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THE GIRL-PAGE IN ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE.

I fear me it will make me scandalised.

LUCETTA. If you think so, then stay at home, and go not.

JULIA. Nay, that I will not.

LUCETTA. Then never dream on infamy, but go.

It was easy to imagine the journey, easy to prepare for it, but for a girl accustomed to seclusion, to a garden, to submit to the perils of Elizabethan voyage demanded all the courage that would seem to have been a characteristic of the age. Sometimes her lover waited for her below, as Lorenzo for Jessica, but this was rare. Oftener she would creep out alone on her exploration, afraid, half wishful of discovery, were it not for the sharpness of her love.

Although, Viola, in *The Coxcomb* of Beaumont and Fletcher, never assumes a man's suit (it had been safer for her if she had), her thoughts as she leaves home, trustful of her lover, might echo the feelings of Bellario or Julia as they started out.

"The night is terrible, and I enclosed
With that my virtue and myself hate most,
Darkness; yet I must fear that which I wish,
Some company; and every step I take
Sounds louder in my fearful ears to-night
Than ever did the shrill and sacred bell
That rang me to my prayers. The house will rise
When I unlock the door. Were it by day
I am bold enough; but then a thousand eyes
Warn me from going. Might not God have made
A time for envious prying folk to sleep,
Whilst lovers met, and yet the sun hath shone?
Yet I was bold enough to steal this key
Out of my father's chamber; and dare not
Venture upon my enemy, the night,
Armed only with my love to meet my friend.
Alas, how valiant and how 'fraid at once
Love makes a virgin! I will throw this key
Back through a window. I had wealth enough
In jewels with me, if I hold his love
I steal 'em for. Farewell my place of birth!
I never make account to look on thee again."

This Viola was more than usually timorous, perhaps with reason, for on reaching the corner assigned as a meeting-place by Ricardo, her lover, he comes, truly, but too drunk to recognise her, and she is stript by thieves, plundered of her jewels, and forced to work as a farm servant before she is found and rescued by her father and repentant lover, whom, with the weakness common to Elizabethan women, she forgives.

Unaccustomed to travel many lost their way. Martia, in *The Widow*, overtakes a horseman, rides with him for company till, reaching a stretch of desolate country, the stranger summons

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his fellow-thieves and robs her of horse, clothes, and money. If they escaped danger there was always discomfort; the mere exchange of a bedchamber, such as Imogen's, hung "with tapestry of silk and silver," for bare ground and starlight, was hard enough for one who from a window might have watched night come, but had never known its loveliness :—

"I see a man's life is a tedious one.
I have tired myself; and for two nights together
Have made the ground my bed."

Food was not always easy to obtain, and even inns were dangerous, as Theodosia found when, believing herself alone, her weeping betrayed her to her brother, who had come to the room unobserved.

Even if she reached her lover in safety to be his page was to know a life very different to the existence pictured in some of the romantic plays. It is worth while reading Middleton's *More Dissemblers Besides Women*, if only for the realistic description of what a girl had to suffer directly she put on doublet and hose.

The Page (throughout the play she is given no other name) had run away from her friends to serve Lactantio, trustful of his promises to love and marry her, and is mocked of him :—

"If I should marry all those I have promised.
'Twould make one vicar horse ere he could dispatch us."

She is set, not to the tasks assigned to pages in the romantic plays, but to wait on him, clean his boots, get his clothes ready. In the following passage she entreats Dondolo, Lactantio's other servant, to help her with the unaccustomed duties :—

PAGE. I prithee, Dondolo, take this shirt and air it a little against my master rises; I had rather do anything than do 't, i' faith.

DONDOLO. O monstrous, horrible, terrible, intolerable! Are you not big enough to air a shirt? Were it a smock now, you liquorish page, you'd be hanged ere you'd part from it.

PAGE. Pish; here, Dondolo, prithee, take it.

