This book shows how a scholar finds his fun

This book shows how a scholar finds his fun—and then puts it to use. Mr. Harrison is an authority on Shakespeare and the late Elizabethan-early Jacobean period, and like all others who are curious about the great figures of that past, he has wished he might know what the generality of men thought and talked about then—what would be in their newspapers if only there had been any. An Elizabethan Journal supplies that lack by reconstructing what a newspaper in London might have printed during the years 1591-1594.

It would seem to us a very yellow newspaper, certainly, though some of the sensationalism would be justified even by modern practice. Imagine today's headlines about Sir Richard Grenville's famous fight in the Revenge against the overwhelming Spanish fleet. Or the pages that would be given to the trial of Anne Brewen and John Parker for the murder of her husband, a crime of the old but always startling pattern.

Yet the reader of An Elizabethan Journal will find there a sensationalism contemporary newspapers don't approach. The barbarity of the executions is described and even illustrated. There is much about witches, sometimes puzzling, sometimes horrible, sometimes amusing, especially when witches begin working against each other. There are the bits of gossip like the story of John Harington's translation of Ariosto. He was the Queen's godson, and he first translated the 28th book, about Jocondo and Eiametta, and circulated it among the ladies-in-waiting. It was said that when the Queen heard of it she forbade her godson the court for writing down so bawdy a tale, until he should have translated all the other books too.

And there is the story of the carter, who three times came to Windsor to carry the Queen's goods back to London, and was three times sent away empty, since the Queen had changed her mind. "Clapping his thigh he cried out, 'Now I see that the Queen is a woman as well as my wife,' which, being overheard by her Majesty who then stood at a window, she said, 'What a villain is this!' and sent him three gold pieces to stop his mouth."

It is fitting indeed that so pleasant a volume should show for frontispiece Queen Elizabeth's clever, sensitive, shrewd face. She and the England she ruled are equally fascinating.