Hi Johan ... if you look closely you'll see that "little boy" is in blue. Click through on that and you'll find that Phil has identified the servant to be Jack. We don't know his last name, but Pepys took him in last year. https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
My notes taken from the BBC's "EPIDEMIC The Great Plague", 4 episodes in the 2020 season.
THERE'S A NEW SPREAD THEORY: In 1720 Marsailles gets the final epidemic of this kind of plague. The University there has current on-going investigations and experiments which show that body lice and human fleas spread it, not rats. This accounts for why the London outbreak started inland in the parish of St. Giles, and not in the Port / Thames areas. Lice and fleas live in clothes. One is enough to infect a person, and it moves on within 24 hours.
The plague spread from St. Giles (northwest of the city walls) in the poor slum areas to other poor neighborhoods, all outside the walls. The rich people inside London Wall like Pepys had very few outbreaks of plague … hygene, and the vigorous beating of sheets and clothing killed them off. Fleas also live in straw mattresses. Poor children slept in one bed. Poor people share these things, so if one flea was brought home, the entire family were doomed. After death, the "Zorba the Greek" phenomenon often happens: the neighbors acquire the furniture … if they take the mattresses and/or the clothes, they spread the disease without ever seeing the original family.
The great bell of St. Giles-in-the-Field tolled 20 times a day at the height of the plague, so you could hear the approach of the contageon, which must have been terrifying, and helped to fuel the largest mass exodus from London which followed (so they said ... I suspect the WWII evacuations were bigger).
I think Charles II and his "brother" George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, must have read THE PRINCE by Machiavelli as teenagers. Pity George forgot this one:
"He who blinded by ambition, raises himself to a position whence he cannot mount higher, must thereafter fall with the greatest loss." -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
"there pretty late, till finding myself very full of wind, by my eating no dinner to-day, being vexed, I was forced to go home, ..."
I NEVER remember Pepys completely skipping lunch before ... a quick snack, yes ... and it gives him such embarrassing gas he has to leave the office! Poor man.
Either the gas subsided quickly, or Batelier didn't care, as Pepys gorged himself to make up for lost time.
"but at last did call up Jane, and confirm her mistress’s directions for her being gone at Easter, which I find the wench willing to be, but directly prayed that Tom might go with her, which I promised, and was but what I designed;"
Pepys had decided they both should leave last August … I don't know why they are there still, beyond both being much beloved by the Pepyses, until today: https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
Well paid jobs are easy to get after a pandemic ... I don't need to give a citation for that fact. Just watch the current news.
"Terry Jones’ Great Map Mystery" is four excellent investigations into some of the Welsh maps included in John Ogilby's BRITANNIA of 1675 and was, for me, an eye opener as to what Charles II is concluding from the shenanigans of the 1660's.
At school I learned Ogilby employed hundreds of people using the first mileage calculators to measure 20,000 miles of "British" roads (think mostly tracks). Previous maps were measured in one day's journey by coach or horseback, so visitors knew where they would be sleeping. As Pepys tells us, those old maps were not easy to follow, and the "roads" were rough. You'll see how rough in these shows.
This enormous book cost the equivilent of tens of millions of pounds today, but was sponsored by Charles II who went to great lengths to make sure rich people bought it, and he even used them as prizes for lotteries, although it rarely showed how to get to those rich peoples' houses or anything particularly useful they didn't already know.
It's fascinating ... and I won't spoil Terry Jones' big reveal at the end of why Charles wanted this information so badly. It's outside the Diary times anyways.
The shows are available free on BritBox in the USA right now ... poke around; you'll find them. They are too esoteric for pay TV.
"This morning I made a slip from the Office to White Hall, expecting Povy’s business at a Committee of Tangier, at which I would be, but it did not meet, and so I presently back."
Do I hear a sign of relief? Considering the time and effort he invested in sorting out Povy's lack of bookkeeping which led to his removal and Pepys' appointment, I can understand Pepys' concern at the outcome of this hearing. https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
It sounds like Elizabeth didn't know he went to Whitehall, so he also escaped the attention of Hewer and/or his boy? Just testing to see if he can get away with it?
