Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 1).pdf/178

126 than his own. There are, of course, the three Sibyls at Oxford in 1605, which are said to have given a hint for Macbeth, and the amazing Queen of Sheba show in 1606, which has been preserved for us by the wicked wit of Sir John Harington. And there are three examples from the pen of Ben Jonson, to whose ingenuity and learning the genre made a natural appeal, and who had the art to give dramatic life and point even to such trifles. These are the Satyr, with which Lord Spencer welcomed Anne and Henry at Althorp in 1603, the Penates, written when James, like Elizabeth before him, went a-Maying with Sir William Cornwallis at Highgate in 1604, and the graceful Theobalds entertainment, in which the Genius of the house, first weeping for the loss of his master, and then consoled by Mercury, Good Event, and the Parcae, made symbolical delivery of it to the Queen on its exchange by Lord Salisbury with James for Hatfield in 1607.

The civic entertainments naturally followed more formal lines than those in private houses. The citizens rode in their official gowns of black or scarlet. There was a learned oration by the recorder, and very likely also by the schoolmaster or a promising scholar of the grammar school. In a cathedral town there was divine service to be attended in state. The gift was no fantastic trifle, but a solid cup with angels in it. The mimesis, too, was of a more old-fashioned type. Mercury or a nymph might be there, but there were also the traditional pageants of the guilds, bearing their scenes from the miracle plays, or more modern allegories, or representations of local history and industry. At Coventry, in 1566, stood the Corpus Christi cars of the Tanners, Drapers, Smiths, and Weavers. The variegated Norwich entertainment of 1578 included a speech by King Gurgunt, a pageant of the Commonwealth, with local craftsmen working at their looms, and a pageant of the City of Norwich, with Deborah, Esther, Judith, and Queen Martia. Even as late as 1613, it was with scriptural pageants, curiously contaminated with intrusive classical themes, that the citizens of Wells greeted Queen Anne when she visited them from the Bath. The Hammermen furnished the Building of the Ark, Vulcan, Venus, and Cupid, and part of St. George; the Tanners, Chandlers, and Bakers, St. Clement and his Friar, part of Actaeon and Diana, and 'a carte of old virgines' in hides; the Cordwainers Saints Crispin and Crispinian; the Tailors Herodias and John Baptist; and the Mercers the remaining parts of St. George and of Actaeon and Diana. Three morrises also accompanied