Notes

But what saith he that long hath tryde

Of harlots all the wanton flights;

Beware least that your harte be tyde

To fond affects by wanton sights.

Their wandering eies and wanton looks

Catch fooles as fish, on painted hookes.

Their lippes with oyle and honie flowe

Their tongs are fraught with flattering guile

Amidst these joyes great sorrowes grow;

For pleasures flourish but a while;

Their feete to death, their steps to hell,

Do swiftly slide, that thus do mell.

You can not in the Serpents head such deadly poyson find,

As is the fayned love that lives with discontented mind.

Of all the brave, resounding words which God to man hath lent

This soundeth sweetest in mine eare, to say I am content.

It was the art critic, John Ruskin (1819-1900) who commented:

Shakespeare has no heroes.... he has only heroines... the catastrophe of every play is always caused by the folly or fault of a man; the redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom and virtue of a woman, and failing that, there is none.

We see, at the very least, his competitive spirit and his desire to pursue his own gentrification, to avoid making himself 'a motley to the view' (Sonnet CX) in future. He will achieve these goals in concrete terms with the grant of a coat of arms in 1596 and the purchase of a substantial property at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1597.

'We all know somewhat of the world into which he (James Burbage) stepped, a world in the convulsions of a great upheaval, plunged into a melting pot of Fate, with no certainty as to the mould to which its future would be cast It had been stirred to the depths by mighty religious influences spreading from Germany and Swtzerland. Its perceptions had been stimulated by the Italian renaissance, which travellled to us through France. A demand for knowledge of the new learning came from all classes, a supply of translations attempted to answer the demand. As a new world had been given to them out of the haze of the West, which widened their horizon, and stimutated their faculties of wonder and imagination, so a new world had been unrolled to them by the miracles of the printer's shop. Its conservative and reproductive powers made books cheap. The people began to buy them, to read, discuss and understand them in a way hardly understood by modern readers. Everything seemed new and fresh and interesting in the third quarter of the sixteenth century. The political despotism of the Tudors had not yet produced rebellion. The dissolution of the monasteries and the confiscation of their property, one outcome of these influences, had resulted in social, educational and economic changes, as well as further religious developments. Whatever may have been the faults of some of their inmates, the convents had remained in general the centres of education, the guardians of literature, science, art, and empiric knowledge, the dispensers of hospitality, medical treatment and charity. Though a future was assured the better-class priests willing to conform at home, or brave enough to make a career for themselves abroad, their suppression flung on the world numbers of helpless and inferior monks and servitors, whose so-called pensions were too irregularly paid to be any security against want. Armies of old mendicants, formerly their pensioners, some of them harmless and only helpless, others the "sturdy beggars" of later statutes became deteriorated through the disappearance of their regular reckonings of work and provision in the Abbeys. Driven along with those on the hunting ground of the road were many "poor scholars", many younger sons of the minor gentry even, whose family estates had been seized for recusancy; apprentices from various trades whose apprenticeships had been broken from an awakening to independence of thought and action, under the harsh rules a severe master had power to impose; wounded soldiers for whose support there was no proper provision; cozeners, thieves, highwaymen at war with society. Short shrift were allowed the latter, the gallows at once for them when they were caught, for human life was then of less value than the means of supporting it. From all these classes there arose groups of men who earned a precarious livelihood by satisfying the tastes of the peeople. To these also had come a modification of the reanaissance, a spirit from the outer world had stirred among the dry bones.' Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, Burbage and Shakespeare's Stage, p2.