In
July 1575, Queen Elizabeth I visited Kenilworth Castle, the home of the
Earl of Leicester, a few miles north of Stratford. She was about 42 years
old and unmarried. It' s now thought than part of the Earl' s plan was
to persuade her to marry him, and he provided three magnificent weeks of
impress the Queen. There were fireworks and plays, hunting and bear-baiting-much
of it take place around. Queen possible Shakespeare, then an eleven-year-old
glover' s son, was among the crowds who saw a play about a battle between
the English and the Danes preformed by citizens of Coventry. He might also
have seen a comic country wedding, and a pageant on the lake in which:
'Harry
Goldingham was to represent Arion upon the Dolplin' s back, but finding
his voice to be very hoarse and unpleasant, he tears off his disguise and
swears he was none of Arion, not he, but honest Harry Goldingham: which
blunt discovery pleased the Queen better than if it had gone through in
the right way.'
Perhaps
it was at Kenilworth that Shakespeare first learned that truth about actors
which Duke Theseus put into words near the end of A Midsummer Night'
s Dream:
'The best in this kind are but
shadows, and the worth if imagination amend them.'