important a place in the new order of things than it had done in the old. And in fact the yearly tale of performances at court soon doubled and trebled that which had sufficed for the Christmas 'solace' of Elizabeth. Doubtless the King had some personal taste for the drama, though perhaps less than other members of his family.[1] He had long entertained the English actor, Laurence Fletcher, into his service and shown him high favour, and Jonson is our authority for the statement that Shakespeare's plays did 'take', not only 'Eliza' but 'our James'. But his great preoccupation was the hunt, to which he hurried on every opportunity, regardless of the discontent of London and even of the claims of business. Anne, on the other hand, brought up in a court which had been one of the first to come under the influence of the English players abroad, and wedded into a court from which the Kirk had never succeeded in expelling the French habits of amusement domiciled by Mary Queen of Scots, found her chief pleasure in the spectacular arts; and to her influence is mainly due that great development of the Jacobean mask, which gave such scope to the exercise of courtly pens, and to the remarkable decorative genius of Inigo Jones.[2] Anne's interest in all forms of the drama, which even led her to the innovation of visiting a theatre, was fully shared by the royal children, and combined in Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, with a passion for the knightly exercise of the tilt to prolong into the seventeenth century the Renaissance tradition of spectacular feats of arms. The death of this beloved prince, to whom the thoughts of England, disillusioned of his father, turned as the hope of the future, fell near the end of our period. The splendour of the Court festivities reached a climax with the wedding of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613, and faded even before the death of Anne herself in 1619. It had its revival under Henrietta Maria.
The Court was a movable institution, constituted by the actual presence of the sovereign. Abundant choice both of 'standing houses' or 'houses of abode' and of country
- ↑ Carleton to Chamberlain, Jan. 15, 1604 (S. P. D., Jac. I, vi. 21): 'The first holy dayes we had every night a publicke play in the great hale, at which the king was ever present, and liked or disliked as he saw cause; but it seems he takes no extraordinary pleasure in them. The Queen and Prince were more the players frends, for on other nights they had them privately, and hath since taken them to theyr protection.'
- ↑ J. A. Lester, Some Franco-Scottish Influences on the Early English Drama in Haverford Essays (1909).
