This is how an ordinary
playgoer contrasted the reception of Jonson's Roman play of
_Catiline's Conspiracy_ with that of Shakespeare's Roman play of
_Julius Caesar_:--
So have I seen when Caesar would appear,
And on the stage at half-sword parley were
Brutus and Cassius--oh! how the audience
Were ravished, with what wonder they went thence;
When some new day they would not brook a line
Of tedious though well-laboured Catiline.
Shakespeare was the popular favourite. It is rare that the artist who
is a hero with the multitude is also a hero with the cultivated few.
But Shakespeare's universality of appeal was such as to include among
his worshippers from the first the trained and the untrained playgoer
of his time.
IV
Very early in his career did Shakespeare attract the notice of the
cultivated section of Elizabeth's Court, and hardly sufficient notice
has been taken by students of the poet's biography of the earliest
recognition accorded him by the great queen, herself an inveterate
lover of the drama, and an embodiment of the taste of the people in
literature. The story is worth retelling. In the middle of December
1594, Queen Elizabeth removed from Whitehall to Greenwich to spend
Christmas at that palace of Greenwich in which she was born sixty-one
years earlier.
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