"Hewer is too busy now I must give him dictation to transcribe and implement ... "
Just days after the celebrations, the government announced plans for a Transatlantic Slavery Museum, including a new home for the country’s archives, to be built at Newton Plantation, the location of one of the few slave burial grounds discovered and scientifically studied in the Americas.
With this, the Republic of Barbados inaugurates a new era of official support for heritage on an unprecedented scale.
@@@
John T. Gilmore is Reader in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and co-author of A-Z of Barbados Heritage (Miller Publishing, 2020).
... in 1936 Edward W. Daniel wrote of ‘the bad old days of slavery’ and pointed out that Charles II and James II had shares in the Royal African Company. The ground-breaking Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams (later Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago) was published in 1944, arguing for the importance of colonial slavery and sugar plantations in the growth of the capital which fuelled Britain’s Industrial Revolution.
From the 1970s, a new generation of locally and regionally educated cultural activists worked to diffuse this attitude among the wider Barbadian public. A more critical view of the British aspects of the island’s past was inevitable. Some of this was practical.
Many questioned why independent Caribbean countries retained Britain’s Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as their highest legal Court of Appeal, something given repeated attention by judgments in which the Privy Council appeared to be attempting to abolish the death penalty ... while there was widespread local support for retaining the death penalty for murder.
Barbados was one of the parties to the 2001 agreement to establish the Caribbean Court of Justice, formally inaugurated in 2005, ... .
A number of Barbadian historical figures were officially declared to be National Heroes in 1998 and the following year what had been Trafalgar Square in Bridgetown was renamed National Heroes Square.
Since the 1970s there were calls for the removal of Horatio Nelson's statue that stood in Trafalgar Square, having been paid for by many Barbadians through public subscription in 1813. At first, the statue was seen as an relic of colonialism, but by 2020, after the Black Lives Matter protests, Nelson was targeted as a white supremacist and an active supporter of the slave trade.
These claims were based on a letter which Nelson wrote that can be shown to have been altered after his death, but the damage was done. Nelson in Barbados was a powerful symbol of a colonial past which could only be viewed in a negative light.
By the time Nelson was removed from National Heroes Square in 2020, the government of Barbados had announced the country would become a republic in 2021.
An article by a Barbadian explains how the Brits maintained an Empire and a Commonwealth ... highlights in case the link disappears:
Royal portraits on coins suggested connections with the past, but a look at the history Barbadians were given in the 1960s was very selective. Even towards the end of the decade, a little after independence, ... I learnt more about the foibles of King James I than I did about anti-slavery and anti-colonialist figures such as Toussaint L’Ouverture or Henri Christophe.
We all knew how the good ship Olive Blossom had put in to an apparently uninhabited Barbados in 1625 and how Capt. John Powell left an inscription somewhere near what became Holetown, proclaiming ‘James K[ing] of E[ngland] and this Island’.
Textbooks current in the 1960's, such as the 3-volume West Indian Histories by Edward W. Daniel, published in the 1930s and several times reprinted, or A Short History of the British West Indies by H.V. Wiseman (1950) described the ending of colonial slavery as if it were the result of the benevolence of British evangelicals and downplayed the significance of enslaved resistance.
Emancipation occured in 1834 and was the official ending of colonial slavery. 1838 marked the end of the apprenticeship system, a half-freedom that tied the formerly enslaved to their ex-masters.
Yet this was a façade. Even by the 1950s, with the introduction of a full ministerial system of government in Barbados in 1954, with the role of the governor largely ceremonial, the country’s internal affairs were run by local politicians chosen by an electorate based on universal adult suffrage.
Barbados’ move to complete independence on 30 November 1966 was the logical outcome of deep-rooted political developments. Since 1639 there had been a local parliament in the shape of the House of Assembly, which frequently engaged in disputes with the Governor in defence of local interests.
Modern historians will note that for much of its history the House of Assembly was elected on a restricted franchise representing only the interests of white Christian male landowners, who were often the most zealous in claiming their liberties as British subjects when they were opposing some policy that the British government was attempting to impose on them.
