Continued decline in the affairs of John Shakespeare—William Shakespeare’s success in London—Death of Hamnet, William Shakespeare’s only son—Shakespeare buys New Place—He retires to Stratford—Writes his last play,The Tempest—His death.
ThatShakespeare left his wife and family at home at Stratford-on-Avon every one takes for granted. He “deserted his family,” says a rabid Baconian, who elsewhere complains of the lack of evidence to support believers in the dramatist; forgetting that there is no evidence for this “desertion” story; only one of those many blanks in the life of this elusive man, by which it would appear that while he was reaching fame and making money in London as a playwright and an actor, he held no communication with his kith and kin. There remains no local record of William Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon between the year 1587, when he joined with his father in mortgaging the property at Asbies, Wilmcote, which had been his mother’s marriage portion, until 1596, when the register of the death of Hamnet, his only son, occurs at Stratford church, on August 11th. But this is sheer negative evidence of his not having visited his native town for over ten years, and is on a par with the famous Baconian argument thatbecauseno scrap of Shakespeare’s handwriting, except six almost illegible signatures, has survived,thereforehe cannot have written the plays still attributed to him.
Meanwhile, his father’s affairs steadily grew worse,and in 1592 he was returned as a “recusant” by the commissioners who visited the town for the purpose of fining the statutable fine of £20 all those who had not attended church for one month. John Shakespeare’s recusancy has been unwarrantably assumed to be due to Roman Catholic obstinacy; but the fine was remitted because it was shown that he was afraid to go to church “for processe of debt”; which, together with the infirmities of age, or sickness, was a lawful excuse.
Shakespeare’s success in London as an actor, a reviser and editor of old and out-of-date plays, as manager, theatre-proprietor and playwright, is due to that sprack-witted capacity for excelling in almost any chosen field of intellectual activity with which a born genius is gifted. The saying that “genius is a capacity for taking pains” is a dull, plodding man’s definition. Genius will very often fling away the rewards of its powers through just this lack of staying power, and no plodding pains will supply that intuitive knowledge, that instant perception, which is what we call genius.
It was the psychological moment for such an one as Shakespeare to come to London. The drama had future before it: the intellectual receptivity of the Renascence permeated all classes, and the country was prosperous and growing luxurious. Playwrights were numerous, but as yet their productions had not reached a high level, excepting those of Marlowe, to whose inspiration Shakespeare at first owed much. If Shakespeare lived in these times he would be called a shameless plagiarist, for he went to other authors for his plots—as Chaucer had done with hisCanterbury Tales, two hundred years earlier, and as all others had done in between. Not a man of them would escape the charge; but what Shakespeare took ofplot-construction and of dialogue he transmuted from the dull and soulless lines we could not endure to read to-day, into a clear fount of wit, wisdom and literary beauty.
Shakespeare’s career of playwright began as a hack writer and cobbler of existing plays. As an actor his technical knowledge of the requirements of the stage rendered his help invaluable to managers, and the conditions of that time gave no remedy to any author whose plays were thus altered. It may be supposed from lack of evidence to the contrary, that most other dramatic authors submitted to this treatment in silence; perhaps because they had all been employed, at some time or other in the same way. But one man seems to have bitterly resented a mere actor presuming to call himself an author. This was Robert Greene, who died Sept. 3rd, 1592, after a long career of play-writing and pamphleteering. He died a disappointed man, and wrote a farewell tract, published after his death, which includes a warning to his fellow-authors and an undoubted attack upon Shakespeare, under the thin disguise of “Shake-scene.”
It is to be considered that Shakespeare had by this time been five years in London; that he had proved himself singularly adaptable, and had finally, on March 3rd, 1592, attained his first popular success, in the production at the newly-opened “Rose Theatre” on Bankside, Southwark (third London playhouse, opened February 19th, 1592), ofHenry the Sixth. It was a veritable triumph. The author played in his own piece, and the other dramatists looked on in dismay. Jealousy does not seem to have followed Shakespeare’s good fortune, and the numerous references to him as poet and playwright by others are kindly and fully recognise his superiority. Only Greene’s posthumous work exists to show how one resented it. The tracthas the singular title of “A Groats-Worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance.” Incidentally it warns brother-dramatists against “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers that with hisTygers heart wrapt in a players hidesupposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absoluteJohannes factotumis, in his ovine conceite, the only Shake-scene in a countrie.”
The identification of this crow in borrowed plumage, this “Shake-scene,” is completed by the line, “O tiger’s heart, wrapp’d in a woman’s hide,” which is a quotation from the Third Part ofHenry the Sixth, where the Duke of York addresses Queen Margaret; while the term “Johannes factotum,”i.e.“Johnny Do-everything,” is a sneer at Shakespeare’s adaptability and many-sided activities.
The merits of Shakespeare as an actor are uncertain. Greene seems to imply that he was of the ranting, bellowing type who tore a passion to tatters and split the ears of the groundlings. Rowe, who wrote of him in 1709 says: “The top of his performance (as an actor) was the Ghost in his ownHamlet”; not an exacting part; other traditions say Adam inAs You Like It, an even less important character, was his favourite; but the suggestion we love the better to believe is that his best part was the cynical, melancholy, philosophic Jaques. Donnelly, chief of the Bacon heretics, has in hisGreat Cryptogram, a weird story of how Bacon wrote the part of Falstaff for Shakespeare, to fit his great greasy stomach. He knew Shakespeare could not act, and so provided a part in which no acting should be required; turning Shakespeare’s natural disabilities to account, so that, if the audience could not laugh with him in his acting, they should laugh at him and dissolve into merriment at the clumsy antics of so fat a man!
There are actor-managers in our times—no actor-author-managers like Shakespeare—who deserve the cat-calls and the missiles of their audiences. They do not merely “lag superfluous on the stage,” but ought never to be on it; like the celebrated actor-manager whose impersonation of Hamlet was, according to Sir W. S. Gilbert’s caustic remark, “funny without being vulgar.” It is not conceivable that Shakespeare himself, who puts such excellent advice to actors into the mouth of Hamlet, should himself have been incompetent.
With Shakespeare’s leap into fame, in 1592, went a simultaneous “boom,” as it might now be termed, in theatres and the drama. Theatres multiplied in London, theatrical companies grew prosperous, and such men as Shakespeare, Merle and the Burbages amassed wealth.
In 1596 died William Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, whose burial register in the books of Holy Trinity church, Stratford, runs—
“August 11th, Hamnet, filius William Shakespeare.” His father must surely have been present on this occasion. This year is generally said to be that in which the dramatist who in his time had played many parts, returned to his native town, a made man. He came back with his triumphs ringing fresh in his ears, for that season witnessed the great success of the production ofRomeo and Juliet. In July, also, his father had applied to the Heralds’ College for a grant of arms, an application for a patent of gentility which would have come absurdly from a penniless tradesman. The inference therefore, although we have no documentary evidence to that effect, is that William Shakespeare had not only kept in touch with his people, but had helped his father out of his difficulties and was himselfthe instigator of this application for a grant of arms. The application was eventually successful. The arms thus conferred are: “Or, on a bend sable, a tilting spear of the first, point upwards, steeled proper. Crest, a falcon, his wings displayed, argent, standing upon a wreath of his colours and supporting a spear in pale, or.” The motto chosen was “Non sanz droiet.”
