MS Historical Society of Pennsylvania: Gratz Collection: Case 11, Box 10:British Literary Misc
My dear Mrs Latimer
Thank you very much for your pleasant Shakespeare book.
I have read the first three divisions of it and enjoyed it once [?]. You should suggest to your audience the series of Shakespeare Tableaux, which I once saw. They were got up by Lady Laura Ridding wife to the bishop of Southwell, who was then headmaster of Winchester college.3 She assigned one play to each of a set of different families and each group was exhibited three times with a little advance in the action. The best of all was the unveiling of Hermione, whose drapery was wonderfully made of a linen sheet most statue like and with an exceedingly finely face Paulina to unveil her. Then Juliet on her tomb was very good.
Yours sincerely
C M Yonge
By the by (in a second edition) it could not have been Drayton’s Polyolbion that coincided with Shakespeare as to fairies for that is about the Rivers of England, but you must mean his Nymphidia, a very funny fairy poem where Oberon, whose queen is Mab, and not Titania, is jealous of her flirtation with Pigwiggin a fairy knight. When they are going to fight, Pigwiggin
puts him on a coat of mail
Which was of a fish’s scale
That when his foe should him assail
No point should be prevailing
His rapier was a hornet’s sting
It was a very dangerous thing
For if it chanced to hurt the king
It would be long in healing.
Drayton was not born till 1563, and I am much inclined to think that unless both went to folk lore, he was the borrower. They were exact contemporaries a year between them