In 1831 the franchise was extended to all those who met the property qualifications among the island’s Jews and ‘Free Coloureds’ (that is, persons of African descent who were not enslaved) and thereafter a slow series of incremental changes extended it further until, by 1950, all adult men and women had the right to vote. ...
The Independence Constitution provided for Queen Elizabeth to continue as head of state after independence, not as Queen of the United Kingdom, but as Queen of Barbados; diplomats representing the new nation sometimes found themselves challenged to explain the difference to representatives of republics. ...
This transition from reading and writing to dictation may also reflect a couple of other important transitions forced on Pepys by his eyesight.
One ... it moves him from the Clerk mentality to the Commissioner mentality. He's dressing the part for years, living the part progressively, and now he's forced to act the part in the office. He had a private office built so he could think while he worked. Now he can't do the accounts and write the first drafts, so the noise barrier will keep things confidential while he talks and delegates to others.
Two ... he's getting older. He can't justify hiding out in the office and learning the job any more. Got to live off his wits, his intellect, and his contacts. Maybe a run for Parliament is a possibility? Maybe he should get more involved with the Royal Society?
Delegation makes this a turning point in Pepys' personal awareness and his possibilities, assuming no one looks too carefully into those Tangier accounts. Acting as if he doesn't have a care in the world seems to be his current defense. Which brings up point 3:
By delegating, Pepys is training Hewer to take over, should that be necessary.
"I wonder if shorthand was a standard skill for clerks and office types."
Coincidentally I was reading a blog about Shakespeare and the Earl of Oxford, and came across these annotation about playwriting in the 1590's:
"NoSweatShakespeare 20 September 2020 "Did you know that Shakespeare’s actors learned their lines from “cue scripts,” where they only had their lines and the lines just before on paper? Can you imagine rehearsing a play without having read it? And just a few days before performance. To learn more about Shakespeare’s theatrical era, click the link here for some quick facts. (Photo: cue script for Orlando, circa 1591 — source: The Shakespeare Ensemble) THE LINK IS DEAD, SORRY.
"Stephanie Hughes For [Edward de Vere, Earl of] Oxford that would have been his secretaries at a given time, first Anthony Munday (such a manuscript exists with Munday's hand identified) then John Lyly. There still exists one of these with a few corrections in a hand that looks to me like Oxford's (I have a pile of photocopies of material in Oxford's hand ..., so I'm pretty good at recognizing it). ... "For the most part, he [Oxford] would have dictated both his plays and his corrections to a secretary. Lords had secretaries who wrote their letters for them. Half of what we have from Oxford were written by such a secretary.
"Gilbert Wesley Purdy The [theater] company scribe would have written these [cue scripts] out." @@@
Given this and the examples of Pepys and Coventry, it seems ambitious young but poor men finished their University degrees at the four "British" universities: Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews or Trinity College, Dublin. With their Latin credentials, then they learned a contemporary skill like shorthand and accounting, so they could clerk for powerful men and, with luck and sponsorship, work their way up the food chain.
Alternatively young men could be like Creed, and become proficient with the sword and be valuable as a body guard/councillor/soldier ... or, like John Pepys, get a degree in Divinity and try preaching and spiritual councilling ... or, with an interest in science, they could study medicine ... or maybe a family member was in import/export and they could apprentice there. All these careers paths required proficient Latin.
Like young people today, just because you qualify for something at 25 doesn't mean you'll be doing that at 40. A skill is a way into one of the clubs.
And a position with the Navy Board would be a prize appointment, held by the most qualified -- as good as being the lazy kid brother of the current Clerk of the Acts (i.e. nepotism generally trumped all, pun intended, but still required University-level Latin).
We are so lucky having English as the official international language (apologies to Stephane who probably believes it's French). Given population size, it should be Chinese, of course.
Pepys' review from the last year's viewing of SHE WOULD IF SHE COULD:
"Lord! how full was the house, and how silly the play, there being nothing in the world good in it, and few people pleased in it. The King was there; but I sat mightily behind, and could see but little, and hear not all."
