Honest Harry Goldingham

I have just finished reading Elizabeth the Great by Elizabeth Jenkins (1958), and found it a terrific book.  It is an "intimate" biography of the great queen, historically accurate, fast paced, with an exquisite blend of emotional and political perspectives.  It reads more like a novel than a biography, with truly moving passages.  In only 350 pages it takes Elizabeth from birth to death, without hesitating to stop and admire the fashions and jewelry that meant so much to the queen and were so effective in her elaborate self-presentation, while at the same time grasping the essential psychological dimensions of her virginity, her courtships, her administrative acumen, her love-love relationship with her subjects, in short, her genius.

Of course, any discussion of the life of Elizabeth must take into account the role played by Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, and Elizabeth's own true love.  Leicester does not come off too well in Jenkins' telling, but that is as may be.  The reason for bringing this up is to cite a passage from the book describing a great pageant Leicester put on for Elizabeth's visit to his castle Kenilworth in the July of 1575.  Pageants displayed for the queen's entertainment were lavish beyond description, and Dudley being the favorite, had to outdo any pageant previously given.  He succeeded.  The part I wish to draw attention to was the famous display of Arion on the dolphins back.  I quote from Ms. Jenkins:

"As the heat had returned after the rain, the queen went out in the cool of the early evening, and on her return from one expedition at twilight a water pageant greeted her as she rode onto the bridge.  While strains of music sounded on the mere, the Lady of the Lake advanced on her floating island, scintillating with lights.  A mermaid drew a tail eighteen feet long through the waves beside her, and perched on the back of a gigantic dolphin, Arion prepared to address the awe-inspiring figure whose horse was reined to a standstill above his head..." (218)

This scene is famous for Shakespeare's reference to it (perhaps) in his much later career.  Kenilworth is located just 12 miles northeast of Stratford.  It is known the local populace "crowded in as spectators to watch Elizabeth as she passed in splendor..." (Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare a Compact Documentary Life).  It is also a commonplace of Shakespeare criticism that Oberon's lines to Puck at 2.1.150 of A Midsummer Night's Dream may well be a memory of this occasion:

Thou rememberest
Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid's music.

The shooting stars are equated with the Kenilworth fireworks.  Again, in Twelfth Night (1.2.15-17) the sea captain says of Sebastian:

Where, like Arion on the dolphin's back,
I saw him hold acquaintance with the waves
So long as I could see.

Young William would have been 11 in 1575, and his father would have been at his financial and social acme as alderman, before the darker days of financial difficulties.  It is easy to imagine John and Will among the crowds craning to see their queen in her splendor and the remarkable devices presented by her favored courtier and intimate.  It is just the sort of memory that might have stamped itself into his psyche to reappear later in his poetry.

Or is it?  The Norton Shakespeare draws attention to the Elvetham pageant of 1591, based (I believe) on the article by Edith Rickert ("Political Propaganda and Satire in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Modern Philology, Vol. 21, No. 1. (Aug., 1923), pp. 53-87).  She tries to make a case for Shakespeare's use of the Elvetham events rather than a memory of the Kenilworth pageant.  The validity of her arguments are an open question, but for me there is a further event at the Kenilworth pageant that seems to bring it much closer to A Midsummer Night's Dream than the Elvetham pamphlet.  I continue quoting from Jenkins' book where I left off above:

"Some lines, indeed, he did bring out, but the occasion was too much for him; his memory failed, and pulling off his mask in exasperation, he shouted that 'he was none of Arion, not he, but honest Harry Goldingham.'  The queen was in fits of laughter and said afterwards that this had been the best part of the show."

This sounds for all the world to me like Snug the joiner reassuring the ladies that he is, indeed, no ferocious lion that might affright them:

You, ladies, you, whose gentle hearts do fear
The smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on floor,
May now perchance both quake and tremble here,
When lion rough in wildest rage doth roar.
Then know that I, one Snug the joiner, am
A lion-fell, nor else no lion's dam;
For, if I should as lion come in strife
Into this place, 'twere pity on my life. (5.1.217-224)

It is the same play-within-a-play setting with the same good simplicity of heart overviewed by benevolent, bemused royalty.  I think this, in addition to the dolphin and Arion, must have stuck deep in young Will's imagination as he developed his extraordinary abilities not only as a poet, but as one able to layer appearance and reality on stage.

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