assuming a claim to armorial bearings, which would entitle them to rank as 'gentlemen'. Shakespeare in 1596 obtained a confirmation of a grant of arms made to his father as bailiff of Stratford nearly thirty years before; and in 1599 sought additional authority to impale the coat of his mother's family, the Ardens.[1] Heminges obtained a confirmation of arms in 1629. Such grants did not go altogether unstrictured by heraldic purists, and the cases of Shakespeare and of his fellow Richard Cowley formed part of the material for a charge of making grants to 'base and ignoble persons' brought by a rival against the responsible king-of-arms. Augustine Phillips and Thomas Pope did not trouble the heralds, but went to an heraldic painter, and bought, the one the arms of Sir William Phillips, Lord Bardolph, and the other those of Sir Thomas Pope, Chancellor of the Augmentations.[2] These ambitions of the players, no less than their investments, yielded stuff both for moralizing and for satire. Henry Crosse, in his Vertues Common-wealth (1603), rebukes the pride of the 'copper-lace gentlemen' who 'purchase lands by adulterous playes'.[3] And in the tract of Ratseis Ghost (1605), already cited, Gamaliel Ratsey speaks of those 'whom Fortune hath so well favored that, what by penny-sparing and long practise of playing, are growne so wealthy that they have expected to be knighted, or at least to be conjunct in authority and to sit with men of great worship on the bench of justice'; and he advises the country player, with whom he has fallen in, to get him to London, 'and when thou feelest thy purse well lined, buy thee some place or lordship in the country, that, growing weary of playing, thy mony may there bring thee to dignitie and reputation'. The player too heard 'of some that have gone to London very meanly, and have come in time to be exceeding wealthy'. Ratsey then knights him 'Sir Simon Two Shares and a Halfe', and tells him he is 'the first knight that ever was player in England'.[4]
Certainly all players did not grow rich, even in London.at a small gravers shopp in Foster Lane. . . . Pope the player would have no other armes but the armes of S^r Tho. Pope, Chancelor of y^e Augmentations'.]
- ↑ Lee, 281; G. R. French Shakespeareana Genealogica, 514; Herald and Genealogist, i. 492.
- ↑ Lee, 285, citing (a) manuscript notes by Ralph Brooke on William Dethick's grants of arms, in which both Shakespeare and Cowley appear in a list of persons given arms on false pretences, and (b) a manuscript Discourse of the Causes of Discord amongst the Officers of Arms by William Smith, Rougedragon, 'Phillipps the player had graven in a gold ring the armes of S^r W^m Phillipp, Lord Bardolph, with the said L. Bardolphs cote quartred, which I shewed to M^r York [Brooke, York Herald
- ↑ App. C, No. liv.
- ↑ Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 325; cf. ch. x.
