literary friends in London to honor the volume with some verses of their own. This they agreed to do; but instead of complimenting the author, Chester, they wholly ignored that impossible creature, and celebrated Sir John himself. In this respect the volume is unique, so far as I know, in Elizabethan literature.

Following the long and tedious poem by Chester, which fills no fewer than 167 pages, comes a blank page, and then a new and formal title, running thus: “Hereafter Follow Diverse Poeticall Essaies on the Former Subject; viz. The Turtle and Phoenix, Done by the Best and Chiefest of our Moderne Writers, with their Names Subscribed to their Particular Works: Never before Extant. And (now first) Consecrated by them all Generally to the Love and Merite of the True-Noble Knight, Sir John Salisburie." The contributors were the four eminent playwrights, William Shakespeare, John Marston, George Chapman, and Benjamin Jonson, and a writer who signed himself "Ignoto."

The first poem, called Invocatio, and signed "Vatum Chorus" (i.e., "Chorus of the Poets," meaning all the poets contributing the following verses), explains the purpose they have in writing, namely to celebrate the generosity and nobility of Sir John Salisbury:

That we may give a round to him

In a Castalian bowl crown'd to the brim.

The second poem, likewise signed "Vatum Chorus," and addressed To the Worthily Honor'd Knight, Sir John Salisburie, requests him to accept the following verses for their sincerity:

No mercenary hope did bring them forth,
They tread not in that servile gate,
But a true zeal, born in our spirits,

Responsible to your high merits.

The first poem, very brief, is signed "Ignoto." The second is signed "William Shake-speare." Then follow in succession poems signed "John Marston," "George Chapman," and "Ben Jonson.”

Ignoto, in fourteen lines, vaguely observed that only from the death of one phoenix is another phoenix born. Marston described in grandiloquent terms the beauty of that offspring, "which now is grown unto maturity" (Jane Salisbury would be fourteen years old in 1601), 'a most exact, wondrous creature, arising out of the Phoenix and Turtle Dove's ashes." Chapman praised Salisbury's constancy to his mate:

She was to him the analis'd world of pleasure,
Her firmness cloth'd him in variety.

Jonson, after a humorous invocation, celebrated likewise Sir John's fidelity to his wife:

O, so divine a creature,
Who could be false to?

And in an Ode 'eveovolaσTIкn he described in extravagant terms the "illustrate brightness" of Lady Salisbury.

The verses Shakespeare contributed, though ostensibly on the theme of the Phoenix and the Turtle, are not closely related to that theme as Chester had developed it. Indeed Shakespeare seems not to have read Chester's tedious poem far enough to have unraveled its cryptic meaning, or to have discovered that from the ashes of the dead birds, whose death was merely an allegorical representation of matrimony,' there came noble offspring. Accordingly, in his haste jumping to the conclusion that the two birds died in reality "leaving no posterity," he wrote a graceful funeral song, in which, in the meta

1 I cannot accept Sir Sidney Lee's opinion (Life, p. 272) that Shakespeare's poem was not penned for Chester's book, but was "either devised in an idle hour with merely abstract intention, or it was suggested by the death within the poet's own circle of a pair of devoted lovers."

physical style of John Donne, he played with the ideas that marriage makes two into one and that "one is no number." The concluding lines of the "Threnos" may be slyly humorous when the poet calls upon his readers to repair to the urn and —

For these dead birds sigh a prayer.

The whole undertaking on the part of these distinguished London poets reminds one, at least in a way, of the commendatory poems which many writers contributed to Coryat's Crudities. Jonson begins jocularly: "We must sing too?" and all the poets seem to try in a sly way to be as obscure as Chester himself. But, of course, the contributors restrained themselves in order rightly "to gratulate an honorable friend."

The episode may be taken as illustrating Shakespeare's good nature in humoring the vanity of a country knight who had been a generous friend to the theatres and the London playwrights. And Sir John's abiding affection for the poet is indicated in lines recently found among papers belonging to the Salisbury family.1 Addressing Heminges and Condell as "my good friends," the writer declares that in publishing the First Folio they have given to England a treasure more glorious than "Cortés, with all his Castelyne associates," digged from the richest mines of Mexico. Though the lines could not have been written by Sir John, who died in 1612, they were produced by some member of his family, probably by his son, Sir Henry, who, being admitted to the Middle Temple in 1607, was no doubt familiar with his father's distinguished friend, and so came to be numbered among those who, as he puts it, "loved the dead" playwright.

1 See Sir Israel Gollancz, "Contemporary Lines to Heminges and Condell," in The Times Literary Supplement, Thursday, January 26, 1922, p. 56.

CHAPTER XVIII

WORCESTER'S MEN; TROILUS AND CRESSIDA FOR many years the Chamberlain's and the Admiral's companies were the only adult troupes "allowed" by the Privy Council to perform regularly in London. But in the spring of 1602 the Earl of Worcester's Men and the Earl of Oxford's Men, who had been "joined by agreement together in one company," thereafter called Worcester's Men, secured through the "suit of the Earl of Oxford" the permission of the Queen likewise to play in the city.1 On March 31, 1602, the Privy Council, under special orders from the Queen, wrote to notify the Lord Mayor of the "allowance" of the new company, adding: "And, as the other companies that are allowed, namely, of me, the Lord Admiral, and the Lord Chamberlain, be appointed their certain houses, and one and no more to each company, so we do straitly require that this third company be likewise [appointed] to one place. And because we are informed the house called the Boar's Head [an inn situated in Whitechapel without Aldgate] is the place they have especially used, and do best like of, we do pray and require you that the said house, namely the Boar's Head, may be assigned unto them.”

This new company was in part composed of actors who had seceded from the Chamberlain's Men soon after the Globe was erected - William Kempe, Christopher Beeston, John Duke, and Robert Pallant, all excellent actors, favorably known to the public. With them were

1 For the history of this company see my Shakespearean Playhouses, pp. 157-59, 294–309.

associated Robert Lee, who had as early as 1593 belonged to the Chamberlain's Company, and who now was ranked among the best players of the day, Thomas Greene, whose fame as a comedian was not much inferior to that of William Kempe,1 John Lowin, whose ability later made him one of the leading members of the Globe Company, and Richard Perkins, whose fine acting was praised by John Webster. As their playwright they secured Thomas Heywood, called by Charles Lamb "a prose Shakespeare," who for many years had been industriously writing for the Admiral's Men. As the chief dramatist for this new company he was destined to produce some of his most successful plays, for example his Ages, which, we are told, thronged the theatre "with numerous and mighty auditories." To secure his services the actors gave him a position among them as a fullsharer, so that he bore to his company much the same relation that Shakespeare did to the Chamberlain's organization. In addition to Heywood, who was their regular playwright, they occasionally employed the well-known dramatists Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Wentworth Smith, Richard Hathaway, and John Webster.

After securing their license as a city company, Worcester's Men occupied, in accordance with the order of the Privy Council, the Boar's Head in Whitechapel; but an inn-yard remote from the centre of population put them at a serious disadvantage, and six months later they

1 See Greene's Tu Quoque. Heywood wrote: "There was not an actor of his nature [i.e., a comedian] of better ability, ... more applauded by the audience, of greater grace at Court, or of more general love in the city."

Webster, in publishing The White Devil, affixed at the end an expression of his appreciation to the company for its excellent performance of the play: "Whereof, as I make a general acknowledgment, so in particular I must remember the well approved industry of my friend Master Perkins, and confess the worth of his action did crown both the beginning and end." A portrait of Perkins now hangs in the Dulwich Picture Gallery.