But we are digressing, again, as who does not when the image of Shakespeare comes across him? To return:--
The court celebrations of Christmas were observed throughout the reign of the first James; and the Prince Charles himself was an occasional performer in the pageantries prepared for the occasion, at great cost. But at no period do they appear to have been more zealously sought after, or performed with more splendor, than during that which immediately preceded the persecution, from whose effects they have never since recovered into anything like their former lustihood. In the early years of Charles the First's reign, the court pageants of this season were got up with extraordinary brilliancy,--the king with the lords of his court, and the queen with her ladies, frequently taking parts therein. This was the case in 1630-31; and at the Christmas of 1632-33 the queen, says Sandys, "got up a pastoral in Somerset House, in which it would seem she herself took a part. There were masques at the same time, independently of this performance, the cost of which considerably exceeded £2,000, besides that portion of the charge which was borne by the office of the revels and charged to the accounts of that department." In the same year, we learn that a grant of £450 was made to George Kirke, Esq., gentleman of the robes, for the _masking attire_ of the king and his party. In 1637 there is a warrant, under the privy seal, to the same George Kirke for £150, to provide the masking dress of the king; and, in the same year, another to Edmund Taverner for £1,400 towards the expenses of a masque to be presented at Whitehall on the ensuing Twelfth Night. We have selected these from similar examples furnished by Sandys, in order to give our readers some idea of the sums expended in these entertainments, which sums will appear very considerable when estimated by the difference between the value of money in our days and that of two hundred years ago. Several of the masques presented at court during this reign, and the preceding ones, were written by Ben Jonson.
During the whole of this time, the forms of court ceremonial appear to have been aped, and the royal establishments imitated as far as possible, by the more powerful nobles; and the masques and pageantries exhibited for the royal amusement were accordingly reproduced or rivalled by them at their princely mansions in the country. Corporate and other public bodies caught the infection all over the land; and each landed proprietor and country squire endeavored to enact such state in the eyes of his own retainers, as his means would allow. The sports and festivities of the season were everywhere taken under the protection of the lord of the soil; and all classes of his dependants had a customary claim upon the hospitalities which he prepared for the occasion. The masques of the court and of the nobles were imitated in the mummings of the people,--of which we give a representation here, and which we shall have occasion particularly to describe hereafter,--they having survived the costly pageants of which they were the humble representatives. The festival was thus rendered a universal one, and its amusements brought within the reach of the indigent and the remote. The peasant, and even the pauper, were made, as it were, once a year sharers in the mirth of their immediate lord, and even of the monarch himself. The laboring classes had enlarged privileges during this season, not only by custom, but by positive enactment; and restrictive acts of Parliament, by which they were prohibited from certain games at other periods, contained exceptions in favor of the Christmas-tide. Nay, folly was, as it were, crowned, and disorder had a license! Sandys quotes from Leland the form of a proclamation given in his "Itinerary" as having been made by the sheriff of York, wherein it is declared that all "thieves, dice-players, carders" (with some other characters by name that are usually repudiated by the guardians of order) "_and all other unthrifty folke_, be welcome to the towne, whether they come late or early, att the reverence of the high feast of Youle, till the twelve dayes be passed." The terms of this proclamation were, no doubt, not intended to be construed in a grave and literal sense, but were probably meant to convey something like a satire upon the unbounded license of the season which they thus announce.