burden of practically incessant litigation. There is a quality necessary for a successful man of business which it looks as if he did not possess: the- power to foresee, and in good time to mitigate or deflect, the rise of interests counter to his own in the persons with whom he is intimately asso- ciated. One imagines him working against aO odds, forthright and absorbed, till pulled up,, contrary to all expectation, by the covetousness of a Giles Alleyn, or the suspiciousness of ans Ellen Brayne. His bitter difficulties bulk much, more largely here than the resources by which he was enabled to meet them ; still we find him in 1595/6 able to buy from Sir William More of Loseley for 600Z. the Blackfriars property, of which he made the first theatre in stone. A" year- later, worn out by fresh attacks, and six weeks; before he would have moved his company oufr of the original wooden Theatre at Holywell r James Burbage died.

The most stirring incident in the life of James Burbage's sons is, of course, the Homeric exploit by which, in the winter of 1598, they tore down the wooden Theatre in Shoreditch, and at night transported it across the river, re-erecting it inj the Liberty of Bankside, where it became the ever-famous Globe. In the lawsuits which fol- lowed, two different dates nearly a month apart are given as that of the transportation ; this has been explained as arising from the material having been removed in two separate undertakings. We think Mrs. Stopes is right in rejecting this explanation ; she believes the earlier- date (28 Dec.) to be the correct one. In this.