“August 11th, Hamnet, filius William Shakespeare.” His father must surely have been present on this occasion. This year is generally said to be that in which the dramatist who in his time had played many parts, returned to his native town, a made man. He came back with his triumphs ringing fresh in his ears, for that season witnessed the great success of the production ofRomeo and Juliet. In July, also, his father had applied to the Heralds’ College for a grant of arms, an application for a patent of gentility which would have come absurdly from a penniless tradesman. The inference therefore, although we have no documentary evidence to that effect, is that William Shakespeare had not only kept in touch with his people, but had helped his father out of his difficulties and was himselfthe instigator of this application for a grant of arms. The application was eventually successful. The arms thus conferred are: “Or, on a bend sable, a tilting spear of the first, point upwards, steeled proper. Crest, a falcon, his wings displayed, argent, standing upon a wreath of his colours and supporting a spear in pale, or.” The motto chosen was “Non sanz droiet.”
What was this right to heraldic honours and the implied gentility they carried, the Shakespeares claimed? It was based upon a quibble that John Shakespeare’s “parent, great-grandfather and late antecessor, for his faithful and approved service to the most prudent prince king H. 7 of famous memorie, was advanced and rewarded with lands and tenements geven to him,” etc. The description of the miserly Henry the Seventh as “prudent” is, like “mobled queen,” distinctly “good”; but we are not greatly concerned with that, only with the fact that the martial and loyal antecessors claimed for John Shakespeare were really those of his wife. He adopted his wife’s family, or rather, her family’s pretensions to call cousins with the more famous Ardens.
William Shakespeare had returned to Stratford a well-to-do man, with an income which has been estimated at about £1300 of our money, but he had not yet completed his work, and his reappearance in his native town was not permanent. You figure him now, the dramatist and manager, with considerable shares in the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres, rather concerned to relinquish the trade—not a profession, really, you know—of actor, but with his company much in request at Court and in the mansions of the great. He was, one thinks, a little sobered by the passage of time; and by the death, this year, of his only son; and quite sensible of the dignity that new patent of arms had conferredupon his father and himself. To mark it, he bought in 1597 a residence, the best residence in the town, although wofully out of repair. It was known, with some awe, to his contemporaries as “the great house.” Sixty pounds sterling was the purchase money: we will say £480 of present value. It was bought so cheaply probably because of its dilapidated condition, for it seems to have been built by Sir Hugh Clopton in 1485, and at this time was “in great ruyne & decay & unrepayred.” Shakespeare thoroughly renovated his newly-acquired property, and styled it “New Place.”
He did not, apparently, at once take up his residence here, for his theatrical company was acting before the Queen at Whitehall in the spring and he would doubtless have been present, and perhaps accompanied them when they were on tour in Kent and Sussex in the summer. But he was at Stratford a part of the next year, which was a year of scarcity. He had accumulated a large stock of corn, over against the shortage, and in a return made of the quantity of grain held in the town he held ten quarters. In the January of this year he contemplated buying some land at Shottery. “Our countriman, Mr. Shaksper,” wrote Abraham Sturley to Richard Quiney on January 24th, “is willinge to disburse some monei upon some od yarde land or other att Shotterei or neare about us.” It would seem that Shakespeare did not, after all, purchase this land. Perhaps he could not get it a bargain, and what we know of his business transactions, small though it may be, all goes to show that he was a keen dealer and not at all likely to spend his money rashly.
This year is remarkable for the writing of a letter to Shakespeare by Richard Quiney, the only letter addressed to him now in existence. It is dated October25th and addressed from Carter Lane, in the City of London. Shakespeare was apparently then at Stratford—
“To my Loveinge good ffrende and contreymann Mr. Wm. shackespere dlr thees:“Loveinge Contreyman, I am bolde of yow, as of a ffrende, craveinge yowr helpe with xxxliuppon Mr. Bushell’s & my securytee, or Mr. Myttons with me. Mr. Rosswell is nott come to London as yeate, & I have especiall cawse yow shall ffrende me muche in helpeinge me out of all the debettes I owe in London, I thancke god, & muche quiet my mynde wch wolde nott be indebeted. I am nowe towardes the Cowrte, in hope of answer for the dispatche of my Buysenes. Yow shall nether loase credytt nor monney by me, the Lorde wyllinge; & nowe butt perswade yowrself soe, as I hope, & yow shall not need to feare butt with all hartie thanckefullenes I wyll holde my tyme & content yowr ffrende, & yf we Bargaine farther, yow shalbe the paiemr. yowrselfe. My tyme biddes me hastene to an ende, & soe I commit thys [to] yowr care, & hope of your helpe. I feare I shall nott be backe thys night ffrom the Cowrte. Haste. The Lorde be with yow and with vs all, amen. ffrom the Bell in Carter Lane, the 25th October, 1598.
“To my Loveinge good ffrende and contreymann Mr. Wm. shackespere dlr thees:
“Loveinge Contreyman, I am bolde of yow, as of a ffrende, craveinge yowr helpe with xxxliuppon Mr. Bushell’s & my securytee, or Mr. Myttons with me. Mr. Rosswell is nott come to London as yeate, & I have especiall cawse yow shall ffrende me muche in helpeinge me out of all the debettes I owe in London, I thancke god, & muche quiet my mynde wch wolde nott be indebeted. I am nowe towardes the Cowrte, in hope of answer for the dispatche of my Buysenes. Yow shall nether loase credytt nor monney by me, the Lorde wyllinge; & nowe butt perswade yowrself soe, as I hope, & yow shall not need to feare butt with all hartie thanckefullenes I wyll holde my tyme & content yowr ffrende, & yf we Bargaine farther, yow shalbe the paiemr. yowrselfe. My tyme biddes me hastene to an ende, & soe I commit thys [to] yowr care, & hope of your helpe. I feare I shall nott be backe thys night ffrom the Cowrte. Haste. The Lorde be with yow and with vs all, amen. ffrom the Bell in Carter Lane, the 25th October, 1598.
“Yowrs in all kyndnes“Rye. Quyney.”
There is nothing to show directly what was Shakespeare’s reply to this request for the loan of so considerable a sum; which, however, was not the personal matter it would seem to be. Quiney was a substantial man, mercer and alderman of Stratford, and was in London, incurring debts in the interests of the town,whose law business he was furthering. He wanted nothing for himself.
It is curious that this letter was discovered among the town’s papers, not among any Shakespeare relics, and it is believed was never actually sent after being written; for another letter is extant, addressed by one of the town council, Abraham Sturley, to Quiney, on November 4th, in which he says: “Ur letter of the 25 October . . . which imported . . . that our countriman Mr. Wm. Shak. would procure us monei. . . .” It would appear, therefore, that on the very day he was writing, Quiney had received assurance from Shakespeare that he would lend.
In 1600 Shakespeare’s company played before the Queen at Whitehall, and on several occasions in 1602: their last performance being at Richmond in Surrey on February 2nd, 1603. The following month the great Queen died. In 1602 Shakespeare had been buying land in the neighbourhood of Snitterfield and Welcombe from the Combes; no less than 107 acres, and in succeeding years he considerably added to it; further, in July 1605, expending £440 in the purchase of tithes. Early in September 1601, his father, John Shakespeare, had died. Seven years later, also in September, died his mother. In 1607, his eldest daughter, Susanna, married Dr. John Hall, and on the last day of the same year his brother Edmund, an actor, was buried in St. Saviour’s, Southwark.
