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SUMMER DAYS IN
SHAKESPEARE LAND

SOME DELIGHTS OF THE ANCIENT TOWN OF
STRATFORD-UPON-AVON AND THE COUNTRY ROUND
ABOUT; TOGETHER WITH A SKETCH OF THE LIFE
OF MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

IN WHICH MANY THINGS BOTH NEW AND ENTER-
TAINING ARE TO BE FOUND, PRETTILY SET FORTH
FOR THE PLEASURE OF THE GENTLE READER; AND
WHEREIN CERTAIN FANATICS ARE HANDSOMELY
CONFUTED.

WRITTEN BY CHARLES G. HARPER, AND
FOR THE MOST PART ALSO ILLUSTRATED BY HIM
WITH A PEN
OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS ARE FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

New York
JAMES POTT & COMPANY
London: CHAPMAN & HALL, Ltd.

1913

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E.,
AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

PREFACE

By “Shakespeare Land,” as used in these pages, Stratford-on-Avon and the country within a radius of from twelve to twenty miles are meant; comprising parts of Warwickshire and Gloucestershire, and some portions of Worcestershire which are mentioned by Shakespeare, or must have been familiar to him. So many thousands annually visit Stratford-on-Avon that the town, and in some lesser degree the surrounding country, are thought to be hackneyed and spoilt for the more intellectual and leisured visitor; but that is very far from being the case. Apart from such acknowledged centres of Shakespearean interest as the Birthplace at Stratford-on-Avon, the parish church, and Anne Hathaway’s Cottage at Shottery; and excepting such great show-places as Kenilworth and Warwick castles, Shakespeare Land is by no means overrun, and is in every way charming and satisfying. Stratford town itself, the very centre of interest, is unspoiled; and the enterprise of the majority of Shakespearean pilgrims is of such a poor quality, and their intellectual requirements as a rule so soon satisfied, that the real beauties of the Warwickshire villages and the towns and villages of the Cotswolds are to them a sealed hook. Except these byways be explored, such an essential side of Shakespeare as that I have touched upon in the chapter “Shakespeare the Countryman” will be little understood.

It is thus entirely a mistaken idea to think the Shakespeare Country overdone. On the contrary, it is much less known than it ought to be, and would be, were it in any other land than our own. And Stratford itself has not done so much as might have been expected in exploiting possible Shakespearean interest. Ancient house-fronts that the poet must have known still await the removal of the plaster which for two centuries or more has covered them; and the Corporation archives have not yet been thoroughly explored.

Incidentally these pages may serve to expose some of the Baconian heresies. If there be many whose judgment is overborne by the tub-thumping of the Baconians, let them turn to some of the extravagances of Donnelly and others mentioned here, and then note the many local allusions which Shakespeare and none other could have written.

The Bacon controversy, which since 1857 has offered considerable employment for speculative minds, and is still in progress, is now responsible for some six hundred books and pamphlets, monuments of perverted ingenuity and industrious research misapplied; of evidence misunderstood, and of judgment biased by a clearly proclaimed intention to place Bacon where Shakespeare stands. These exceedingly well-read gentlemen, profited in strange concealments, have produced a deal of skimble-skamble stuff that galls our good humours. The veriest antics, they at first amuse us, but in a longer acquaintance they are, as Hotspur says of Glendower, “as tedious as a tired horse, a railing wife; Worse than a smoky house.”

This is no place to fully enter the discussion, but we may here note the opinion of Harvey, the great contemporary man of science, on Bacon, the amateur of science. “My Lord Chancellor,” he said, “writes about Science like a Lord Chancellor.” Any one who reads Bacon’s poetry will notice that the poets might have applied the same taunt to his lines.

Yet they tell us now, these strange folk, eager for a little cheap notoriety, not only that “Bacon wrote the Greene, Marlowe, and Shakespeare plays,” but that his is the pen that gives the Authorised Version of the Bible its literary grace. Well, well. They say the owl was a baker’s daughter; a document in madness.

Charles G. Harper.

Ealing, August 24, 1912.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I

The Beginnings of Stratford-on-Avon.

Ninety-five miles from the City of London, in the southern part of Warwickshire, and on the left, or northern bank of the Avon, stands a famous town. Not a town famed in ancient history, nor remarkable in warlike story, nor great in affairs of commerce. It was never a strong place, with menacing castle or defensive town walls with gates closed at night. It stood upon a branch road, in a thinly-peopled forest-district, and in every age the wars and tumults and great social and political movements which constitute what is called “history” have passed it by.

