,
hawking, cock-fighting, bull-baiting, dancing, until the Puritans found
such enjoyments immoral. The youthful Shakespeare acquired an intimate
knowledge of dogs and horses, hunting and falconry, though this was a
gentleman's sport. The highways were full of ballad singers, beggars,
acrobats, and wandering players. Play-acting of one kind or another had
long been common over most of rural England. Miracle plays were given at
Coventry up to 1580, and bands of professional actors came to Stratford
frequently, and on their first recorded appearance received their
permission to act from the bailiff, John Shakespeare (1568-1569). There
was many a Holofernes or Bottom to marshal his pupils or
fellow-mechanics for an amateur performance; and Shakespeare may have
seen the most famous of the royal entertainments, that at Kenilworth in
1575, when Gascoigne recited poetry, and Leicester, impersonating Deep
Desire, addressed Elizabeth from a bush, and a minstrel represented
Arion on a dolphin's back. The tradition may be right which declares
that it was the trumpets of the comedians that summoned Shakespeare to
London.

In the main, life in the country was not so very different from what it
is now in the remoter places. Many a secluded English village, as
recently as fifty years ago, jogged on much as in the sixteenth century.
Opportunity then as now dwelt mostly in the cities, but the city of the
sixteenth century bore slight resemblance to a city of to-day.

London, with less than 200,000 inhabitants, was still a medieval city in
appearance, surrounded by a defensive wall, guarded by the Tower, and
crowned by the cathedral. The city proper lay on the north of the
Thames, and the wall made a semicircle of some two miles, from the Tower
on the east to the Fleet ditch and Blackfriars on the west. Seven gates
pierced the wall to the north, and the roads passing through them into
the fields were lined with houses. Westward along the river were great
palaces, behind which the building was practically continuous along the
muddy road that led to the separate city of Westminster. The Thames,
noted for its fish and swans, was the great thoroughfare, crowded with
many kinds of boats and spanned by the famous London Bridge. By one of
the many rowboats that carried passengers hither and thither, or on foot
over the arches of the bridge, between the rows of houses that lined it,
and under the heads of criminals which decorated its entrance,