It was in 1609 that Shakespeare retired permanently to Stratford. He and his players had been honoured by the new sovereign from the very beginning of his reign; but Shakespeare now severed his active connection with the stage. In this year his famous Sonnets were published, those sugared verses addressed to his patron, the Earl of Southampton, in which he laments havingmade himself “a motley to the view.” Henceforth he would be a country gentleman and dramatic author, and let who would seek the applause of the crowd. He now wrote theTaming of the Shrew, whose induction is permeated with local allusions; he bought more land in the neighbourhood of Stratford; he kept some degree of state at New Place. In 1611 he sold his shares in the theatres, but in 1612 bought property at Blackfriars. Thus Shakespeare passed his remaining years. As Rowe, his earliest biographer says, they were spent “as all men of good sense will wish theirs to be; in ease, retirement, and the conversation of his friends.”
His last dramatic work,The Tempest, was written in 1611, and bears evidences of being consciously and intentionally his last. It is easily dated, because of the references in it to the “still vex’d Bermoothes,” the Bermuda islands, which were discovered by Admiral Sir George Somers’ expedition in 1609. The “discovery” was made by the Admiral’s ship, theSea Venture, being driven in a storm on the hitherto unknown islands. The disasters, the adventures, and the strange sights and sounds of the isles were described by Sylvester Jourdain, one of the survivors, in an account published October 1610, called “A Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called the Isle of Divels.”
Shakespearean students find a purposeful solemnity in the treatment of the play, and some perceive in the character of the magician, Prospero, a portraiture of himself, his work done, and with a foreboding of his end, oppressed with a sense of the brief span and the futility of life—
“We are such stuffAs dreams are made of, and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep.”
“We are such stuffAs dreams are made of, and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep.”
Thus he brings his labours to an end—
“this rough magicI here abjure; and, when I have requiredSome heavenly music, (which even now I do,). . . I’ll break my staff,Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,And, deeper than did ever plummet sound,I’ll drown my book.”
“this rough magicI here abjure; and, when I have requiredSome heavenly music, (which even now I do,). . . I’ll break my staff,Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,And, deeper than did ever plummet sound,I’ll drown my book.”
The retirement of Shakespeare rather curiously synchronises with the spread of Puritanism, that slowly accumulating yet irresistible force which, before it had expended its vigour and its wrath was destined to abolish for many years the theatre and the actor’s calling, and even to behead a king and work a political revolution. The puritan leaven was working even in Stratford, and in 1602 the town council solemnly decided that stage-plays were no longer to be allowed, and that any one who permitted them in the town should be fined ten shillings. This edict apparently became a dead letter, but in 1612 it was re-enacted and the penalty raised to £10.
We may perhaps here pertinently inquire: Did Shakespeare himself become a Puritan? Probably so moderate and equable a man as he seems to have been belonged to no extreme party; but it is to be noted that Dr. John Hall, husband of his eldest daughter, was a Puritan, and that Susanna herself is described in her epitaph as “wise to salvation,” which means that she also had found the like grace.
In 1614 Shakespeare seems to have entertained a Puritan divine at New Place, according to a somewhat ambiguous account in the Stratford chamberlain’s accounts, in which occurs the odd item: “One quart of sack and one quart of claret wine given to the preacher at New Place.” If we may measure his preaching by his drinking, he must have delivered poisonously longsermons. But the town council were connoisseurs in sermons, just as the council of forty years earlier had been patrons of the drama; and they sought out and welcomed preachers, just as their forbears had done with the actors. Only those divines do not seem to have been paid for their services, except in drink. They were all thirsty men, and the council rewarded their orations with the same measure as given to the preacher at New Place.
In January 1616, William Shakespeare instructed his solicitor to draft his will. No especial reason for this settlement of his worldly affairs appears to be recorded. In February his daughter Judith was married to Thomas Quincy, vintner, son of that Richard who eighteen years earlier had sought to borrow the £30. In March he was taken ill and the draft will was amended without being fair-copied, a sign, it may be argued, of urgency. It bears date March 25th, and has three of the poet’s signatures; one on each sheet. But he lingered on until April 23rd, dying on the anniversary of his birthday.
Stratford-on-Avon—It has its own life, quite apart from Shakespearean associations—Its people and its streets—Shakespeare Memorials.
Stratford-on-Avonwould be an extremely interesting town, both historically and scenically, even without its Shakespearean interest. It does not need association with its greatest son to stand forth easily among other towns of its size and command admiration. It is remarkably unlike the mind’s eye picture formed of it by almost every stranger. You expect to see a town of very narrow streets, rather dull perhaps and with little legitimate trade, apart from the sale of picture-postcards, fancy china, guide-books, miniature reproductions of the inevitable Shakespeare bust, and the hundred-and-one small articles that tourists buy; but Stratford-on-Avon is not in the least like that. It is true that with a singular lack of humour there is a “Shakespeare Garage,” while we all know that Shakespeare never owned a motor-car; that the bust is represented in mosaic over the entrance to the Old Bank, founded in 1810, upon which Shakespeare could never, therefore, have drawn a cheque; and that the Shakespeare Hotel not only bears the honoured name, but also a very large copy of the bust over its porch, and names all its rooms after the plays. Honeymoon couples, I believe, have been given the room calledLove’s Labour’s Lost, andCymbeline,Midsummer Night’s Dreamand many another will astonish the guest at that really very fine and ancient hotel. I forget if there bea bedroom named afterTwo Gentlemen of Verona. If so, it must obviously be one of the double rooms mentioned in the tariff.
They gave meAs you Like It, and it was sufficiently comfortable: I liked it much. On the other hand,Macbethmakes one fearful of insomnia. “Macbeth does murder sleep.” Not poppy nor mandragora—well, let it be.
It is also true that the old market-house, a quaint isolated building of late eighteenth or early nineteenth century standing at the junction of Wood and Henley Streets with Bridge Street, and now a Bank, has for weather-vane the Shakespeare arms and crest of falcon and spear; and it is no less undeniable that the presiding genius of the place has his manifestations in many other directions; but all these things, together with the several antique furniture and curio shops where the unique articles—of which there is but one each in the world—you purchase to-day are infallibly replaced to-morrow, are for the benefit of the visitor, the stranger and pilgrim. “I was a stranger and ye took me in,” I murmured when the absolute replica of the unmatched article I had purchased was unblushingly exposed for sale within a day or two.
The Stratfordian notices none of these things: they are there, but they don’t concern him. You think they do, and that if a suggestion were made that the town should be renamed “Shakespeare-on-Avon” he would adopt it and be grateful; but you would be quite wrong; he would not. If you caught a hundred Stratford people,flagrante delicto, in the pursuit of their daily business and haled them into the Guildhall or other convenient room and set them an examination paper on Shakespeare, no one would pass with honours. Why should any of them? They have grown up with Shakespeare;they accept him as a fact, just as they do the rising and setting of the sun and the waxing and waning of the moon; but they are not interested in him any more than they are in the courses of those luminaries. They talk of anything but Shakespeare, and I have met and spoken with many who have never been inside the Birthplace, or to Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, or in the Harvard House, or indeed to any of the show-places in and about the town. They each save about half a guinea in the aggregate, but they don’t do so either by way of self-denial or economy. They are simply not interested.
