CHAPTER XLI. The Tavern Revel CHAPTER XLII. More Strange than True CHAPTER XLIII. England on the Defensive CHAPTER XLIV. The Boar's Head, in East Cheap CHAPTER XLV. The Camp at Tilbury CHAPTER XLVI. The Invincible Armada CHAPTER XLVII. The Player at Court CHAPTER XLVIII. Sir Thomas Lucy in London CHAPTER XLIX. The Theatre of the Blackfriars CHAPTER L. The Scenic Hour CHAPTER LI. The Tavern CHAPTER LII. The Player in his Lodging CHAPTER LIII. The Poet and his Patron CHAPTER LIV. A Consultation CHAPTER LV. Ill Weaved Ambition CHAPTER LVI. The Associates CHAPTER LVII. The Poet and his Friends CHAPTER LVIII. Stratford and its Neighbourhood CHAPTER LIX. Kenilworth CHAPTER LX. The Return CHAPTER LXI. The Discomfited Scrivener CHAPTER LXII. Old Friends CHAPTER LXIII. Which ends this strange eventful History WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AS HE LIVED, STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, AND QUEEN ELIZABETH. CHAPTER I. A FOREST SCENE. It was one morning, during the reign of Elizabeth, that a youth, clad in a grey cloth doublet and hose (the usual costume of the respectable country tradesman or apprentice in England), took his early morning stroll in the vicinity of a small town in Warwickshire. Lovely as is the scenery in almost every part of this beautiful county, which exhibits, perhaps, the most park-like and truly English picture in our island, it was (at the period of our story) far more beautiful than in its present state or cultivated improvement. The thick and massive foliage of its woods, in Elizabeth's day, were to be seen in all the luxuriance of their native wildness, unpruned, unthinned, untouched by the hand of man, representing in their bowery beauty the wild uncontrolled woodlands of Britain, when waste, and wold, and swamp, and thicket constituted all. The fern-clad undulations and forest glades around, too, at this period, were peopled by the wild and herded deer--those "poor, dappled fools--the native burghers of the desert city"--which, couched in their own confines, their antlered heads alone seen in some sequestered spot amongst the long grass, gave an additional charm to the locality they haunted, in all the freedom of unmolested range, from park to forest, and from glade to thicket. In these bosky bournes and sylvan retreats, unmolested then by the axe of an encroaching population; nay, almost untrodden, save by the occasional forester or the fierce outlaw; the gnarled oaks threw their broad arms over the mossy carpet, giving so deep a shade in many parts, that the rays of the mid-day sun were almost intercepted, and the silent forest seemed dark, shadowy, and massive, as when the stately tramp of the soldiery of Rome sounded beneath its boughs.