The issue of family status has a bearing on another theatrical event that the young Shakespeare might have observed. Did he attend any of the festivities that accompanied the great Earl of Leicester’s sumptuous entertainment of Queen Elizabeth at his Kenilworth estate for nineteen extravagant days in 1575? The whole affair is rumored to have cost Leicester a staggering £60,000 – a figure put in proportion by the relatively comfortable income of £10 per year which we considered earlier (p. 17). Kenilworth is only fourteen miles from Stratford and if anyone from the borough was invited to attend it might well be the still‐respected alderman and members of his family. (William’s mother, Mary Arden, came from a notable Warwickshire family in her own right.)
What fuels interest in this possibility is the fact that, some twenty years later, Shakespeare included a passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream which might just glance at one of the spectacles on view at Kenilworth. Oberon asks Puck if:
Thou rememb’rest
Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song,
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres
To hear the sea‐maid’s music?
(2.1.148–54)
On August 18, 1575 there was a water‐pageant on a large lake in Kenilworth’s grounds, with a show of the Lady of the Lake, which the Queen watched from a bridge. This is described in a letter, ascribed to Robert Langham or Laneham:
And the Lady by and by, with her two nymphs, floating upon her movable islands (Triton on his mermaid skimming by) approached toward her Highness on the bridge: as well to declare that her Majesty’s presence both so graciously thus wrought her deliverance … and … to present her Majesty (as a token of her duty and good heart) for her Highness’s recreation with his gift, which was Arion that excellent and famous musician, in tire and appointment strange well seeming to his person, riding aloft upon his old friend the dolphin (that from head to tail was a four and twenty foot long) and swimmed hard by these islands. Herewith Arion, for these great benefits – after a few well couched words unto her Majesty of thanksgiving, in supplement of the same – began a delectable ditty of a song, well apted to a melodious noise, compounded of six several instruments all covert, casting sound from the dolphin’s belly within; Arion the seventh, sitting thus singing (as I say) without.6
Interestingly, a different image emerges from a second account of the event, by the poet and courtier, George Gascoigne:
From thence her Majesty passing yet further on the bridge, Proteus appeared, sitting on a dolphin’s back. And the dolphin was conveyed upon a boat, so that the oars seemed to be his fins. Within which dolphin a consort of music was secretly placed, the which sounded, and Proteus clearing his voice, sang this song of congratulation, as well in behalf of the Lady distressed, as also in behalf of all the nymphs and gods of the sea.
(Gascoigne, 1576)
So one observer thought he saw an actor playing Arion, the Greek poet and lyre‐player, singing on a dolphin; another saw Proteus, the shape‐changing sea‐god, doing it. The only mermaid involved, in Langham’s account, was being ridden by Triton, another sea‐deity. Did Shakespeare’s memory play tricks on him over the years, or did he embroider the event for his own artistic purposes? Or, more prosaically, did Shakespeare simply read about these famous events in one or both of these printed accounts, and adapt them to his needs? Apart from anything else, there is no evidence that a wider public was allowed to witness the events at Kenilworth: Langham had a position at court and Gascoigne was employed by Leicester in devising some of the entertainments. We know that Shakespeare read widely and with a retentive memory. In Twelfth Night he would describe Viola’s brother as “like Arion on the dolphin’s back” (1.2.15), but surely from his copious reading of classical mythology rather than memories of long ago.