Chapel Street, Stratford-on-Avon
Stratford would lose a very great deal if the world in general were to become as indifferent to the Swan of Avon; but it would still be a prosperous market-town, dependent upon the needs of the surrounding agricultural villages. Agriculture has ever been the mainstay of Stratford, and as far as we can see, ever will be. All around in the Avon valley stretch those rich pastures that still “lard the rother’s sides,” and on market days there come crawling into the streets, among the cattle and the sheep, carriers’ carts from many an obscure village, with curious specimens of countryfolk who have not lost the old habit of looking upon Stratford as the centre of the universe. So much the better for Stratford. “’Tain’t much as I waants,” said one to the present writer, “an’ I rackon I can get it at Stratford ‘most as good as anywheer else. Besides, I du like to come to town sometimes, an’ see a bit of life.”
One can, in fact, see a good deal of life in the town, but the liveliest time—quite apart from the Shakespeare Festival, which is exotic and mostly for visitors—is the Mop Fair, much more familiarly known as “Stratford Mop.” This annual event is held somewhat too late for the average visitor’s convenience; on October 12th,when the tourists have mostly gone home. It is the great hiring-fair for farm servants and others: perhaps we had better say, was, for the hiring has almost wholly fallen into disuse, together with the so-called “Runaway Mop,” of a fortnight after, at which the servants already hired and not pleased with their bargain might re-engage.
I think the average visitor might not, after all, be pleased with Stratford Mop, which is in some ways a very barbarous affair; the chief barbarity of course being the roasting of oxen whole in the streets; a loathly spectacle, and not one calculated to increase respect for our ancestors, whose great idea of fit merry-making for very special occasions was this same roasting of cattle whole and making the public conduits run wine. The last sounds better, but from the accounts preserved of the wine dispersed at such times we know that the quantity was meagre and the quality exceedingly poor.
But the vast crowds resorting to Stratford for the Mop see nothing gruesome in the spectacle. Special trains run from numerous places, and all the showmen in the country seem to have hurried up for the event.
The streets of Stratford are broad and pleasant, with a large proportion of ancient houses still left; half-timbered fronts side by side with more or less modern brick and plaster, behind which often lurks a rich old interior, unknown to the casual passer-by. Sometimes a commonplace frontage is removed, revealing unexpected beauty in an enriched half-timber framing which the odd vagaries in taste of bygone generations have caused to be thus hidden. There is in this way a speculative interest always attaching to structural alterations in the town. In this chance fashion the fine timbering of the so-called “Tudor House” was uncovered in 1903, and other instances might be given.Recently, also, Nash’s House has been completely refronted, in fifteenth century style, wholly in oak. In fact, we might almost declare that Stratford is now architecturally, after many years, reverting to the like of the town Shakespeare knew. And if the modernised house-fronts were systematically stripped, among them that occupied by Messrs. W. H. Smith & Son at the corner of High Street and Bridge Street, the house occupied for many years by Judith Shakespeare and her husband, Thomas Quiney, the vintner, Stratford would become greatly transformed.
But the mention of Bridge Street is a reminder that here at any rate a great change has been made. It is the widest of all the streets, and is in fact a very wilderness of width. All the winds that sport about the neighbourhood seem to have their home in Bridge Street. Your hat always blows off when you turn the corner into it, and the dust and homeless straws go wandering up and down its emptiness, seeking rest in the Avon over the Clopton Bridge, but always blown back. Now Bridge Street was not always like this. In Shakespeare’s time, and until 1858, when the last of it was cleared away, a kind of island of old houses occupied part of this roadway. It was called “Middle Row.” Such a collection of houses was the usual feature of old English towns. There was an example in London, in Holborn, with exactly the same name; but it disappeared somewhat earlier than its Stratford namesake. Pictures survive of this Bridge Street landmark. I think a good many Stratford people regret it, but regrets will not bring it back. We think of the irrevocable, and of Herrick’s witch—
“Old Widow Prowse, to do her neighbours evil,Has given, some say, her soul unto ye Devill;But when sh’as killed that horse, cow, pig, or hen,What would she give to get that soul again?”
“Old Widow Prowse, to do her neighbours evil,Has given, some say, her soul unto ye Devill;But when sh’as killed that horse, cow, pig, or hen,What would she give to get that soul again?”
But the Stratford folk, unlike Widow Prowse, did their spiriting with the best intentions. Unfortunately, good intentions notoriously pave the way to hot corners.
It was a very picturesque old row, with the “Swan” inn hanging out its sign; and perhaps, in these times of reconstructions, it may even yet be rebuilt, after the evidences of it that exist.
In Bridge Street is another landmark in the way of literary associations. The “Red Horse” hotel has a large, dull and uninteresting plaster front, but American visitors find the house attractive on account of Washington Irving’s stay there about a hundred years ago, when he was writing of Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s country. The sitting-room he occupied is kept somewhat as a shrine to his memory, and the chair he fancifully called his “throne” is still there, but you may not sit in it. It is kept under lock and key, in a cupboard with glass doors. The poker he likened to his sceptre is kept jealously in the bar. Citizens of the United States ask to see it, and it is reverently produced and unfolded from the many swathings of “Old Glory” in which it is enwrapped: “Old Glory” being, it is necessary to explain to Britishers, the United States flag, the “stars and stripes.” Gazing upon it, they see that it is engraved with a dedicatory inscription by another citizen of the U.S.A.
If you proceed down Bridge Street you come presently to the Clopton Bridge that crosses the Avon, and so out of the town. The bridge is one of the many works of public utility and practical piety executed, instituted, or ordained in his will by Sir Hugh Clopton, the greatest benefactor Stratford has known. A scion of that numerous family, seated at Clopton House a mile out of the town, he went to London and prospered as a mercer, becoming Lord Mayor in 1492. Leland,writing in 1532, quaintly tells of him and his bridge: “Hugh Clopton aforesaid made also the great and sumptuous Bridge upon Avon, at the East ende of the Towne, which hath 14 great Arches of stone and a long Causey made of Stone, lowe walled on each syde, at the West Ende of the Bridge. Afor the tyme of Hugh Clopton there was but a poore Bridge of Tymbre, and no Causey to come to it; whereby many poore Folkes and others refused to come toStratfordwhen Avon was up, or comminge thither, stood in jeopardye of Lyfe. The Bridge ther of late tyme,” he proceeds to say, “was very smalle and ille, and at high Waters very hard to come by. Whereupon, in tyme of mynde, one Clopton a very rich Marchant and Mayr of London, as I remember, borne aboutStrateforde, having neither Wife nor Children, converted a great Peace of his Substance in good workes atStratford, first making a sumptuus new Bridge and large of Stone when in the midle be a VI great Arches for the main Streame of Avon, and at eache Ende certen small Arches to bere the Causey, and so to pass commodiously at such tymes as the Ryver riseth.”
The bridge was widened in 1814. I do not think that great benefactor of Stratford intended that tolls should be charged for passing over his bridge, but in the course of time, such charges were made, and the very large and imposing toll-house that remains shows us that it is not so very long since the bridge has been freed again.
