THE GIRL-PAGE IN ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE. 443

FROM the earliest ballads, where a girl followed her lover to battle
in the armour of his esquire, to that curious mingling of romance
and psychology, *Mademoiselle de Maupin*, and numerous
modern instances, literature has delighted in the girl-page and
her adventures, and never more so than during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.

Every Elizabethan writer seems to have been tempted by the
possibilities of disguise. The men and women in play, romance
and poem have to assume something, if it is but an Italian name.
There are repeated instances of a man borrowing a ruff and a
farthingale, but perhaps the favourite of all devices is to send a
girl forth in the apparel of a boy.

"A brave disguise and a safe one," it gave liberty in an age when freedom was unknown to women, and nothing entangled a plot so delightfully; possibly it owed its origin to the spirit of adventure so essential an element of the time. Lyly, in *Gallathea*, where two girls turn boys for a year, was perhaps the first to introduce the device, but it began to be favoured with *Philaster*, with *Twelfth Night*, and *As You Like It*; the realists played with it in *More Dissemblers Besides Women, The Roaring Girl*, and *No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's*. Finally, it degenerated into a mere conventional figure with Shirley, with some of the later plays ascribed to Fletcher (but assuredly not by him), and reappeared, robbed of some of its natural and earlier vividness, as Fidelia in Wycherley's *The Plain Dealer*.

Perhaps no age was so sensitive to experiment and discovery
as the Elizabethan period. Translations and foreign literature
between them poured vitality into the country and mingled with
the stories of sailors, who voyaged not only to the half-known
Indies, but East as well, and northwards as far as Russia.
Travelling became frequent. The world was open to a youth,
and experience bounded only by the skill of his sword and wit.
Play after play jeered at the foreign fashions that overran the
country; play after play borrowed its story from a foreign source.
Merchants sought stuffs and tapestries for their wives as far
abroad as Ragusa, till Lady Cressingham's threat (*Anything for
a Quiet Life*)—"If I live another year, I'll have my agents shall
lie for me at Paris, and at Venice, and at Valladolid in Spain,
for intelligence of all new fashions"—was rather a truth
than an exaggeration.

But a woman, often more sensitive than a man to the spirit
of an age, had nothing but monotony to gratify her longing for
experience. A lover was the one break in her seclusion, and he
was chosen for her. Girls were married, often at fifteen, to men
they had seen, perhaps, some half a dozen times. Choice of a
husband was the privilege of widows, who alone seem to have
been accorded a slight degree of freedom. For the most part the
following lines express the life they had of necessity to lead :—

"We have grown old together,
As many ladies and their women do,
With talking nothing, and with doing less;
We have spent our life in that which least concerns life,
Only in putting on our clothes."

It is questionable how far this dullness, unbroken by adven-
ture, was beguiled with books. Harebrain, in *A Mad World*,
*My Masters*, says, speaking of his wife: "I have conveyed away
all her wanton pamphlets, as Hero and Leander, Venus and
Adonis"; and, forgetful, perhaps, of the emptiness of the day,
Imogen spent her evenings with a poem, as Iachimo noted: "She
has been reading late—

"The tale of Tereus; here the leaf's turned down
Where Philomel gave up."

Yet it is doubtful if it ever became the general diversion of
women; and merely to read romances is ever but a poor sub-
stitute for reality. More often the life women desired was that
pictured for them by Lazarillo, in *Blurt, Master Constable*: "It
shall be your first and finest praise to sing the note of every new
fashion at first sight, and, if you can, to stretch that note above
ela." They are to pleasure their husbands by learning music,
"for by this means your secret friend may have free and open
access to you, under the co'our of pricking you lessons." They
are not to rest until they procure a garden a fair distance from
the city :—

"Then, in the afternoon, when you address your sweet perfumed body to
walk to this garden, there to gather a nosegay—sops-in-wine, cowslips,
columbines, heart's-ease—the first principle to learn is, that you stick black
patches for the rheum on your delicate blue temples, though there be no
room for the rheum: black patches are comely in most women, and being
well fastened, draw men's eyes to shoot glances at you. Next, your ruff
must stand in print; and for that purpose, get poking-sticks with fair and
long handles, lest they scorch your lily sweating hands. Then your hat with
a little brim, if you have a little face; if otherwise, otherwise. Besides, you
must play the wag with your wanton fan; have your dog—called Pearl, or
Min, or Why Ask you, or any other pretty name—dance along by you; your
embroidered muff before you, on your ravishing hands."

