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Shakspeare performing before Queen Elizabeth and her Court. Engraved for Burtens Magazine

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Of Shakspeare's Comedy of Love's Labor's Lost before Queen Elizabeth.

THE subject of the accompanying plate is a fancy sketch by a celebrated English artist, named Buss, representing the performance of Shakspeare's comedy of Love's Labor's Lost, before queen Elizabeth and her Court. We believe, from the London papers, that the painter intended to represent Shakspeare upon the stage before his august patron, in the performance of Don Adriano de Armado, a fantastical Spaniard, a character in the above comedy. But we have no authority that the dramatist ever performed in the play in question, although we do not possess the power of contradicting the assertion. The nation and nature of the character, and the quaint allusion contained in its name, were undoubtedly designed as a grateful compliment to her virgin majesty. Shakspeare was indubitably a courtier, and spared no means of gratifying the weaknesses of Elizabeth and the prejudices of the day. The vilifying twisting of the character of Richard III., the mortal enemy of the grandfather of the queen, is a convincing evidence in support of our assertion.

The play of Love's Labor's Lost (so named in the folio of 1623,) is generally supposed to be the earliest of Shakspeare's productions. Malone assigns 1591 as the date of the original drama, but changed it afterwards, with sufficient reason, to 1594. Chalmers supposes 1592 as the year wherein this comedy was written, but gives no satisfactory cause for his preference. The original edition of this play is doubtless lost, for the oldest copy extant, dated 1598, is said, in the title page, to be "newly corrected and augmented." In 1597, it was represented at Whitehall palace, before queen Elizabeth, by her express desire-we are then to suppose that we possess the copy of the piece as it was "newly corrected and augmented" for the purpose of exhibition before her majesty.

We have said that there is no authority extant for the assumption that Shakspeare personated Armado, even at the command of her majesty the queen. At the same time, if he played in the

piece, he was likely to select the character of the thrasonical Spaniard, inasmuch as the broad humors of the other masquers rendered them unavailable to an actor of our poet's calibre, and the parts of the dashing and witty courtiers were above his pitch.

In Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humor, his name appears attached to Old Knowell; Adam, in his own As You Like It, was another of his assumptions. In Seganus, his name appears amongst the comedians—although we know that his ghost in Hamlet was one of his best performances, and that he occasionally figured in various of his kingly characters, such as the Fourth, Sixth, and Eighth Henrys in his own historical plays.

The last mention of Shakspeare's name as an actor appears in the list of characters attached to Ben Jonson's play of Seganus, published in 1603.

Queen Elizabeth frequently indulged in witnessing dramatic performances, produced at her own expense, within her own palace walls. The Cotton MSS. contain various charges made in the accounts of the Master of the Revels for velvets, silks, cloths of gold, etc., for setting forth the stage. In the very first year of her reign, there is a notice of the players being stopped in their performances in consequence of the objectionable matter which they represented. "The same day at nyght (Christmas) at the quens court, ther was a play afor her grace, the whych the plaers plad shuche matter that they wher commandyd to leyff off, and continently the maske cam in dansyng." Nevertheless, we find on the same authority, that on the twelfth night following, "a skaffold" for the play was set up in the hall, and "after play was done ther was a goodly maske, and after, a grett bankett that last tyll midnyght."

The "skaffold in the hall" sounds rudely to a modern ear, as the chief appliance and means of dramatic display in the palatial abode of the queen of England. But the public stage was in its infancy at the time of Shakspeare's birth, and the conveniences and elegant fittings wherewith the drama of the present day is graced, were unknown to the most ardent well-wisher of the stage in the early days of Elizabeth's reign. Chalmers observes "that what Augustus said of Rome may be remarked of Elizabeth and the stage; he found it brick and he left it marble." At her accession in 1558, no regular theatre had been established, and the players of that period, even in the capital, were compelled to have recourse to the yards of great inns, as the most commodious places which they could obtain for the representation of their pieces. These being surrounded by open stages and galleries, and possessing likewise numerous private apartments and recesses, from which the genteeler part of the audience might become spectators at their ease, while the central space held a temporary stage, uncovered in fine weather, and protected by an awning in bad, were not ill calculated for the purposes of scenic exhibition, and most undoubtedly gave rise to the form and construction adopted in the erection of the licensed theatres.

In consequence of Elizabeth's patronage, the drama rapidly assumed an important stand. A regular play-house was built in the Blackfriars in 1570, and in 1574, Burbage's regular company of players was established by royal license. Before the sixteenth century expired, fourteen distinct companies of players exhilirated the golden days of good queen Bess, Shakspeare's name appearing on the list enrolled by lord Warwick and the lord Chamberlain. Theatres, of course, proportionately increased; and during the time that Shakspeare immortalized the stage, not less than seven of these structures, of established popularity, were in existence, with various others of ephemeral notoriety. B.

HOPE.

BRIGHT harbinger of bliss, whence dost thou | And make thy home in its shadowy hall,

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