This lack of review probably indicates that hearing the words and seeing the action didn't improve his opinion.
"He preaches in a devout manner of way, not elegant nor very persuasive, but seems to mean well, and that he would preach holily; and was mighty passionate against people that make a scoff of religion. And, the truth is, I did observe Mrs. Hollworthy smile often, and many others of the parish, who, I perceive, have known him, and were in mighty expectation of hearing him preach, but could not forbear smiling, and she particularly upon me, and I on her."
Until the last phrase I was reading that Dr. Waterhouse might talk the religious talk, but he was not very good at walking the virtuous walk so far as the ladies were concerned. Pepys instinctively recognized a fellow sinner???
Pepys only refers to waytes (aka waits or waites) once in the Diary by name. However, these entrepreneurs serenaded him with various levels of professionalism quite a few times. Search on "waits" under ANNOTATIONS they'll be flagged as I find them.
Comments
Second Reading
About Sunday 7 February 1668/69
San Diego Sarah • Link
Never fear, Matt, the Brits did gaslighting, admittedly later than Pepys ... see Britain's Angela Lansbury in https://moviestvnetwork.com/stori…
About Monday 8 February 1668/69
San Diego Sarah • Link
Hi Johan ... if you look closely you'll see that "little boy" is in blue. Click through on that and you'll find that Phil has identified the servant to be Jack. We don't know his last name, but Pepys took him in last year.
https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
About Plague
San Diego Sarah • Link
My notes taken from the BBC's "EPIDEMIC The Great Plague", 4 episodes in the 2020 season.
THERE'S A NEW SPREAD THEORY:
In 1720 Marsailles gets the final epidemic of this kind of plague. The University there has current on-going investigations and experiments which show that body lice and human fleas spread it, not rats.
This accounts for why the London outbreak started inland in the parish of St. Giles, and not in the Port / Thames areas. Lice and fleas live in clothes. One is enough to infect a person, and it moves on within 24 hours.
The plague spread from St. Giles (northwest of the city walls) in the poor slum areas to other poor neighborhoods, all outside the walls. The rich people inside London Wall like Pepys had very few outbreaks of plague … hygene, and the vigorous beating of sheets and clothing killed them off.
Fleas also live in straw mattresses. Poor children slept in one bed. Poor people share these things, so if one flea was brought home, the entire family were doomed.
After death, the "Zorba the Greek" phenomenon often happens: the neighbors acquire the furniture … if they take the mattresses and/or the clothes, they spread the disease without ever seeing the original family.
The great bell of St. Giles-in-the-Field tolled 20 times a day at the height of the plague, so you could hear the approach of the contageon, which must have been terrifying, and helped to fuel the largest mass exodus from London which followed (so they said ... I suspect the WWII evacuations were bigger).
This first episode is available on YouTube, free:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m…
About George Villiers (2nd Duke of Buckingham)
San Diego Sarah • Link
I think Charles II and his "brother" George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, must have read THE PRINCE by Machiavelli as teenagers. Pity George forgot this one:
"He who blinded by ambition, raises himself to a position whence he cannot mount higher, must thereafter fall with the greatest loss." -- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
About Monday 8 February 1668/69
San Diego Sarah • Link
"there pretty late, till finding myself very full of wind, by my eating no dinner to-day, being vexed, I was forced to go home, ..."
I NEVER remember Pepys completely skipping lunch before ... a quick snack, yes ... and it gives him such embarrassing gas he has to leave the office! Poor man.
Either the gas subsided quickly, or Batelier didn't care, as Pepys gorged himself to make up for lost time.
About Monday 8 February 1668/69
San Diego Sarah • Link
"but at last did call up Jane, and confirm her mistress’s directions for her being gone at Easter, which I find the wench willing to be, but directly prayed that Tom might go with her, which I promised, and was but what I designed;"
Pepys had decided they both should leave last August … I don't know why they are there still, beyond both being much beloved by the Pepyses, until today:
https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
Well paid jobs are easy to get after a pandemic ... I don't need to give a citation for that fact. Just watch the current news.
