94 SHAKESPEARE ON TOBACCO. 
drinkers or sellers. It had now become s0 great a custom 
and had increased so fast after the importation of Virginia 
tobacco that it afforded them no insignificant theme for the 
display of their geniu®* The plays of Jonson, Decker, 
Rowland, Heywood, Middleton, Fields, Fletcher, Hutton, 
Lodge, Sharpham, Marston, Lilly (court poet to Elizabeth), 
the Duke of Newcastle and others are full of allusions to 
the plant and those who indulged in its use. Shakespeare,t 
however, does not once allude to its use, and his silence on 
this then curious custom has provoked much conjecture and 
inquiry. Some affirm that he wrote to please royalty, but if 
so why did he not condemn the custom to appease the wrath 
of a sapient king. Others say he kept silence because he 
was the friend of Raleigh, and though he would have gladly 
held up the great smoker and his favorite indulgence, feared 
to add to the popularity of the custom by displeasing his 
royal master. Another class affirm that as the stories of his 
plays are all antecedent to his own time, therefore he never 
mentions either the drinking of tobacco, or the tumultuous 
scenes of the ordinary which belonged to it, and which are 
so constantly met with in his contemporary dramatists. Says 
one: 
“How is it that our great dramatist never once makes 
even the slightest allusion to smoking? Who can suggest a 
reason? Our great poet knew the human heart too well, and 
kept too steadily in view, the universal nature of man to be 
afraid of painting the external trapping and ephemeral 
customs of his own time. Does he not delight to moralize 
on false hair, masks, rapiers, pomandens, perfumes, dice, 
bowls, fardingales, ete? Did he not sketch for us, with 
enjoyment and with satire, too, the fantastic fops, the pomp- 
ous stewards, the mischievous pages, the quarrelsome revellers, 
the testy gaolers, the rhapsodizing lovers, the siy cheats, and 
the ruffling courtiers that filled the streets of Elizabethan 
London, persons who could have been found nowhere else 
* “Never did nature prodnee a Plant that ina short Time became so universally used, for it 
wabibut gc short seb ile Know) in Europe. till it wns taken siniost everywhere, either chewed 
: snuffed. pipe of tobacco is now the general a : o i 
Mug. Bottle, or Puneh-bow wus ‘Short. ioe nd most Irequent Companion Ofe 
t Gifford has also remarked that Shakspeare fs the only one of the dramatic writers of the 
age of Janes who does not condescend to notice tobacco; all the others abound in allusions 
poli Chitzuoin, on the atng and ae the Otdonr ie world of Loudon was tics Wivided 
5 + on the stage. and at the ordinary, The world of London was then divide 
into two classes—the tobaccu-lovers and the tobacco-haters, : i 