Such is, and has been from the beginning, the town of Stratford-on-Avon, whose very name, although now charged with a special significance as the birthplace of Shakespeare, takes little hold upon the imagination when we omit the distinguishing “on Avon.” For there are other Stratfords to be found upon the map of England, as necessarily there must be when we consider the origin of the name, which means merely the ford where the “street”—generally a paved Roman road—crossed a river. And as fords of this kind must have been very numerous along the ancient roads of this country before bridges were built, we can only be astonished that there are not more Stratfords than the five or six that are found in the gazetteers.

The Roman road that came this way was a vicinal route from the Watling Street where Birmingham now stands, through Henley-in-Arden and Alcester, the Roman station of Alauna. Passing over the ford of the Avon, it went to London by way of Ettington, Sunrising Hill, and Banbury. Other Roman roads, the Fosse Way and Ryknield Street, remodelled on the lines of ancient British track-ways, passed east and west of Stratford at an equal distance of six miles.

All the surrounding district north of the Avon was woodland, the great Forest of Arden; and to the south of the river stretched a more low-lying country as far as the foot of the Cotswold Hills, much less thickly wooded. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when the Forest of Arden was greatly diminished, these districts owned two distinctive names: the forest being called “the Wooland,” and the southward pasture-lands “the Feldon.”

The travellers who came this way in early Saxon times, and perhaps even later, came to close grips with the true inwardness of things. They looked death often in the face as they went the lonely road. The wild things in the forest menaced them, floods obscured the fords, lawless men no less fierce than the animals which roamed the tangled brakes lurked and slew. “Now am I in Arden,” the wayfarer might have said, anticipating Touchstone, “the more fool I; when I was at home I was in a better place; but travellers must be content.”

No town or village then existed upon the banks of Avon, and the first mention of Stratford occurs in A.D. 691, when a monastery situated here is named. It was an obscure house, but with extensive and valuable lands which Bishops of Worcester hungered for and finally obtained. The site of this monastery was scarcely that of the existing town of Stratford, but was where the present parish church stands, in what is known as “Old Stratford,” which is on the extreme southerly limit of the town. It was thus situated at some little distance from the ford, which was of course exactly where the Clopton Bridge now crosses the river. At that ford there would probably even then have been a hermit, as there was later, charged with the due guidance of travellers, and in receipt of offerings, but of him we know nothing, and next to nothing of the monastery.

The Bishops of Worcester, having thus early obtained a grant of the monastery and its lands, became lords of the manor and so remained for centuries, wielding in their spiritual and manorial functions a very complete authority over the town which gradually arose here. To resist in any way the Church’s anointed in matters spiritual or temporal would have been to kick most foolishly against the pricks, for in his one autocratic capacity he could blast your worldly prospects, and in the other he could (or it was confidently believed he could) damn you to all eternity. Thus it may well be supposed that those Right Reverend were more feared than loved.

It was an agricultural and cattle-raising community that first arose here. “Rother Street” still by its name alludes to the olden passage of the cattle, for “rother” is the good Anglo-Saxon word “hroether,” for cattle. The word was known to Shakespeare, who wrote, “The pasture lards the rother’s sides.”

In 1216 the then Bishop of Worcester obtained a charter for a fair, the first of four obtained between that date and 1271. The fairs attracted business, and about 1290 the first market was founded. The town had begun to grow, slowly, it is true, but substantially. At this period also that Guild arose which was originally a religious and charitable fraternity, but eventually developed into surprising issues, founding a grammar-school and becoming a tradesmen’s society, whence the incorporation of the town in 1553, and the establishment of a town council derived. Camden, writing about this time, was able to describe it as “proper little mercat towne.”

In that era which witnessed the incorporation of the town of Stratford-on-Avon and the birth of Shakespeare the population was some 2000. It is now about 8300; a very moderate increase in three hundred and fifty years, and much below the average rate for towns, by which Stratford might now have had a population of about 16,000.