DONDOLO. It's no more but up and ride with you, then! All my generation were beadles and officers, and do you think I'm so easily entreated? You shall find a harder piece of work, boy, than you imagine, to get anything from my hands; I will not disgenerate so much from the nature of my kindred; you must bribe me one way or other, if you look to have anything done, or else you may do 't yourself: 'twas just my father's humour when he bore office. You know my mind, page; the song! the song! I must either have the song you sung to my master last night when he went to bed, or I'll not do a stitch of service for you from one week's end to the other. As I am a gentleman, you shall brush cloaks, make clean spurs, nay, pull off strait boots, although in the tugging you chance to fall and hazard the breaking of your little buttocks.

But for all her singing Dondolo soon tired of doing her work for her, even expressed his scorn to Lactantio :—

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"But you can keep a little tit-mouse page there,
That's good for nothing but to carry toothpicks,
Put up your pipe or so, that's all he's good for :
He cannot make him ready as he should do;
I am fain to truss his points every morning;"

She could not even ride :—

"I think he scarce knows how to stride a horse;
I saw him with a little hunting nag
But thus high t'other day, and he was fain
To lead him to a high rail, and get up like a butter-wench."

Sooner or later detection was inevitable. Whether they were
willing or not to give up this perilous liberty is an interesting
point the old dramatists leave unanswered. It is curious to note
there was ever a slight contempt, felt rather than expressed,
visible in the minds of the other characters. Incredible as it
may seem, the stiff dullness of Arethusa was nearer the Eliza-
bethan ideal of women than the wild loveliness of Bellario. And
why did Shakespeare mar Viola and Imogen with even the hint
of cowardice? A girl who had suffered shipwreck and the perilous
life of a page would never have shrunk so woefully from encounter
with Sir Toby, would never have admitted a fear of unsheathed
steel. Imogen would have drawn her rapier boldly—

"and if mine enemy
But fear the sword like me, he'll scarcely look on't."

are the only unnatural lines she speaks in *Cymbeline*. Bellario
was ready enough for fighting if the chance had come, and even
Martia faced the thieves boldly, if she did spoil it afterwards by
admitting she knew the pistol was not loaded.

Elizabethan literature is rich in examples of these pages,
though often the disguise is assumed but for a single scene or
by a character of little real importance. The vivid and memor-
able instances are Imogen, Viola, Rosalind, Julia and Jessica in
Shakespeare; Bellario, Theodosia and Leocadia in Beaumont and
Fletcher; Moll, Mistress Lowwater, the Page and Martia in
Dekker and Middleton; Gallathea and Phillida in Lyly; Ascanio
in Massinger; Eroclea in Ford.

Perdita, though she is bidden—

"Dismantle you; and, if you can, disliken
The truth of your own seeming;"

never actually appears as a boy. With Portia and Nerissa one
never loses the sense that they are women, disguised because the
plot requires it, not from any desire of adventure, nor the neces-
sity of life. They are a little solemn with maturity, too con-
fident; the poetry of Imogen, the imaginative seriousness of

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Viola, are alike alien to their thought. The few lines where
Jessica, at the window, plays with Lorenzo and her disguise :—

"But love is blind, and lovers cannot see
The pretty follies that themselves commit;
For if they could, Cupid himself would blush
To see me thus transformed to a boy."

is far more valuable a contribution to the psychology of the girl-
page, whose very essence, in these romantic plays, is the beauty
of childhood, newly touched by youth, but not yet lost to dream.

