The banquet lasted three hours, when the cloth was removed, the table was placed upon the ground—­that is, removed from the dais—­and their majesties, standing upon it, washed their hands in basins, as did the others.  After the dinner was the ball, and that ended, they took their places at the windows of a roam that looked out upon a square, where a platform was raised and a vast crowd was assembled to see the king’s bears fight with greyhounds.  This afforded great amusement.  Presently a bull, tied to the end of a rope, was fiercely baited by dogs.  After this tumblers danced upon a rope and performed feats of agility on horseback.  The constable and his attendants were lighted home by half an hundred halberdiers with torches, and, after the fatigues of the day, supped in private.  We are not surprised to read that on Monday, the 30th, the constable awoke with a slight attack of lumbago.

Like Elizabeth, all her subjects were fond of the savage pastime of bear and bull baiting.  It cannot be denied that this people had a taste for blood, took delight in brutal encounters, and drew the sword and swung the cudgel with great promptitude; nor were they fastidious in the matter of public executions.  Kiechel says that when the criminal was driven in the cart under the gallows, and left hanging by the neck as the cart moved from under him, his friends and acquaintances pulled at his legs in order that he might be strangled the sooner.

When Shakespeare was managing his theatres and writing his plays London was full of foreigners, settled in the city, who no doubt formed part of his audience, for they thought that English players had attained great perfection.  In 1621 there were as many as ten thousand strangers in London, engaged in one hundred and twenty-one different trades.  The poet need not go far from Blackfriars to pick up scraps of German and folk-lore, for the Hanse merchants were located in great numbers in the neighborhood of the steel-yard in Lower Thames Street.

Foreigners as well as contemporary chronicles and the printed diatribes against luxury bear witness to the profusion in all ranks of society and the variety and richness in apparel.  There was a rage for the display of fine clothes.  Elizabeth left hanging in her wardrobe above three thousand dresses when she was called to take that unseemly voyage down the stream, on which the clown’s brogan jostles the queen’s slipper.  The plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and of all the dramatists, are a perfect commentary on the fashions of the day, but a knowledge of the fashions is necessary to a perfect enjoyment of the plays.  We see the fine lady in a gown of velvet (the foreigners thought it odd that velvet should be worn in the street), or cloth of gold and silver tissue, her hair eccentrically dressed, and perhaps dyed, a great hat with waving feathers, sometimes a painted face, maybe a mask or a muffler hiding all the features except the eyes,