Shakspere's England Author:George Walter Thornbury Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Dress, Scenes, and Characters. Food. Parallelisms. Few Facts of his Life. A Dozen Dates. Traditions of him. His Learning. His Individuality. Al... more »lusions to Acting. The Dramatist and Manager. Amateur Acting. Humiliation of the Actor. Self-Accusation, Remorse. Mystery of Sonnets. Urging Friend to Marriage. Love, Poems, and Repentance. Puns on his Name. Allusions to contemporary Events. Allusions to Hawking Bear-Baiting. Love of Music. Aristocratic. Respect for Popery. Patriotism. Compliments to Royalty. Origin of his Plays. The Elizabethan theatre must be viewed as little better than one of Richardson's shows as far as appliances go: the curtains pull apart, and there is a tapestry representing a town, that is Troy. To make sure of it, there's a board over head with the name written upon it, like a fingerpost. At the back of the stage is a platform and balcony, that is the city wall, where Helen will see the armies, of eight men each, pass in awful processionthe Greeks a little knook-kneed, the Trojans two of them squinting. The musicians are in a high stage box. The actors enter: Troilus in hose and doublet, and Cressida (a plump boy of fourteen) in fardingale and scarf. A man in a black velvet cloak, heralded by a trumpet, has before this entered as Prologue. Such is Shakspere's stage. On the boards at each side are gallants smoking and laughing. The pit is standing, and the second gallery is cracking nuts and pelting Hector with rotten apples. But in the best boxes TARLETON THE LOW COMEDIAN. we see some rather eminent men: Burleigh for instance, and Sidney and, Raleigh, while Shakspere acts Achilles. Many an Elizabethan traveller must have been startled at a turn of the road by such a waggon of strolling players as me...« less