The incorporation of this little town in the reign of Edward the Sixth was a great event locally. It included the restitution to the people of the place of the buildings and the property of the Guild of Holy Cross which had been confiscated in 1547, when also the inhabitants had been relieved from the yoke of the Bishops of Worcester, whose manor had been taken away from them. It is true that the manorial rights had not been abolished and that the property and its various ancient privileges had only been transferred to other owners, but it was something to the good that the Church no longer possessed these things. These were not arbitrary changes, the whim of this monarch or that, Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth did only what others in their place would and must have done. They were certainly sovereigns with convictions of their own, but their attitude of mind was but the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, and they did not so much originate it as be swayed by it. Those statesmen who have been held meanly subservient to them were, after all, men of like convictions. They saw the old order to be outworn and existing institutions ripe for change. It was the age of the Renascence. Everywhere was the new spirit, which was remodelling thought as well as material things. It was the age, above all things, of the new learning. These feelings led the advisers of the young king, Edward the Sixth, to counsel the restitution to the town of the property of the Guild dissolved only six years earlier, with the important provision that the grammar-school was to be re-established and maintained out of its revenues. To this provision we distinctly owe the dramatist, William Shakespeare, who was born at the very time when the educational advantages thus secured to the children of the townsfolk had settled down into smoothly working order. Education cannot produce a Shakespeare, it cannot create genius, but it can give genius that chance in early elementary training without which even the most adaptive minds lose their direction.

The ancient buildings of the Guild, which after its long career as a kind of lay brotherhood for what modern people would style “social service,” had attained an unlooked-for development as the town authority, thus provided Stratford with its Grammar School and its first town-hall. In those timbered rooms the scholars received their education, and for eighty years, until 1633, when the first hall built especially for the corporation was opened, the aldermen and councillors met there. Among them was John Shakespeare.

CHAPTER II

The Shakespeares—John Shakespeare, Glover, Wool-merchant—Birth of William Shakespeare—Rise and Decline of John Shakespeare—Early Marriage of William.

A MODERN man who now chanced to own the name of “Shakespeare” would feel proud, even of that fortuitous and remote association with the greatest figure in English literature. He might even try to live up to it, although the probabilities are that he would quite early forgo the attempt and become a backslider to commonplace. But available records tell us no good of the earliest bearers of the name. The first Shakespeare of whom we have any notice was a John of that name. He was hanged in 1248, for robbery. It is a very long time ago since this malefactor suffered, and perhaps he was one of those very many unfortunate persons who have been in all ages wrongfully convicted. But the name was not in olden times a respectable one. It signified originally one who wielded a spear; not a chivalric and romantic knight warring with the infidel in Palestine, or jousting to uphold the claims to beauty of his chosen lady, but a common soldier, a rough man-at-arms; one who was in great request in his country’s wars, but was accounted an undesirable when the piping times of peace were come again and every man desired nothing better than to sit beneath his own vine and fig-tree. We have record of a certain Shakespeare who grew so weary of the name that he changed it for “Saunders.” But Time was presently to bring revenge, when William Shakespeare, afterwards to become a poet and dramatist of unapproachable excellence, was born, to make the choice of that recreant bearer of the name look ridiculous.

One Shakespeare before the dramatist’s time had reached not only respectability but some kind of local eminence. This was Isabel Shakespeare, who became Prioress of the Priory of Baddesley Clinton, near Knowle. Baddesley Clinton is in the ancient and far-spreading Forest of Arden, and near it is the village of Rowington, where there still remains the very picturesque fifteenth-century mansion called Shakespeare Hall, which is said to have been in the dramatist’s time the residence of a Thomas Shakespeare, an uncle. But William Shakespeare’s genealogy has not been convincingly taken back beyond his grandfather Richard (whose very Christian name is only traditional), who is stated to have been a farmer at Snitterfield, three miles from Stratford-on-Avon.

Warwickshire was, in fact, extremely rich in Shakespeares, many of them no relatives of the dramatist’s family. They grew in every hedgerow, and very many of them owned the Christian name of William, but they spelled their patronymic in an amazing number of ways. It is said to be capable of four thousand variations. We will forbear the most of these. “Shaxpeare” is the commonest form. The marriage-bond for William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway spells his name “Shagspere,” and the dramatist himself spells it in two different ways in the three signatures on his will, which forms to the Baconians conclusive proof of the two following contradictory propositions (1) that he did not know how to spell his own name, and (2) that, the spelling being different, the so-called signatures were written by a law-clerk! As a matter of fact, the spelling of one’s name was in those times a matter of taste and fancy, which constantly varied. Sir Walter Raleigh, contemporary with Shakespeare, was a scholar whom no one will declare an illiterate, yet he wrote his own name, with a fine disregard of consistency and of what future generations might say, “Rawley,” “Ralegh,” “Rawleighe” and “Rauleygh.”