About John Ogilby
San Diego Sarah • Link
"Terry Jones’ Great Map Mystery" is four excellent investigations into some of the Welsh maps included in John Ogilby's BRITANNIA of 1675 and was, for me, an eye opener as to what Charles II is concluding from the shenanigans of the 1660's.
At school I learned Ogilby employed hundreds of people using the first mileage calculators to measure 20,000 miles of "British" roads (think mostly tracks). Previous maps were measured in one day's journey by coach or horseback, so visitors knew where they would be sleeping. As Pepys tells us, those old maps were not easy to follow, and the "roads" were rough. You'll see how rough in these shows.
This enormous book cost the equivilent of tens of millions of pounds today, but was sponsored by Charles II who went to great lengths to make sure rich people bought it, and he even used them as prizes for lotteries, although it rarely showed how to get to those rich peoples' houses or anything particularly useful they didn't already know.
It's fascinating ... and I won't spoil Terry Jones' big reveal at the end of why Charles wanted this information so badly. It's outside the Diary times anyways.
The shows are available free on BritBox in the USA right now ... poke around; you'll find them. They are too esoteric for pay TV.
About Friday 5 February 1668/69
San Diego Sarah • Link
No indication of having a watchdog with Pepys today.
About Thursday 4 February 1668/69
San Diego Sarah • Link
"This morning I made a slip from the Office to White Hall, expecting Povy’s business at a Committee of Tangier, at which I would be, but it did not meet, and so I presently back."
Do I hear a sign of relief? Considering the time and effort he invested in sorting out Povy's lack of bookkeeping which led to his removal and Pepys' appointment, I can understand Pepys' concern at the outcome of this hearing.
https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
It sounds like Elizabeth didn't know he went to Whitehall, so he also escaped the attention of Hewer and/or his boy? Just testing to see if he can get away with it?
"Hewer is too busy now I must give him dictation to transcribe and implement ... "
About Tuesday 26 January 1668/69
San Diego Sarah • Link
'"Sally" being the Republic of Salé, an Ostend-style pyrate kingdom on the Moroccan coast ...'
I love the description of Ostend!!!
I've been spelling it Sallee, but I find Stephane is correct. Phil has it under "Sale" in our Encyclopedia:
https://www.pepysdiary.com/encycl…
About Barbados
San Diego Sarah • Link
PART 3
Just days after the celebrations, the government announced plans for a Transatlantic Slavery Museum, including a new home for the country’s archives, to be built at Newton Plantation, the location of one of the few slave burial grounds discovered and scientifically studied in the Americas.
With this, the Republic of Barbados inaugurates a new era of official support for heritage on an unprecedented scale.
@@@
John T. Gilmore is Reader in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and co-author of A-Z of Barbados Heritage (Miller Publishing, 2020).
https://www.historytoday.com/arch…
About Barbados
San Diego Sarah • Link
PART 2
... in 1936 Edward W. Daniel wrote of ‘the bad old days of slavery’ and pointed out that Charles II and James II had shares in the Royal African Company. The ground-breaking Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams (later Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago) was published in 1944, arguing for the importance of colonial slavery and sugar plantations in the growth of the capital which fuelled Britain’s Industrial Revolution.
From the 1970s, a new generation of locally and regionally educated cultural activists worked to diffuse this attitude among the wider Barbadian public. A more critical view of the British aspects of the island’s past was inevitable. Some of this was practical.
Many questioned why independent Caribbean countries retained Britain’s Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as their highest legal Court of Appeal, something given repeated attention by judgments in which the Privy Council appeared to be attempting to abolish the death penalty ... while there was widespread local support for retaining the death penalty for murder.
Barbados was one of the parties to the 2001 agreement to establish the Caribbean Court of Justice, formally inaugurated in 2005, ... .
A number of Barbadian historical figures were officially declared to be National Heroes in 1998 and the following year what had been Trafalgar Square in Bridgetown was renamed National Heroes Square.
