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Updated: June 13, 2025
Thence up to the Painted Chamber, and there heard a conference between the House of Lords and Commons about the Wine Patent; which I was exceeding glad to be at, because of my hearing exceeding good discourses, but especially from the Commons; among others, Mr. Swinfen, and a young man, one Sir Thomas Meres: and do outdo the Lords infinitely.
Meres was plainly a man of muddled and inaccurate learning, of no judgment, and of no critical power, a sort of Elizabethan Boswell without Boswell's virtues, and it is no paradox to say that it is this which gives his Discourse its chief interest. It probably represents not his own but the judgments current on contemporary writers in Elizabethan literary circles.
The firm horse-fen lay, bright green, along the foot of the wold; beyond it, the browner peat, or deep fen; and among it, dark velvet alder beds, long lines of reed-rond, emerald in spring, and golden under the autumn sun; shining river-reaches; broad meres dotted with a million fowl, while the cattle waded along their edges after the rich sedge-grass, or wallowed in the mire through the hot summer's day.
A peasant would now be ashamed to bring his cow to a fortune-teller; all the village would laugh. Even the shepherds had lost the power of communing with the planets at night; and all the valley read the Petit Journal instead of consulting the vieilles meres. One must go as far as Brittany to see a real peasant with the superstitions of a peasant.
In 1598, as we saw, Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia credits Shakespeare with Venus and Adonis, with privately circulated sonnets, and with a number of the comedies and tragedies. How the allusions "negative the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a nom de plume is not apparent," says Mr. Greenwood, always constant to his method.
In 1598 his name is mentioned as one of the better-known writers of comedies, by Francis Meres, in his 'Palladis Tamia. His first successful comedy was, 'Every Man in his Humour. Fama says that the manuscript which the author had sent in to the Lord Chamberlain's Company, was on the point of being rejected when Shakspere requested to have the play given to him, read it, and caused its being acted on the stage.
Amidst scenes that have little changed since the Iceni hid in the marshland-bordering woods, and crept out in their coracles on the rush-fringed meres, he is at home with Nature, and becomes her friend, her lover. She holds back no secret from him if he wills that he should learn it; she charms him with her many moods.
"Out of every little Island in their fens, for forty miles on end. There are the herds fattening themselves on the richest pastures in the land, and no man needing to herd them, for they are all safe among dikes and meres." "I will make my boats sweep their fens clear of every head " "Take care, my Lord King, lest never a boat come back from that errand.
At night he made his nest, of hurriedly woven branches, in the highest swaying of the tree-tops, where not even the leopard, cunning climber though she was, could come at him without giving timely warning. And so, doggedly and swiftly making his way due east, he came at length to the fringes of that vast region of swampy meres and fruitful, rankly wooded islets which was occupied by the Bow-legs.
Flat, low-lying forests, and lonely meres, and rough, isolated farms sped past below the rushing voyagers, then a black head-land, and then a wide, shallow arm of the sea.
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