444 THE GIRL-PAGE IN ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE.

They are to seem unwilling if invited out to supper and to eat little at table, "because it may be said of you, you are no cormorant; yet at your coming home you may counterfeit a qualm, and so devour a posset." If they have daughters they are to marry them to gallants, not citizens, and to ensure this they must "go all the ways yourselves you can to be made ladies, especially if, without danger to his person, or for love or money, you can procure your husband to be dubbed."

It is not surprising that with this as a common ideal of a woman's existence Elizabethan girls, in despair, sought the wider life accorded to their brothers, and were willing to turn, for this freedom, to the doublet and hose of a boy.

It is customary to assert that the frequency with which a page is found to be a girl disguised is due to the fact that in the seventeenth century the women's parts were always acted by boys. Yet any careful examination of Elizabethan plays must show that this was the least of many reasons, a thought of modernity, neglectful of the spirit of that age. If the motive behind the disguise was indirectly love, to rejoin a husband or to follow a lover, the actual reason for assuming it was to obtain liberty, some protection from the dangers inseparable from the voyage.

It was impossible for any unprotected woman to travel alone during the Elizabethan age. Robberies, outrage of every kind, were but too common. No girl above the rank of a waiting woman might cross the street unattended. It was a period of parental oppression, when girls were married to the man who would give the most land for them or claim with them the smallest dowry; youth sacrificed to age and spent strength for a handful of gold. In a time when immorality was more or less expected, jealousy fettered women until almost the sunlight was forbidden to their gaze. It is little to be wondered at that any girl with individuality, a sense of adventure, should prefer to trust the promises of a young and obedient lover rather than stay to suffer virtual imprisonment at the tyrannical hands of some unloved suitor of her parents' choice.

This impossibility of movement from place to place save as a man forced half the dramatists to fit their heroines with doublet and hose. Viola, wrecked and alone in Illyria, assumes the disguise of necessity; it is danger, not desire, which drives Julia into a page's suit. Only as a boy may Bellario follow Philaster; only as a gallant may Mistress Lowwater be revenged.

It is easy to imagine a girl, born into an age of vitality and discovery, beating against the restrictions imposed by an older, less sensitive world. Reading, the solitary amusement permitted her longing for beauty, would fill her dreams with impossible

445

romances that took the colour of truth beside the unbroken monotony of her days. She would watch her brothers with life at their own disposal, envious of their freedom. Then some boy, young in thought as herself, with a letter, moments of stolen meeting, would awaken a new reality that itself was built of dream. Impetuous, not with the tranquil protest books had aroused against her existence, but with actual emotions, actual rebellion, she would grow, with a few weeks, alien to her surroundings, eager to command, unready of obedience. Perhaps her lover would be sent abroad until the weeks grew barren of hope, with the one taste of reality to bar her for ever from childish acceptance of their dreariness. Perhaps some marriage would be threatened, hateful to her dreams. Perhaps it would be restraint she was weary of, to follow merely with her eyes the free birds passing her window, to long and long for the woods where they nested until the call of wildness might be stilled no longer. Knowing the liberty of a boy, she would think of her lover and the life he had promised till, as the wind rippled the rose-leaves, she grew mad with the bitterness of inaction, and stole out in the summer night, page in heart as well as apparel, old enough to love adventure, too young to realise its dangers.

Elizabethan plays are full of pictures of these girls, from the first chance meeting, through every incident and peril of such a life, up to the final discovery or admission of their disguise.

Julia, pleading with Lucetta for aid, knows it is impossible for her to rejoin Proteus save as a man :—

LUCETTA. But in what habit will you go along?

JULIA. Not like a woman; for I would prevent
The loose encounters of lascivious men;
Gentle Lucetta, fit me with such weeds
As may beseem some well-reputed page.

LUCETTA. Why, then, your ladyship must cut your hair.

JULIA. No, girl; I'll knit it up in silken strings,
With twenty odd-conceited true-love knots :
To be fantastic may become a youth
Of greater time than I shall show to be.

LUCETTA. What fashion, madam, shall I make your breeches?

JULIA. That fits as well as—"Tell me, good my lord,
What compass will you wear your farthingale?"
Why, even that fashion thou best lik'st, Lucetta.

LUCETTA. You must needs have them with a codpiece, madam.

JULIA. Out, out, Lucetta! that will be ill-favoured.

LUCETTA. A round hose, madam, now's not worth a pin,
Unless you have a codpiece to stick pins on.

JULIA. Lucetta, as thou lov'st me, let me have
What thou think'st meet, and is most mannerly :
But tell me, wench, how will the world repute me
For undertaking so unstaid a journey?