Since the 1970s there were calls for the removal of Horatio Nelson's statue that stood in Trafalgar Square, having been paid for by many Barbadians through public subscription in 1813. At first, the statue was seen as an relic of colonialism, but by 2020, after the Black Lives Matter protests, Nelson was targeted as a white supremacist and an active supporter of the slave trade.
These claims were based on a letter which Nelson wrote that can be shown to have been altered after his death, but the damage was done. Nelson in Barbados was a powerful symbol of a colonial past which could only be viewed in a negative light.
By the time Nelson was removed from National Heroes Square in 2020, the government of Barbados had announced the country would become a republic in 2021.
What happens next remains to be seen.
About Barbados
San Diego Sarah • Link
An article by a Barbadian explains how the Brits maintained an Empire and a Commonwealth ... highlights in case the link disappears:
Royal portraits on coins suggested connections with the past, but a look at the history Barbadians were given in the 1960s was very selective. Even towards the end of the decade, a little after independence, ... I learnt more about the foibles of King James I than I did about anti-slavery and anti-colonialist figures such as Toussaint L’Ouverture or Henri Christophe.
We all knew how the good ship Olive Blossom had put in to an apparently uninhabited Barbados in 1625 and how Capt. John Powell left an inscription somewhere near what became Holetown, proclaiming ‘James K[ing] of E[ngland] and this Island’.
Textbooks current in the 1960's, such as the 3-volume West Indian Histories by Edward W. Daniel, published in the 1930s and several times reprinted, or A Short History of the British West Indies by H.V. Wiseman (1950) described the ending of colonial slavery as if it were the result of the benevolence of British evangelicals and downplayed the significance of enslaved resistance.
Emancipation occured in 1834 and was the official ending of colonial slavery. 1838 marked the end of the apprenticeship system, a half-freedom that tied the formerly enslaved to their ex-masters.
Yet this was a façade. Even by the 1950s, with the introduction of a full ministerial system of government in Barbados in 1954, with the role of the governor largely ceremonial, the country’s internal affairs were run by local politicians chosen by an electorate based on universal adult suffrage.
Barbados’ move to complete independence on 30 November 1966 was the logical outcome of deep-rooted political developments. Since 1639 there had been a local parliament in the shape of the House of Assembly, which frequently engaged in disputes with the Governor in defence of local interests.
Modern historians will note that for much of its history the House of Assembly was elected on a restricted franchise representing only the interests of white Christian male landowners, who were often the most zealous in claiming their liberties as British subjects when they were opposing some policy that the British government was attempting to impose on them.
In 1831 the franchise was extended to all those who met the property qualifications among the island’s Jews and ‘Free Coloureds’ (that is, persons of African descent who were not enslaved) and thereafter a slow series of incremental changes extended it further until, by 1950, all adult men and women had the right to vote. ...
The Independence Constitution provided for Queen Elizabeth to continue as head of state after independence, not as Queen of the United Kingdom, but as Queen of Barbados; diplomats representing the new nation sometimes found themselves challenged to explain the difference to representatives of republics. ...
About Wednesday 3 February 1668/69
San Diego Sarah • Link
This transition from reading and writing to dictation may also reflect a couple of other important transitions forced on Pepys by his eyesight.
One ... it moves him from the Clerk mentality to the Commissioner mentality. He's dressing the part for years, living the part progressively, and now he's forced to act the part in the office.
He had a private office built so he could think while he worked. Now he can't do the accounts and write the first drafts, so the noise barrier will keep things confidential while he talks and delegates to others.
Two ... he's getting older. He can't justify hiding out in the office and learning the job any more. Got to live off his wits, his intellect, and his contacts. Maybe a run for Parliament is a possibility? Maybe he should get more involved with the Royal Society?
Delegation makes this a turning point in Pepys' personal awareness and his possibilities, assuming no one looks too carefully into those Tangier accounts. Acting as if he doesn't have a care in the world seems to be his current defense. Which brings up point 3:
By delegating, Pepys is training Hewer to take over, should that be necessary.
