lascivious writhing of their tender limbs, and gorgeous decking of their apparell, in feigning bawdie fables gathered from the idolatrous heathen poets'. I should feel more easy in drawing inferences from this, were the book extant.[1] But it seems to indicate either that the controversialist of 1569 was less careful than his successors to avoid attacks upon Elizabeth's private 'solace', or that the idea had already occurred to the Master of turning his rehearsals of Court plays to profit by giving open performances in the Chapel. That the Court performances themselves took place in the Chapel is possible, but not very likely; the usual places for them seem to have been the Hall or the Great Chamber.[2] But no doubt they sometimes fell on a Sunday.
The boys played at Court on 6 January 1570 and during Shrovetide 1571. On 6 January 1572 they gave Narcissus, and on 13 February 1575 a play with a hunt in it.[3] On all these occasions Hunnis was payee. An obvious error of the clerk of the Privy Council in entering him as 'John' Hunnis in connexion with the issue of a warrant for the payment of 1572 led Chalmers to infer the existence of two Masters of the name of Hunnis.[4] During the progress of 1575 Hunnis contributed shows to the 'Princely Pleasures' of Kenilworth, and very likely utilized the services of the boys in these.[5] And herewith his active conduct of the Chapel performances appears to have been suspended for some years. A play of Mutius Scaevola, given jointly at Court by the Children of the Chapel and the Children of Windsor on 6 January 1577, is the first of a series for which the place of Hunnis as payee is taken by Richard Farrant. To this series belong unnamed plays on 27 December 1577 and 27 December 1578, Loyalty and Beauty on 2 March 1579, and Alucius on 27 December
- ↑ Hazlitt-Warton, iv. 217, citing f. xii of the pamphlet. I know of no copy. One is catalogued among Bishop Tanner's books in the Bodleian, but Stopes, 226, 'went to Oxford on purpose to see it, but found that it had utterly vanished'. Macray, Annals of the Bodleian, 211, thinks that it may have been destroyed when Tanner's books fell into a river during their transit from Norwich to Oxford in Dec. 1731. The pamphlet is also cited for an example of the use of the term 'spur money' (Bumpus, 29, with date '1598'). F. T. Hibgame (10 N. Q. i. 458) describes a collection of pamphlets seen by him in New York under the general title of The Sad Decay of Discipline in our Schools (1830), which included Some Account of the Stripping and Whipping of the Children of the Chapel, containing a 'realistic account of the treatment of the boys at one of the royal chapels', of which he thought the author might be George Colman.
- ↑ Cf. ch. vii.
- ↑ Feuillerat, Eliz. 244, 'Holly, Ivye, firr poles & Mosse for the Rock . . . Hornes iij, Collers iij, Leashes iij & dogghookes iij with Bawdrickes for the hornes in Hvnnyes playe'.
- ↑ Variorum, iii. 439.
- ↑ Cf. ch. xxiii (Gascoigne).
