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2 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND
festivals, holy pictures for pilgrimages and other pious
occasions, drolleries, tavern scenes, and other lively subjects
for booths at the fairs or the pack of the travelling pedlar.
All these subjects would naturally induce imitations by
English artists, and in this way what may be called a native
school of painters began to develop itself in divers parts of
England. Their productions, being usually of ephemeral
and little more than local importance, and at their best
but imitations of the works of the more highly trained
artists of the Netherlands, have survived in few and
inconsiderable examples.
Shakespeare himself shows little enthusiasm for the
pictorial arts, but the allusions, scanty as they are, which
figure in his plays and poems, all suggest that the pictorial
arts were a part of the ordinary daily life of the people,
with which any one of his readers or spectators would be
familiar, and show the dramatist in an observant, if hardly
appreciative, attitude. Let us follow Shakespeare's experiences,
and we shall find him alluding to the art of painting
in many different ways.
The little houses in Henley Street, at Stratford-on-
Avon, in one of which Shakespeare was born, offered
little scope for adornment by the artist. His grandfather,
Robert Arden, lived however in greater state in his
house at Wilmcote, for he mentions in his will no less
than eleven ' painted cloths '. How universal such house
decorations were throughout England in Shakespeare's
youth is well attested by Estienne Perlin, a French visitor to
England in 1558/when he wrote from his own observation :
' Les Anglois se servent fort des tapisseries, des toilles
pinctes, qui sont bien faictes, ausquelles y a force magnifiques
roses couronnees, ou il y a des fleurs de Liz &
Lions, car en peu de maisons vous pouves entrer que vous
ne trouvies ces tapisseries.' These painted cloths seem
to have been paintings in tempera on canvas, originally
intended to replace tapestry, and were probably introduced
by Italian artists early in the sixteenth century. They
are usually carefully distinguished from ' pictures in tables
or paintings on panels', and are important in the history
of art, since the painted or stained cloth was the forerunner
of the painting on canvas, which, gradually displacing the
painting on panel, was almost universally adopted. In the