There are many who consider the Harvard House to be the most delightful piece of ancient domestic work in the town, and it is indeed a gem. The history of it is absolutely clear. It was built in 1596 by one Thomas Rogers, alderman. His initials and those of his wife Alice, together with the date are still to be seen, carvedon the woodwork beneath the first-floor window. The carved brackets supporting the first floor represent the Warwick Bear and Ragged Staff and the bull of the Nevilles. The bull is easily recognisable, but the bear is only to be identified after considerable study, and looks a good deal more like a pig. Katharine Rogers, daughter of the builders of this house, married Robert Harvard of Southwark, butcher, in 1605. Almost everything in Stratford pivots upon Shakespeare, or is made to do so, and it is therefore not difficult to imagine Rogers’ beautiful little dwelling being erected here at the very time when Shakespeare was contemplating purchasing New Place, and the dramatist’s interest in it. Rogers, being, like John Shakespeare on the town council, must have been very closely acquainted with the family. The Rev. John Harvard, son of Robert and Katharine, emigrated to the New England States of America in 1637 and died of consumption the following year, at Charleston, leaving one half of his estate, which realised £779 17s.2d., together with his library of over 300 volumes, to a college then in contemplation; the present Harvard University at Cambridge, Massachusetts, described as the oldest and among the richest seats of learning in the United States; although the “learning” displayed there has not yet hatched out any world-shaking genius; genius being, as we who visit Stratford cannot fail to see, a quality quite independent of the academies, and springing, fully-equipped to do battle with the world, in the most unpromising places.
The Harvard House
It is not long since the Harvard House was restored and dedicated to the public, and particularly to the use of Harvard students; in October 1909, to be precise. It had passed through various hands, and finally was offered for sale by auction. The biddings failed toreach the reserve price and the property was withdrawn at £950. Chicago, in the person of a wealthy native of that place, came to the rescue, and it was privately bought for the purpose of converting it into a “house of call,” whatever that may be, for Americans touring this district, and especially, as already noted, for students of Harvard—who obtain admission free. Other persons pay sixpence.
It is a place of very great seclusion, for Harvard students (who mostly study the more lethal forms of football and baseball nowadays) are rare; and I guess if you want to track the Americans in Stratford, you must go to the Shakespeare Hotel, anyway, or to the “Red Horse.” The house was in the occupation of a firm of auctioneers and land agents until the purchase. The “restoration” of the exterior has been very carefully and conservatively done, and the interior discloses some particularly beautiful half-timbered rooms.
From time to time it seems good to amiable and well-meaning persons to set up “Shakespeare memorials” in Stratford, and it is equally amiable in the town to accept them. Thus we see in Rother Street an ornate gothic drinking-fountain and clock-tower, the “American Memorial Fountain,” given in 1887 by that wealthy Shakespearean collector, George W. Childs, proprietor of thePhiladelphia Ledger. It includes also the function of a memorial of the first Victorian Jubilee. Shakespearean quotations adorn it, including the apposite one fromTimon of Athens: “Honest water, which ne’er left man i’ th’ mire.”
But Shakespeare serves the turn of every man, and if you like your beer, you can set against this the equally Shakespearean quotation, “A quart of ale is a dish for a king.”
The Memorial Fountain rather misses being stately,and it would be better if the quarter chimes of its clock did not hurry so over their business, as if they wanted life to go quicker, and time itself to be done with. Amity is the note of Mr. Childs’ fountain, and the “merry songs of peace” are the subject of one of the carved quotations: that is why the British Lion and the American Eagle alternate in effigy at the angles, supporting their respective national shields of arms. The British Lion looks tame and the American Eagle is a weird fowl wearing the chastened “dearly beloved brethren” expression of a preacher at a camp meeting.
The Shakespeare Memorial by the riverside is the partial realisation of a project first considered in 1769, at the jubilee presided over by Garrick, revived in 1821 and again in 1864. This was an idea for a national memorial, to include a school of acting: possibly with Shakespeare’s own very excellent advice to actors, which he placed in the mouth of Hamlet, set up in gilded words of wisdom in its halls. The school for actors has not yet come into being, but at the annual festivals, when Shakespearean companies take the boards in the theatre which forms a prominent part of the Memorial, you may witness quaint new readings of the dramatist’s intentions.
The Harvard House: Panel Room
The great pile of buildings standing by the beautiful Bancroft gardens, in fine grounds of its own beside the river, “comprises,” as auctioneers and house agents might say, the theatre aforesaid, a library, and picture gallery. It was built 1877–79 from funds raised by a Memorial Association founded by Mr. Charles E. Flower of Stratford-on-Avon, and very widely supported. The architect, W. F. Unsworth, whose name does not seem to be very generally known, has produced a very imposing, and on the whole, satisfactory composition, whose shape was largely determined by that of theoriginal Globe Theatre of Shakespeare’s own time in Southwark. It is of red brick and stone, and a distinct ornament to the town and the riverside, although its gothic appears to have here and there a rather Continental flavour. A little more pronounced, it might seem almost Rhenish. But let us be sufficiently thankful the Memorial did not take shape in Garrick’s day, when it would certainly have assumed some terrible neo-classic form. There are some particularly good and charming gargoyles over the entrance, notably that of Puck carrying that ass’s head with which Bottom the Weaver was “translated,” inMidsummer Night’s Dream. A sketch of it appears on the title-page of this book. I do not think a description of the theatre, the library, or the picture gallery would serve the object of these pages, and I do not propose to describe the monument designed, executed and presented by Lord Ronald Gower, because that is done in every guide-book, and because I do not like that extremely amateurish and flagrantly-overpraised work: may the elements speedily obliterate it!
Quick-growing poplars have reached great heights since the buildings were first opened, and the Theatre and Memorial is being rapidly obscured by them. It looks its best from the Clopton Bridge, and combines with Holy Trinity church to render the town, viewed from the other side of the Avon, a place of considerable majesty and romance.
Crossing either that ancient bridge to the “Swan’s Nest” inn which has become subdued to the poetry in the Stratford air and has abandoned its old name, the “Shoulder of Mutton,” we may roam the meadows opposite the town. Or we may equally well cross the river by the long and narrow red brick tramway bridge, built in 1826 for the purposes of theStratford-on-Avon and Shipston-on-Stour Tramway: an ill-fated but heroic project that immediately preceded steam railways. The Great Western Railway appears to have some ownership in the bridge, and by notice threatens awful penalties—something a little less than eternal punishment—to those who look upon—or cycle upon—it.
Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon
Somehow we reach those free and open meadows over against the town where the Avon runs broad and deep down to the mill and the ruined lock, just opposite the church. It is from these meadows that theaccompanying drawing of the church was taken. The breadth of the river between the Clopton Bridge and the church is exceptional, and gives a great nobility to the town. Both above and below these points it becomes much narrower, and the navigation down stream is a thing of the past. The Avon down to Binton and up beyond Charlecote is, in fact, rendered impassable by difficulties created by the Lucy family of Charlecote, and by the Earl of Warwick. Private ownership in navigable or semi-navigable streams is an ancient and complicated affair concerned with rights of fishing, of weirs and mill-leets, and other abstruse and immemorial manorial privileges, and it has furnished the lawyers with many a fat brief. It has cost the Corporation of Stratford-on-Avon £700 in recent years, in a dispute about this ruined lock and the impeded access to the river past the church and the mill, to the other decayed lock at Luddington. The Lucys gained the day, and that is why we cannot go boating down the river from Stratford.
