The gallants would have resorted to his stage daily (as they would have gone to the baths if they had been in old Home); and the ha'penny seats have enjoyed themselves quite as much had he given them the school of "The Hog hath lost his Pearl," or "The Devil is an Ass," or the tumbles of a clown. Why should this thrifty manager have ransacked Greek and Latin and Italian letters, the romance of Italy and the Sagas of the Horth (or, according to Dr. Farmer, rummaged the cloisters of all England, to get these at second hand)? Had these all been collected in a public library, would he have had leisure to sit down and pull them over for this precious audience of his, these gallants and groundlings--when his money was quite as safe if he merely reached out and took the nearest spectacle at hand (as he took his "Taming of the Shrew," "Winter's Tale," "sea-coast of Bohemia," and all--from Robert Greene)? But, if we may be allowed to conceive that it was the _action_ (that is to say, the "business") of the Shakespearean plays that delighted this Shakespearean audience (that filled the cockpit, galleries, and boxes, while poor Ben Jonson's, according to Digges, would hardly bring money enough to pay for a sea-coal fire), and that certain greater than the manager used this action thereafter as a dress for the mighty transcripts caused to be printed under voucher of the popular manager's name--if we may be allowed to conceive this--however exceptional, it is at least an accounting for the Shakespearean plays as we possess them to-day, without doing violence to human experience and the laws of nature. Southampton, Raleigh, Essex, Rutland, and Montgomery are young noblemen of wealth and leisure, {273}who "pass away the time merely in going to plays every day." * We have seen that the best seats were on the stage, and these, of course, the young noblemen occupied. There were no actresses in those days--the female parts were taken by boys--but titled ladies and maids of honor were admitted to seats on the stage as well as the gallants, and a thrifty stage manager might easily make himself useful to both. If my Lord Southampton was bosom friend to William Shakespeare (as rumor has it), their intimacy arose probably through some such service. A noble youth of nineteen, of proverbial gallantry and sufficient wealth (though, it must be remembered, as among the fortunes of his day, a comparatively poor man; not able to give away $25,000 at a time, for instance), was not at so great a loss for a friend and alter ego in London in 1593 (the date at which the "Venus and Adonis" is dedicated to him) as to be forced to forget the social gulf that separated him from an economical commoner (lately a butcher in the provinces), however popular a stage manager, except for cause; and it takes considerable credulity to believe that he did forget it (if he did), through being dazzled by the transcendent literary abilities of the economical commoner aforesaid.