“There is no slander in an allowed fool, though he do nothing but rail,” says Olivia in “Twelfth Night”; while the melancholy Jaques, speaking of his desire to assume the motley dress, protests:—
“I must have liberty
Withal, as large a charter as the wind,
To blow on whom I please; for so fools have.”
Thus the jester was able to find in his wit and position an excuse generally, though not invariably, sufficient to cover every freedom taken with master or guests. But in Shakspere’s time this ancient and long-famous appurtenance to the larger households was already passing out of existence, a fact to which the dramatist himself makes reference in “As You Like It”: “Since the little wit that fools have was silenced, the little foolery that wise men have makes the greater show.”
But when we pass from these huge and ostentatious establishments to the dwellings of the middle and trading classes, we find the transitional character of the period far more marked. Evidences of domestic development and improvement reveal themselves on every side. The essential traits of mediævalism were gradually disappearing; and with the steady realization on the part of the commercial elements in the community of their increasing importance in the complex life of the time, there went many significant changes, indicating the slow collapse of the old régime and the consolidation of society upon its modern foundations.
Nevertheless, in the internal policy and arrangement of the Elizabethan household there was still much that would strike a present-day observer as remarkable—for the older spirit still made itself felt, though ancient forms were passing away. For instance, the relations existing between the head of the house and those about him and dependent upon him, if no longer what they were a hundred years before, had not yet begun to assume their distinguishing modern characteristics. The position of servant, ’prentice, or journeyman still partook of a certain suggestion of servitude, which it has required many years of social evolution to wear partially away. Our nineteenth-century notion of contract based upon terms something like equal, at least in theory—of so much money paid in return for such and such services rendered—had not yet established itself; and while the understanding between employer and employed was gradually acquiring more and more of a commercial quality, it had not by any means lost all its personal implications. The ’prentices of the time, for example, were something more and something less than those occupying analogous positions in our own days. They belonged to the establishment, lived with their master, ate at his table, formed part of the family; yet at the same time wore coats of blue—the color which everywhere symbolized servitude, and even constituted, as we know from “The City Madam” and other plays, the livery of Bridewell. They not only were their master’s assistants in the work of the shop; they furnished him also a kind of body-guard, or retinue—for on occasions when he had to make excursions after dark they went with him, bearing torches or lanterns to light the way, and stout clubs, for use in case of sudden assault. But the personal character of such relationships is perhaps most fully shown in the fact that masters and mistresses dealt out corporal punishment to their servants, a universal practice, which, as Chamberlayne tells us in his “Survey,” was expressly sanctioned by law. In Heywood’s “English Traveller,” young Geraldine accounts for the circumstance that Bess, Mrs. Winscott’s maid, tells slanderous stories about her, by the supposition that—
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