We may cross the stream just below this point, by a footbridge, and come into the town again past the big corn-mill whose ancient ownership caused all this trouble. The present building is only about a century old, but it is the representative of the original mill that stood on this spot over a thousand years ago, and belonged then and long afterwards to the Bishops of Worcester. The exquisite humour of the manorial law ordained not only that the people of Stratford were under obligation to have their corn ground here, but that they were also made to pay for it. And as competitive millers were thus barred, there can be no doubt but that corn-milling was an expensive item. The old churchmen loved eels, useful for Friday’s dish, and the Bishops of Worcester were sometimes accustomed totake consignments of them in place of money payments for use of the mill.
The possibilities of the Avon in the matter of floods are very eloquently set forth on the walls of this mill: the astonishing high-water marks of floods for a century past being marked. Scanning them, it seems strange that mill and church and a good part of the town itself have not been washed away.
Passing through Old Town into Church Street, the fine Elizabethan three-gabled residence seen on the way, on the right hand, is Hall’s Croft, the home of Dr. John Hall, Susanna Shakespeare’s husband, before they removed to New Place following upon Shakespeare’s death. The old mulberry-tree in the beautiful garden at the back of the house is said to have been planted by her.
The Memorial Theatre
Shakespeare’s Birthplace—Restoration, of sorts—The business of the Showman—The Birthplace Museum—The Shakespearean garden.
ToHenley Street most visitors to Stratford-on-Avon first turn their steps; a little disappointed to discover that it is by no means the best street in the town and must have been rather a poor outskirt at the time when John Shakespeare came in from Snitterfield, to set up business in a small way. There is, as the sentimental pilgrim will very soon discover for himself, a plentiful lack of sentiment nowadays in the business of showing Shakespeare’s Birthplace. For it is a business, and conducted as it is on extremely hard-headed lines, yields a considerable profit; a profit disposed of strictly according to the terms on which the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust is defined in its Parliamentary powers. Enough has already been said to show the sensitive soul that his sensibilities are apt to be extremely tried when he comes this way; but then, to be sure, there can be but a small proportion of such among the 40,000 persons who annually pay their sixpences (and another to see the Birthplace Museum next door). Sometimes, when the dog-star rages and tourists most do gad about, a solid phalanx of visitors, each provided with his ticket from the office down the street, will be found lined up, waiting, like the queues outside the London theatres, for earlier arrivals to be quickly disposed of. The bloom of sentiment, as delicate as that upon a plum or peach, is rudely rubbed off by these things, by rules and regulations and the numbered ticket; but the very fame of Shakespeare and the increasing number of visitors who have, or think they have—or at the very least of it think they ought to have—an intelligent interest in a great man’s birthplace brings about this horrid nemesis of the professional showman.
Shakespeare’s Birthplace
If you be a little exacting, and would keep the full freshness, the sweetest savour of hero-worship, be content not to see the Birthplace, and especially not that garden at the back of it. It was not, you know it quite well, in the least like this when John Shakespeare lived here and had his wool-store next door, where the Birthplace Museum is now, and sometimes bought and sold corn or carried on the trade of glover. The place has had so many changes of fortune, the appearance of the exterior itself has been so utterly changed and so conjecturally restored, that the thinking man loses a good deal of confidence. And the interior: the rooms without furniture or sign of habitation are like a body whence the soul has fled.
The building did not, for one thing, stand alone as it does now, the houses on either side having been pulled down after it was purchased in 1848; with the, of course, entirely admirable idea of the better lessening its risk from fire. The effect, and that of the hedges with their hairpin railings, is to give the place the very superior appearance of a private house. If old John Shakespeare could be summoned back and taken for a walk along Henley Street, he would be surprised at many things, but by none more than by the odd disappearance of every man’s midden and the altered appearance of his own house. He would wonder what had become of his shop, and assume no doubt that the occupier had made his fortune and retired into private life. He wouldnot know that it is still a place of business, and among the best-paying ones in Stratford, too.
William Shakespeare succeeded to the property of his father, and in his turn willed this Henley Street dwelling-house to his sister, Joan Hart, for life. She had become a widow a few days only before his death, but herself survived until 1646. The woolshop—now the Museum part—he left to his daughter Susanna, who on the death of her aunt came into possession of all the building. At her decease, being the last descendant of her father, she willed it to Thomas Hart, the grandson of her aunt, Joan Hart. From him it descended to his brother George, who in his own lifetime gave it to his son, Shakespeare Hart, whose widow passed it on to another George Hart, nephew of her late husband. In 1778 George was gathered to his fathers and Thomas, his son, reigned in his stead; in 1793 leaving what had been the woolshop to his son John and the Birthplace to his son Thomas, who three years later made over his share to his brother John. On the death of this person in 1800 the property passed to his wife for the remainder of her life, and then to his three children, as co-partners. Since early in the eighteenth century it had been mortgaged up to the hilt, and the three partners were practically obliged to sell in 1806. Thus the last remote link with Shakespeare’s kin was severed. Thomas Court, the purchaser, died in 1818, and on the death of his wife in 1847 the house was purchased by public subscription, on behalf of the nation. This transaction was completed in the following year, at a cost of £3000, the purchase being in 1866 handed over to the Corporation of Stratford-on-Avon, who held it in trust until the incorporation of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in 1891.
In all this time the structure suffered many changes, the former woolshop being opened as an inn, the“Maidenhead,” even in Shakespeare’s own time, 1603. Later it became the “Swan and Maidenhead,” and had its front new-faced with brick in 1808. Meanwhile, the Birthplace had in 1784 become a butcher’s shop, hanging out the sign board “The immortal Shakespeare was born in this house.” In the course of these changes the dormer windows had disappeared, about 1800, and the whole was in a very dilapidated state. The restoration work of 1857–58, renewing the vanished dormers in the roof, pulling down the brick front and reinstating a timber-framed elevation, and generally placing the building again in a weather-proof condition, cost nearly a further £3000.
Photographs scarcely give a correct impression of the exterior as thus restored. They reproduce the form, but not the true tone and quality of the timber and plaster, and in truth they make the house look better than it is. The quality of the exterior materials is not convincing and makes the house look very unauthentically new. The timbers and the plaster may be even better than they were in John Shakespeare’s time, but we do not wish them to be, and there is a spruceness and a kind of parlourmaidenly neatness about the place which we feel quite sure the man who was fined for having a muck-heap in front of his house, and for not keeping his gutter clean never knew. Painted woodwork, mathematically true, and the kind of plaster facing we see here were unknown in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Roughly split oak formed both interior and exterior framing to John Shakespeare’s house, and the houses of his neighbours, and it was only in Victorian times that the neatness and the soullessness expressed here became the obsession of craftsmen. In short, they do these things much more convincingly to-day at Earl’s Court.
Mr. Andrew Carnegie, who is a very much greaterperson than Columbus and discovered America in the monetary sense, while Columbus only added to his geographical knowledge and not to his wealth, has also discovered Stratford-on-Avon, and has generously given the town a public library and the Trustees of the Birthplace two old cottages, all in Henley Street. At the offices you purchase tickets for the Birthplace and the Birthplace Museum, and may well, before doing so, look into that public library, formed out of one of those ancient timber-framed houses Stratford is fortunate enough to possess in profusion. It is a charmingly remodelled building, very well worth inspection.
The Kitchen, Shakespeare’s Birthplace
But let us to the Birthplace. At the door we are met by a caretaker. If it be late in the day he will be a little, or possibly very, husky. In any case he is hurried. He hastens us into a stone-floored room inwhich a multitude of people are already waiting. They look as if they were attending an inquest, or, at the best of it, a seance, and expected every moment to be called upon to view the body, or to hear knockings or see ghostly shapes. He shuts the door. It is a solemn moment, and in the passing of it we do actually hear knockings, loud and impatient—but they are not spirits from the vasty deep: only other and impatient visitors who have paid their sixpences. But they must wait.