About Wednesday 3 February 1668/69
San Diego Sarah • Link
"I wonder if shorthand was a standard skill for clerks and office types."
Coincidentally I was reading a blog about Shakespeare and the Earl of Oxford, and came across these annotation about playwriting in the 1590's:
"NoSweatShakespeare
20 September 2020
"Did you know that Shakespeare’s actors learned their lines from “cue scripts,” where they only had their lines and the lines just before on paper? Can you imagine rehearsing a play without having read it? And just a few days before performance. To learn more about Shakespeare’s theatrical era, click the link here for some quick facts. (Photo: cue script for Orlando, circa 1591 — source: The Shakespeare Ensemble)
THE LINK IS DEAD, SORRY.
"Stephanie Hughes
For [Edward de Vere, Earl of] Oxford that would have been his secretaries at a given time, first Anthony Munday (such a manuscript exists with Munday's hand identified) then John Lyly. There still exists one of these with a few corrections in a hand that looks to me like Oxford's (I have a pile of photocopies of material in Oxford's hand ..., so I'm pretty good at recognizing it). ...
"For the most part, he [Oxford] would have dictated both his plays and his corrections to a secretary. Lords had secretaries who wrote their letters for them. Half of what we have from Oxford were written by such a secretary.
"Gilbert Wesley Purdy
The [theater] company scribe would have written these [cue scripts] out."
@@@
Given this and the examples of Pepys and Coventry, it seems ambitious young but poor men finished their University degrees at the four "British" universities: Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews or Trinity College, Dublin. With their Latin credentials, then they learned a contemporary skill like shorthand and accounting, so they could clerk for powerful men and, with luck and sponsorship, work their way up the food chain.
Alternatively young men could be like Creed, and become proficient with the sword and be valuable as a body guard/councillor/soldier ... or, like John Pepys, get a degree in Divinity and try preaching and spiritual councilling ... or, with an interest in science, they could study medicine ... or maybe a family member was in import/export and they could apprentice there. All these careers paths required proficient Latin.
Like young people today, just because you qualify for something at 25 doesn't mean you'll be doing that at 40. A skill is a way into one of the clubs.
And a position with the Navy Board would be a prize appointment, held by the most qualified -- as good as being the lazy kid brother of the current Clerk of the Acts (i.e. nepotism generally trumped all, pun intended, but still required University-level Latin).
We are so lucky having English as the official international language (apologies to Stephane who probably believes it's French). Given population size, it should be Chinese, of course.
About Monday 1 February 1668/69
San Diego Sarah • Link
Pepys' review from the last year's viewing of SHE WOULD IF SHE COULD:
"Lord! how full was the house, and how silly the play, there being nothing in the world good in it, and few people pleased in it. The King was there; but I sat mightily behind, and could see but little, and hear not all."
This lack of review probably indicates that hearing the words and seeing the action didn't improve his opinion.
About Sunday 31 January 1668/69
San Diego Sarah • Link
"He preaches in a devout manner of way, not elegant nor very persuasive, but seems to mean well, and that he would preach holily; and was mighty passionate against people that make a scoff of religion. And, the truth is, I did observe Mrs. Hollworthy smile often, and many others of the parish, who, I perceive, have known him, and were in mighty expectation of hearing him preach, but could not forbear smiling, and she particularly upon me, and I on her."
Until the last phrase I was reading that Dr. Waterhouse might talk the religious talk, but he was not very good at walking the virtuous walk so far as the ladies were concerned. Pepys instinctively recognized a fellow sinner???
About Waytes
San Diego Sarah • Link
Pepys only refers to waytes (aka waits or waites) once in the Diary by name. However, these entrepreneurs serenaded him with various levels of professionalism quite a few times. Search on "waits" under ANNOTATIONS they'll be flagged as I find them.
About Sunday 13 October 1667
San Diego Sarah • Link
That should be
https://www.pepysdiary.com/encycl…
Sorry!
About Wednesday 15 October 1662
San Diego Sarah • Link
That should be
https://www.pepysdiary.com/encycl…
Sorry!