In any case, the “law-clerk” theory will hardly do. A law-clerk who wrote such a shocking bad hand as the six signatures of Shakespeare display could not have earned his living with lawyers and conveyancers. They are signatures, nearly all of them, which might confidently be taken to a chemist, to be “made up,” but exactly how he would read the “prescription” must be left to the imagination.

Sure and certain foothold upon genealogical fact is only reached with William Shakespeare’s father, who established himself at Stratford-on-Avon about 1551, when he seems to have been twenty-one years of age. He was described at various times as a fell-monger and glover, a woolstapler, a butcher and a dealer in hay and corn. Probably, as a son of the farmer at Snitterfield, he was interested in most of these trades. His home and place of business in the town was in Henley Street, then, as now, one of the meaner streets of the place. Its name derives from this forming the way out of Stratford to the town of Henley-in-Arden.

The very first thing we have recorded of John Shakespeare at Stratford is his being fined twelve pence for having a muck-heap in front of his door. Twelve pence in that day was equal to about eight shillings and sixpence of our own times; and thus, when we consider the then notoriously dirty and insanitary condition of Stratford, endured with fortitude, if not with cheerfulness by the burgesses, we are forced to the conclusion that Mr. John Shakespeare’s muck-heap must have been a super muck-heap, an extremely large and offensive specimen, that made the gorge of even the least squeamish of his fellow-townsmen rise. Two other tradesmen were fined at the same time, and in 1558 he was, in company with four others (among whom was the chief alderman, Francis Burbage) fined in the smaller sum of fourpence for not keeping his gutter clean.

By 1556, however, he would seem to have been prospering, for in that year he purchased two copyhold tenements, one in Henley Street, next the house and shop now known as “the birthplace” which he was already occupying; the other in Greenhill Street. Next year he married Mary Arden, of Wilmcote, three miles from Stratford, daughter of Robert Arden, yeoman farmer of that place, said on insufficient evidence to have been kin to the ancient knightly family of Arden. She had become, on her father’s death in December 1556, owner of landed property called Asbies, at Wilmcote, and some like interests at Snitterfield, in common with her brothers and sisters. She was thus, in a small way, an heiress. Wilmcote being then merely a hamlet in the parish of Aston Cantlow, they were married at the church of that place.

John Shakespeare was now a rising tradesman, and in this same auspicious year became a member of the town council, a body then newly established, upon the granting of a charter of incorporation in 1553.

On September 15th, 1558 his daughter Joan was baptized. She died an infant. In 1565, after serving various municipal offices, he became an alderman. Meanwhile, at the close of November 1562, a daughter, Margaret, was born, who died the next year; and in 1564, on April 26th, his son William was baptized. The date of the poet’s birth is traditionally St. George’s Day, April 23rd; now, with the alteration in the calendar, identical with May 5th.

In that year the town was scourged by a terrible visitation of the plague, and John Shakespeare is recorded, among others, as a contributor to funds for the poor who suffered by it. On August 30th he paid twelve pence; on September 6th, sixpence; on the 27th of the same month another sixpence; and on October 20th eightpence; about twenty-two shillings of our money. It is only by tradition—but that a very old one—that William Shakespeare was born at “the birthplace” in Henley Street; but there is no reasonable excuse for doubting it, unless we like to think that he was born at the picturesque old house in the village of Clifford Chambers, which afterwards became the vicarage and is now a farmhouse. A John Shakespeare was at that time living there, two miles only from Stratford, and it has been suggested that he is identical with the father of William, and that in this plague year he took the precaution of removing his wife out of danger.

In 1566 we find a link between the Shakespeares and the Hathaways in John. Shakespeare standing surety for Richard Hathaway; and in the same year his son Gilbert was born; another Joan being born in 1569. In 1568 and 1571 he attained the highest municipal offices, being elected high-bailiff and senior alderman, and thus, as chief magistrate, is found described in local documents as “Mr.” Shakespeare. In 1571 also his daughter Anne, who died in 1579, was born; and in 1573 a son, Richard. In 1575 he purchased the freehold of “the birthplace” from one Edmund Hall, for £40.