“This is the house where Shakespeare was born. You will be shown presently the actual room where he was born, upstairs.”
“It became a butcher’s shop afterwards, didn’t it?” asks some one. The showman looks grieved: the interruption throws him out of gear, like a bent penny in a slot machine. Besides, it isn’t in the programme. “You must excuse me, sir, and not keep people waiting. This was the living room. The chimney corner remains exactly as it was when Shakespeare was a boy. Have you tickets for the Museum? Those who have will go through that door to the right. This room at the back is the kitchen. If you will ascend the staircase, you will be shown the birth-room. Mind the step.”
A dark steep climb, and a narrow passage leads into the former front bedroom. It is almost entirely bare, only an old chair or two and an old coffer emphasising its nakedness. The rough plaster walls and the ceiling are appallingly dirty; Mrs. Shakespeare would be thoroughly ashamed of it, if she could but revisit her home. A plaster cast of the inevitable Shakespeare bust stands in the room, sometimes on the coffer, and sometimes on a spindly-legged table, and looks with serene amusement upon the proceedings. The old person who used to show the birth-room has apparently been superseded. She used to patronise the bust, and afforded some peoplemuch secret amusement. “Plenty room ’ere for the mighty brain,” she would say, drawing her hand across that broad and lofty brow; “there will never be more than one Shakespeare, sir.”
The Room in which Shakespeare was born
The present attendants have less time for that kind of thing, and hurry on with their mechanical tale. Why don’t the Trustees economise, and get a gramophone? “This is the room where Shakespeare was born. The furniture you see does not belong to his time. Some of the glass in the window is original; you can tell it by the green tint. Them laths, sir, in the ceiling? They’re iron, and put up to preserve the original ceiling. No one is allowed in the room above. The ceiling and the walls, as you will observe, are covered with names. Before visitors’ books were provided, visitors were invited to write their names here. You will see that they have fully availed themselves of the privilege, and those who had diamondrings have scratched theirs on the window-panes. Here you will see the signature of General Tom Thumb, who visited the Birthplace with his wife. His name was Stratton. Its position, not very much higher than the skirting-board, shows his height. Helen Faucit’s name appears on the beam overhead. Sir Walter Scott’s name, and Thomas Carlyle’s will be seen on the window.”
We take these and all other signatures on trust, for they are nearly every one terrible scrawls, and are all so extremely crowded together, and the plaster is so dirty, and the glass so nearly opaque that with this and with that they are hardly ever legible.
In a back room hangs an oil portrait of Shakespeare: the so-called “Stratford” portrait, bought in 1860 by William Hunt, the town clerk, together with the old house in which it then hung. It has been cleaned and restored and elaborately framed, and it will be observed that it is further guarded by being enclosed in a steel safe: extraordinary precautions in behalf of a work which is almost certainly spurious.
And so we descend and sign the visitors’ book. A very bulky volume is filled in less than a year, and still the number grows. There were 27,038 visitors in 1896, and 49,117 in 1910. The extremely fine and lengthy summer of 1911 did not, as might have been supposed, bring a record return. On the contrary, the numbers fell in that year to 40,300.
Returning to the kitchen, where in the yawning chimney-place a bacon cupboard will be noticed, we leave by the garden at the back. But meanwhile the Birthplace Museum has been left undescribed. Visitors who have sprung a sixpence for that are taken through from the front room, the living-room. Here are kept many and various articles more or less associated with Shakespeare, and some that have no connection withhim at all. The most interesting are the documents relating to this house; the original letter written by Richard Quincy to Shakespeare in 1598; and a deed with the signature of Shakespeare’s brother Gilbert, who was a draper or haberdasher in London, dated 1609. A desk from the Grammar School, the chair from the “Falcon” at Bidford, in which Shakespeare is supposed to have sat, portraits, prints; a perfect copy of the 1623 First Folio edition of the plays, purchased at the Ashburnham Sale in 1898, and other rare editions, make up the collection, together with a sword said to have been Shakespeare’s, and an interesting gold signet-ring, with the initials “W. S.” entwined with a true-lover’s knot, found in a field outside the town, near the church, early in the nineteenth century. It is said to have been Shakespeare’s ring, but scarcely sufficient stress seems to be laid upon the undoubted authenticity of it. Shakespeare’s will, drafted in January 1616, originally bore the concluding words: “In witness whereof I have hereunto put my seale,” but this was afterwards altered to “hand,” the assumption being that it was the loss of this signet ring which necessitated the alteration.
Shakespeare’s Signet-Ring
Haydon, the painter, wrote to Keats in 1818, about the discovery, “My dear Keats, I shall go mad! In a field at Stratford-on-Avon, that belonged to Shakespeare, they have found a gold ring and seal with the initials ‘W.S.,’ and a true-lover’s knot between. If this is not Shakespeare’s whose is it? I saw an impression to-day, and am to have one as soon as possible: as sure as you live and breathe, and that he was the first of beings, the seal belonged to him, O, Lord!”
Among the exhibits in the Museum are the town weights and measures, the sword of state, and altogether some fine miscellaneous feeding for the curio-fancier.
The cellars under the building are not shown, nor is the western part of it, where the town archives are stored.
The garden at the back is laid out in beds planted with the flowers mentioned by Shakespeare in his works, and in the middle of the well-kept gravelled path is the base of the ancient town cross which formerly stood at the intersection of Bridge Street and High Street. It is a pleasant place, and its present condition is the result of care, the outcome of much pious thought. But we may declare with all the emphatic language at our command, that when William Shakespeare and his brothers Gilbert, Richard and Edmund, and his sister Joan played out here in the back yard, it was very little of a garden, and not at all tidy unless they were angel-children, which we have no occasion to suppose. It seems to have been originally an orchard, but no doubt Mr. John Shakespeare put it to some use in connection with the several trades he followed.
The piety is undoubted, but it is a little overdone, and everything is in sample. They are not very good specimens of marigolds we see here, but still they are obviously marigolds, and we do not—no really we don’t—need the label that identifies them and the other flowers. We can quite easily recognise the winking Mary-bud, that beautiful flower whose golden eyes are among the loveliest blossoms in an old-fashioned garden; we know the rose, the jasmine, the gillyflower, the sunflower, the stock, the ladysmock, and the whole delightful posy, and wonder who and what those folk may be who cannot recognise them, and require these cast-iron labels for their information.
Church Street—The “Castle” inn—The Guild Chapel, Guild Hall, and Grammar School—New Place.
Church Streetis the most likeable of all the streets of Stratford. There you do not, in point of fact, actually see the church, which is out away beyond the end of it. The features of this quiet and yet not dull thoroughfare are the few and scattered shops in among private houses, and a quaint old inn of unusual design, the “Windmill.” It is illustrated here, and so the effective frontage, with its row of singularly bold dormer windows need not be more particularly described. The interior is almost equally interesting, and has a deep ingle-nook with one of those bacon-cupboards that are so numerously found in the town and district. It is a house that attracts and holds the observant man’s attention, and it has been so greatly admired by an American visitor that a complete set of architectural drawings was made for him and an exact replica built in Chicago a few years ago.
