Gitterns, Prickets, Queen Mary’s Wedding Ring and more.

It's that time, again!!!
It's Tudor Trivia Tuesday!!!

1) In his Every Man in his Humour, Ben Jonson says, “I can compare him to nothing more happily than a barber's virginals, for every man may play upon him”. This refers to the fact that “ the virginals stood in the corner of every barber's shop, whilst the lute, the cittern, and the gittern (or guitar), hung from the walls for the use and amusement of customers.” [Notices, 133-4]

2) After the death of Henry VIII. Bishop Gardiner proposed to have a solemn dirge in memory of the King; but, he complained to the Council, “the players of Southwark say that they also will have a solemn playe, to trye who shall have most resorte, they in game, or I in earnest.”

3) Among the 1512 stores of the Earl of Northumberland were “four thousand eighty seven and one-half pounds of wax, fifty-one pounds of wick,17 prickets,18 quarions, and 19 torches.

4) A pricket was a candle stand.

5) A quarrion was a large square block of wax with a wick.

6) Of the young Spanish gentlemen who came with the embassy of the Count Villamediana, in 1603, it is recorded that the English ladies in Cambridge peeped through the latticed windows at them. Later the young men presented them with the bonbons, comfits, and sweetmeats that were upon the table, “which they enjoyed mightily; for (it is remarked) they eat nothing but what is sweetened with sugar, drinking it commonly with their wine and mixing it with their meat.”[ England as Seen, 190]

7) Queen Elizabeth directed the clergymen during her reign to preach that it was acceptable before God to work the harvest on holy days. This, of course, in order to prevent crop spoilage.

8) On the March 9, 1565-6, David Rizzio, the Italian secretary of Mary of Scotland, was torn from her side as she sat at supper, at the instigation of her husband, Lord Darnley, and dragged through her apartments to the outer door, where he was left on the floor for the night, dead with fifty-six wounds, each conspirator having been forced to give a stab, in order that all might be equally guiltly.

9) When Queen Mary died, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton was admitted to see her corpse, and, as Elizabeth had requested, took from her finger the wedding-ring which had been given to her by Philip, and delivered it to Elizabeth as a guarantee that word of the death had been true.

10) The 18^th Century Shakespeare scholar George Steevens noticed that these lines from Romeo and Juliet would appear to be a translation from the Latin of Ovid’s Epistles. I.115-6.

 

O! by this count I shall be much in years,

Ere I again behold my Romeo

Illa ego, quae fueram te decedente puella,

Protinus ut redeas, facta videbor anus.

Ovid. Epistles. I.115-6.

 

Sources: Notices illustrative of the drama and other popular amusements, chiefly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (1865).  The Pall Mall Magazine, Volume 16 (1898). 124. The Household of a Tudor Nobleman (1917). England as Seen by Foreigners, in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First (1865). Horda Angel-Cynnam, or A compleat view of the Manners, Customs, Arms, Habits (1776). Chambers’ Book of Days (1888).

 

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• More on Thomas North as Shakespeare and author of Arden of Feversham. June 14, 2021. “This is also the reason why the title pages included the address of the shop that was selling the book.”
• A 1572 Oxford Letter and the Player’s Speech in Hamlet. August 11, 2020. “The player’s speech has been a source of consternation among Shakespeare scholars for above 200 years.  Why was Aeneas’ tale chosen as the subject?”
• Gutenberg, proto-Hack Writers and Shakespeare. May 26, 2020. “A less well known effect of the Reformation was that many young Catholic men who had taken religious orders in order to receive an education began to lead lives at large from monastic discipline.  Like Erasmus and Rabelais they took up the pen.”
• Shakespeare’s Funeral Meats. May 13, 2020. “Famous as this has been since its discovery, it has been willfully misread more often than not.  No mainstream scholar had any use for a reference to Hamlet years before it was supposed to have been written.”
• Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
• Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.