Of the plays ascribed to Beaumont and Fletcher, Janus in
*The Faithful Friends* is so lifeless a figure that this alone would
prove that Fletcher had little or no share in its composition.
Alathe in *The Night Walker* is more vigorous, but too unreal to
be of value. *The Pilgrim* is the oddest mixture of a parody of
*As You Like It*, with the mad-house scenes so favoured of Dekker
and Middleton. Neither Aliena nor Julietta impress the reader
once with a sense of life. In *Love's Cure* Clara is brought up as
a man, her brother Lucio as a woman, on account of their father's
enemies. He is pardoned, and Clara struggles in vain to adapt
herself to a farthingale—"these clothes will never fadge with
me"—and her brother to draw his sword without flinching, until
love makes Clara willing enough to wear a skirt and turns Lucio
from cowardice to bravery. *Love's Pilgrimage* is a more inter-
esting play. Both disguised as men, the discovery by Theodosia
of Leocadia's sex and the later scene where Philippo pleads with
Leocadia for her love are vivid and full of beauty.

But it is Bellario in *Philaster* that is one of the loveliest, as
it is one of the most complete, studies of the girl-page that litera-
ture has known. It is the poetry and the spirit and the tragedy
of adventure caught in a single figure. Yet—

"The trustiest, loving'st and the gentlest boy
That ever masters kept."

possesses a wisdom, a rarity of intuition wholly unboyish, nor is
she hostage to mere restlessness, but rather the embodiment of
that spirit, warm with longing and experiment some have titled
youth. Her very ordering of the flowers by the fountain, at a
moment so decisive to the whole current of her venturing, has a
tinge of that immaturity to whom sunset, gold rose opening upon
a green-leaved sky, the shape of curving daffodils, were so fresh
in beauty they must be played and trifled with, in all the
enthusiasm of a very young poet, newly compelling words to his
obedient hand. Her pleading with Philaster has the wistful
knowledge of a vision winter has not hardened, in inevitable
conflict with the narrower boundaries of those for whom adven-

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ture is a myth. Allegiance may be transferred at an express command, but only a young boldness could imply so well absolute denial of all save outward surrender, as she enters Arethusa's room: "I wait on you, To do him service." Yet this root of childlessness which sets her apart from the others in the play has scarcely the depth of a leaf. Beneath it her thought divines at once the strangeness of Philaster; "she would fly as far as morning" for his content. Unlike Viola, she is unsullied by any cowardice at the glitter of naked steel. There is no compromise in her nature; the wish of all who will neither yield nor obscure their dream, weary of conflict, broke, as Philaster wounded her, "Oh death, I hope, is come." The final confession of her love is imperishable as Illyria itself—Illyria, that region, sensitive to reality, but of too rare imaginings ever to be quite true even to an Elizabethan day.

Ascanio, in Massinger's *The Bashful Lover*; Eroclea, in *The Lover's Melancholy*, by Ford, are but pale copies of Bellario, nor are the single scenes in which Mellida, in Marston's play, and Eugenia, in Massinger's *The Duke of Milan*, appear as men for the mere purpose of disguise of any importance.

"Light-colour summer stuff, mingled with divers colours," there is a quaint realism about Lyly's play, *Gallathea*, which makes it pleasant enough to read. Especially interesting is the scene where, newly arrayed as boys, both Gallathea and Phillida meet and are afraid to speak lest they betray themselves in the unaccustomed dress.

Gallathea sees Phillida, an apparent shepherd, in the distance—

GALLATHEA. But whist! here commeth a lad: I will learn of him how to behave myself.

PHILLIDA. I neither like my gate, nor my garments; the one untoward, the other unfit, both unseemly. O Phillida!—but yonder staieth one, and therefore say nothing. But O Phillida!

GALLATHEA (aside). I perceive that boys are in as great disliking of themselves as maids, therefore though I wear the apparell, I am glad I am not the person.

PHILLIDA (aside). It is a pretty boy and a faire, he might well have been a woman; but because he is not, I am glad I am, for now under the colour of my coat, I shall decipher the follies of their kind.

GALLATHEA (aside). I would salute him, but I fear I should make a curtsie instead of a legge.

PHILLIDA (aside). If I durst trust my face as well as I do my habit, I would spend some time to make pastime: for say what they will of a man's wit, it is no second thing to be a woman.

But Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher's *Philaster* apart, the most interesting example of the disguise is Moll in *The Roaring Girl* of Middleton and Dekker. This play seems to have been founded upon reality, for a Mary Frith, commonly known as

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Moll Cutpurse, actually lived, though with a far different character to the one ascribed to her in the play. From youth until her death she refused to wear other than male attire, is supposed to have been the first woman to smoke in England, and it is said she once robbed and wounded General Fairfax on Hounslow Heath. Thieving was the least of her vices. She is thought to have died about 1659. There are many references to her in other Elizabethan plays.

Perhaps nothing impresses any student of this age so much as the fact that, with the conditions of life such as are pictured again and again in the realistic comedies, it produced some of the loveliest, most imaginative poetry literature has known. Possibly it was sheer escape from the ugliness of existence drove the dramatists to create for themselves a new world—Illyria, filled with beauty, where the impossible might turn to truth; possibly it was this that drove Dekker and Middleton to fashion from the sordid reality of Mary Frith the figure of Moll, expressed most finely in their own words: “Here’s brave wilfulness!”

Mad, merry or honest Moll, as she is in turn called, fights a duel, it is true, but for honour, not money. Instead of robbing she discovers thieves: she is ready to help all who are worthy of her aid. There is no hint of boyishness about her. She is in thought and speech a man. "Sh'as the spirit of four great parishes, and a voice that will drown all the city," is a true picture of her, and if the poets gave Moll emotions that fitted their imagination they left untouched the speech and customs of that day.

No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's, vivid with pictures of the life of the time, is another interesting play. Mistress Lowwater, in order to be revenged on the widow, Lady Goldenfleece, who has robbed her of her land, takes not only the dress, but the speech and manners of a gallant, while her husband follows her disguised as a serving-man. Her boldness, her determination, are a curious contrast to Julia, to romantic Ascanio. Happier in a riding suit than ever she would be in woman's clothes, she is a fine brother of Witgood's spoiled by the mere accident of her sex.

Mistress Cressingham, Shirley's heroines, are dull and weak after these resolute figures invented at the pleasure of the dramatists, or copied, as Moll was, from life. It becomes a mere convention in the hands of weaker writers, as dying as the age. Restoration plays bring to the disguise a certain measure of new vitality, but Bellario differs from Fidelia in mind as well as speech. Much later, Landor's Aspasia, landing

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at Athens in the dress of an Athenian youth, is curiously truant
in a century that lacked both richness and vitality.

While Lamb's statement that, "for many years after the date
of Philaster's first exhibition on the stage, scarce a play can be
found without one of these women-pages in it," is certainly an
exaggeration, it is difficult to account for the frequency with
which the disguise appears in the literature of the period. To
admit the modern theory that it was owing to boys playing the
women's parts is to ignore Cleopatra, Bellafront, Vittoria Corum-
bona. To portray the sufferings of the Duchess of Malfi it was
not deemed necessary to transform her into a man. There is
Lodge's romance of Rosalynde, which was never intended to be
acted. To a certain extent the thought seems to have been
borrowed from Italian and Spanish stories, and it is possible,
also, that it was a convention of the dramatist to give the plot
more liberty, to afford a larger freedom in moving the heroine
from place to place. Yet all these reasons, even Elizabethan
fondness for disguise, are no sufficient explanation of its favour;
they seem so barren of meaning beside the vivid intensity of the
plays.

To read and re-read Elizabethan poetry is ever to wonder how
much of truth was mingled with imagination, how much was
drawn from life, how much from dream. Was Moll the only
woman to wear a rapier, or did some actual girl steal out, Bellario-
wise, to seize the world as her brothers had seized it, in the
London of these poets; did meeting with a living Imogen colour
these plays with beauty, make them vital as the age? But, what-
ever the reality behind the thought of these girl-pages, whatever
the reason was that led to the favour of this disguise, their soul
was the wildness, native to all poets, that fashioned these figures
of the very spirit of adventure; the imagination of a child joined
to the freedom of a boy.

W. BRYHER.