Opposite the “Windmill” inn is a fine Georgian mansion called “Mason Croft,” obviously once occupied by a person of importance, many years since. But the chief feature of Church Street is the long range of half-timbered buildings with its striking row of massive chimney-stacks, ending with the imposing stone tower of the Guild Chapel. It is entirely right that these buildings should bulk so largely to the eye, for in them is centred the greater part of Stratford’s history. They are the timeworn and venerable buildings of that ancient Guild ofHoly Cross whose beginnings are in the dim past and have never been definitely fixed. The earliest facts relating to the Guild take the story of it back to 1269, when its first Chapel was begun, and when the semi-religious character of the fraternity was its more important half.
The “Windmill” Inn
The Guild may be likened to a mutual benefit society of modern times, with the addition of the religious element. It was founded in superstition, but lived that down and became not only an institution of the greatest service, but also the originator of the Grammar School, and an informal town council and local authority, which, strangely enough, in its later and almost wholly secularised character, withstood the exactions of the Bishops of Worcester, the old-time lords of the manor and their stewards, and finally, after being dissolved in1547, was re-constituted as the town council of the newly incorporated borough in 1553.
The original form of the Guild was that of a subscription society for men and women. Its benefits, unlike those of the Foresters and the Oddfellows of to-day, were chiefly spiritual. It employed priests to look after the religious needs of its members during life and to pray for the health of their souls after death. It secured these then greatly desired benefits at a reduced rate, just as the modern benefit society employs the club doctor. It also in many ways promoted kindliness and good-fellowship, helped the poor, and often found husbands for unappropriated spinsters by the simple process of endowing them. This was all to the good. Somewhat later the Guild espoused the cause of education, and certainly had a grammar school at the close of the fourteenth century, payments to the schoolmaster being the subject of allusion in the Guild’s archives in 1402. Once a year the entire membership went in stately procession to church, and returning to the Guild Hall indulged in one of those gargantuan feasts whose records are the amazement of modern readers. Of the 103 pullets, and of the geese and the beef recorded to have been consumed at one of these feasts in the beginning of the fifteenth century we say nothing, but on the same occasion they drank “34 gallons of good beer,” and “39 gallons of small ale,” perhaps on the well-known old principle that “good eating deserveth good drinking.” The 73 gallons of ale not being enough they sent out and had some more in by the cistern, a method which seems determined and heroic. The account thus includes “1 cestern of penyale,” for which they paid the equivalent of eight shillings, and “2 cesterns of good beer bought from Agnes Iremonger for 3s.”; that is to say, about twenty-four shillings’ worth. They seemto have had enough, “’Tis merry in hall when beards wag all,” and there can be no doubt that the company who on this occasion drank pottle-deep were merry enough.
The Guild also added morality plays to its entertainments; but all these lively proceedings formed but one side to its activities. It fulfilled many of the functions of local government, and strictly too, and its aldermen and proctors were officials not likely to be disregarded. The authority of the Guild was supported by its wealth, contributed by the benefactions of the members, which rendered it in course of time, after the lord of the manor, the largest landowner in and about the town.
It was not so great a change when the old Guild was reconstructed and became the town council. By that time it had ceased its early care for the future of its members’ souls, and had become in some of its developments much more like a Chamber of Commerce. But it had not forgotten to make merry and its love-feasts continued, and its morality plays with them, although they had become a little more after the secular model.
These traditions were continued into the town council, as they could scarcely fail to be, for the members of that body had been also officials of the Guild. John Shakespeare, high Bailiff in 1569, was responsible for inviting a company of actors to perform in the Guild Hall, and others did the like.
The Guild Chapel, founded in 1296 and largely rebuilt by the generosity of Sir Hugh Clopton in the fifteenth century, is the chief of the Guild’s old buildings. It is not now of much practical use, but of venerable aspect and considerable beauty. The tower, porch and nave are Clopton’s work, the beautiful porch still displaying his shield of arms and that of the City of London, althoughgreatly weathered and defaced. He did not touch the chancel, which had already been restored; and the exterior still shows by force of contrast the greatness of Clopton’s gift; his nave entirely overshadowing in its comparative bulk the humble proportions of the chancel. Frankness is at least as desirable a quality in a book as in the affairs of life, and so it may at once be admitted that the interior of the Guild Chapel is extremely disappointing. It is coldly whitewashed, and the ancient frescoes discovered a hundred years ago have faded away. They included a fine, if alarming to some minds, representation of the doom, a fifteenth-century notion of the Judgment Day. Alarming to some minds because of the very high percentage of the damned disclosed at this awful balancing of accounts. Illustrations of this, among the other frescoes, survive, and have a fearful interest. It is pleasing to see the towering mansions of the Blest on the left hand, with St. Peter waiting at the open door welcoming that, ah! so small band; but on the right, where green, pink and blue pig-faced devils with asses’ ears are tormenting their prey, whanging them with bludgeons and raking them in with three-pronged prokers, casting them into Hell’s Mouth, and finally roasting them in a furnace, the prospect is vile. Shakespeare must have been perfectly familiar with these horrific things, and Falstaff’s likening of a flea on Bardolph’s fiery nose to a “black soul burning in hell fire,” looks very like a vivid recollection of them. Some day, perhaps, when the Shakespearean cult at Stratford is more advanced (it is only in its youth yet) these frescoes will be renewed, from the careful records of them that have been kept.
Guild Chapel, Guild Hall, Grammar School and Almshouses
The lengthy line of the Guild Hall and the almshouses of the Guild is one of the most effective things in the town. It dates from 1417. For many years, until 1894, the stout timbering was hidden away beneath plaster, and few suspected the simple beauty of the honest old oak framing hidden beneath. The plaster was spread over itto preserve the oak from the weather. Let us italicise that choice specimen of stupidity, not because it is unique or even rare, for it is found all over the country, and elsewhere in this very town of Stratford, and here and everywhere else it is at last being found out; but because the italics are needed somewhere, to drive home the peculiar dunderheadedness of it. I think perhaps, after all, plaster was coated over old timbering, not so much for the preservation of it as because generations had been born who could not endure the uneven lines of the old work. The woodwork of those later heirs of time was true to a hair’s breadth and planed down to an orderly smoothness: not riven anyhow from the logs. A conflict of ideals had arisen, and the new era was ashamed of the handiwork of the old.
There have been times when architects were also ashamed of their chimneys, and disguised them and hid them away, as though a chimney were an unnatural thing for a house and to be abated and apologised for. The only time to apologise for a chimney is when it smokes inside the house instead of out; and it is pleasant to see that whoever designed and built the long and lofty range of chimneys that rises, almost like a series of towers, from this roof ridge, had not the least idea of excusing them.
The hall of the Guild occupies almost half the length of the lower floor. The remainder forms the almshouses formerly occupied by the poorer brethren of the Guild and still housing the pensioners enjoying their share of the Clopton benefactions. They wear on the right arm a silver badge displaying the Clopton cross,a cross heraldically described as a “cross pattée fitchée at foot.”
The interior of the Guild Hall displays firstly that long ground-floor hall in which the Guild members met and feasted or transacted business, and where their morality plays and the entertainments given by their successors, the earlier town councils, were acted. Here such travelling companies as those who called themselves “the Earl of Leicester’s servants,” and other troupes of actors, occasionally performed. Shakespeare as a boy must have seen them, and thus probably had his attention first directed to the stage as a career.