Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 3).pdf/280



exceedingly pleased, and especially with their dancing, which was beyond all that hath been seen yet. The King made the masters [? maskers] kiss his hand on parting, and gave them many thanks, saying, he never saw so many proper men together, and himself accompanied them at the banquet, and took care it should be well ordered, and speaks much of them behind their backs, and strokes the Master of the Rolls and Dick Martin, who were chief doers and undertakers.'

Chamberlain wrote more briefly, but with equal commendation, to Winwood (iii. 435), while the Venetian ambassador reported that the mask was danced 'with such finish that it left nothing to be desired' (V. P. xii. 532). The mask is but briefly noticed in the published records of the Middle Temple (Hopwood, 40, 42); more fully in those of Lincoln's Inn (Walker, ii. 150-6, 163, 170, 198, 255, 271). The Inn's share of the cost was £1,086 8s. 11d. and presumably that of the Middle Temple as much. A levy was made of from £1 10s. to £4, according to status, and some of the benchers and others advanced funds. A dispute about the repayment of an advance by Lord Chief Justice Richardson was still unsettled in 1634. An account of Christopher Brooke as 'Expenditour for the maske' includes £100 to Inigo Jones for works for the hall and street, £45 to Robert Johnson for music and songs, £2 to Richard Ansell, matlayer, £1 to the King's Ushers of the Hall, and payments for a pair of stockings and other apparel to 'Heminge's boy', and for the services of John and Robert Dowland, Philip Rosseter and Thomas Ford as musicians. The attitude of the young lawyer may be illustrated from a letter of Sir S. Radcliffe on 1 Feb. (Letters, 78), although I do not know his Inn: 'I have taken up 30^s of James Singleton, which or y^e greater part thereof is to be paid toward y^e great mask at y^e marriage at Shrovetide. It is a duty for y^e honour of our Inn, and unto which I could not refuse to contribute with any credit.' A letter by Chapman, partly printed by B. Dobell in Ath. (1901), i. 466, is a complaint to an unnamed paymaster about his reward for a mask given in the royal presence at a date later than Prince Henry's death. While others of his faculty got 100 marks or £50, he is 'put with taylors and shoomakers, and such snipperados, to be paid by a bill of particulars'. Dobell does not seem to think that this was the wedding mask, but I see no clear reason why it should not have been. HENRY CHEKE (c. 1561). If the translator, as stated in D. N. B., was Henry the son of Sir John Cheke and was born c. 1548, he must have been a precocious scholar. Free Will > 1561

S. R 1561, May 11. 'ij. bokes, the one called and the other of Frewill.' John Tysdayle (Arber, i. 156).

A certayne Tragedie wrytten fyrst in Italian, by F. N. B. entituled, Freewyl, and translated into Englishe, by Henry Cheeke.