“that roar In brothels, and break windows, fright the streets, And sometimes set upon innocent bell-men to beget Discourse for a week’s diet,”
and whom Jonson’s Kastril looked up to with so much admiration and respect.
I could not hope by any series of thumbnail sketches to conjure up the manifold details of the daily life of Elizabethan London as one finds it portrayed in the plays of Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, Cooke, and the strange pamphlets of Nash and Greene. But we must not linger over these street scenes. It is ample time that we should pass on to consider a little the various classes which went to make up the population of the metropolis in the days of which we speak.
In the common relationships of class with class the age of Elizabeth differed widely from our own. Sociability was one of the main characteristics of the time, and this the guild life of the larger towns did much to foster. In the places of common resort—in the tavern, the theatre, at St. Paul’s Walk, or the Archery Ground at Finsbury, men daily met their neighbors and brother-citizens, and rubbed shoulders and chopped opinions with a warmth and open-heartedness which, if they had little of modern propriety, also knew little of modern restraint. Moreover, London was not then the vast, overgrown, incoherent city which it has since become, and its inhabitants still took that personal interest in one another’s doings, and felt, to some extent at any rate, that sense of family sympathy which, though they are common traits of provincial town life, are characteristic of the metropolis no longer. Nevertheless, the classes remained absolutely distinct, cut off from one another by chasms of custom and interest, and even law, which were never, save with the rarest exceptions, bridged over. The enactments which had been promulgated at the beginning of the reign to fix with rigid certainty the special garbs of the various ranks of the community, are sufficient to show to what extent the caste system, with its attendant prejudices and conventions, was still rooted deep in English life. The young ’prentice might haply make a fortune, and reach a position of great civic distinction. This much was open to him; but for his helpmeet in life he looked no higher than his master’s daughter. The successful merchant might even reach the Lord Mayor’s bench, but he was still a citizen, and laid no claim to set his foot within the charmed circle of gentle life. This condition of things is illustrated again and again in the plays of the time, as in Middleton’s “City Madam” and Dekker’s “Shoemaker’s Holiday.” There was practically no overlapping of interests, no intermingling of class with class. Money could do much, but it could not, as it will at present, purchase an entrance into the most select society; nor, in the matrimonial market of that day, was a coronet ever knocked down for a dower. But this is only one side of the question. If there was little class sympathy, there was little class rivalry also. Society was more diffuse than it is to-day—held together less firmly, but with less of the friction which is a necessary preliminary to that readjustment of social arrangements which the industrial movements of the modern world are tending slowly to bring about. The classes touched externally, but that was all. In spirit they stood aloof—each content to go its own way, to live its own life, but each, for the most part, equally ready to let the others freely do the same.