Early in 1578 the first note of ill-fortune is sounded in the career of John Shakespeare. Some financial disaster had befallen him. In January, when the town council had decided to provide weapons for two billmen, a body of pikemen, and one archer, and assessed the aldermen for six shillings and eightpence each and the burgesses at half that amount, two of the aldermen were excused the full pay. One, Mr. Plumley, was charged five shillings, and Mr. Shakespeare was to pay only three and fourpence. The following year he defaulted in an assessment for the same amount. Meanwhile, he had been obliged to mortgage Asbies, which had come to him with his wife, and to sell the interests at Snitterfield. The Shakespeares, although they in after years again grew prosperous, never recovered Asbies.

No one knows what caused these straitened circumstances. Possibly it was some disastrous speculation in corn. In the midst of this trouble, his seven-year-old daughter, Anne, died, and another son, Edmund, was horn, 1580. He ceased to attend meetings of the town council, and his son William entered into an improvident marriage.

CHAPTER III

Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s bride—The hasty marriage—Shakespeare’s wild young days—He leaves for London—Grendon Underwood.

William Shakespeare was but eighteen and a half years of age when he married. Legally, he was an “infant.” His wife was by almost eight years his senior, but if we agree with Bacon’s saying, that a man finds himself ten years older the day after his marriage, the disparity became at once more than rectified. She was one Anne, or Agnes, Hathaway; her father, Richard, being a farmer of Shottery. The Hathaways were numerous in this district, there being at that time no fewer than three families of the name in Shottery and others in Stratford. Anne had no fewer than eight brothers and sisters, all of whom, except two, are mentioned in their father’s will. Richard, who describes himself in his will as “husbandman,” executed that document on September 1st, 1581, and died probably in the June following, for his will was proved in London on July 9th, 1582. Storms of rival theories have raged around the mystery surrounding this marriage, of which the register does not exist. It is claimed that Shakespeare was married at Temple Grafton, Luddington, Billesley, and elsewhere, but no shadow of evidence can be adduced for any of these places. All we know is that on November 28th, 1582, Fulke Sandells and John Richardson, farmers, of Stratford, who had been respectively one of the “supervisors” and one of the witnesses of Richard Hathaway’s will, went to Worcester and there entered into a “Bond in £40 against Impediments, to defend and save harmless the right reverend father in God, John, Lord Bushop of Worcester” from any complaint or process that might by any possibility arise out of his licensing the marriage with only once asking the banns. These two bondsmen declared that “William Shagspere, one thone partie and Anne Hathaway of Stratford” (Shottery was and is a hamlet in the parish of Stratford-on-Avon) “in the dioces of Worcester, maiden, may lawfully solemnize marriage together.” This document, discovered in the Worcester Registry in 1836, is sufficiently clear and explicit; but a complication is introduced by a license issued the day before by the Bishop for a marriage “inter Wm. Shaxpere et Anna Whateley de Temple Grafton.” It has been suggested that, as there were Whateleys living in the neighbourhood, and that as there were numerous Shakespeares also, with many Williams among them, this was quite another couple, while others contend that “Whateley” was a mistake of one of the clerks employed in the Bishop’s registry, and that the name of Temple Grafton as “place of residence” of the bride was a further mistake, that being the place intended for the ceremony. In any case, the point is of minor interest for the registers of Temple Grafton do not go back to that date, and the fabric of the church itself is quite new. We do not know, therefore, where Shakespeare was married, nor when; and can but assume that the wedding took place shortly after the bond was signed.

Six months later, Shakespeare’s eldest daughter was born, for we see in the register of baptisms in Holy Trinity church, Stratford, the entry:—

“1583, May 26th, Susanna, daughter to William Shakespere.”

The reason for the hurried visit of the two farmers to Worcester, to hasten on the marriage with but one “asking” in church now becomes evident. They were friends of the late Richard Hathaway, and were determined that young Shakespeare should not get out of marrying the girl he had—wronged, shall we say? Well, no. There have been many moralists excessively shocked at this pre-nuptial intimacy, and they assert that Shakespeare seduced Anne Hathaway.

But young men of just over eighteen years of age do not, I think, beguile young women nearly eight years older. Anne probably seduced him; for woman is more frequently the huntress and the chooser, and man is a very helpless creature before her wiles.

The extravagances of the Baconians may well be illustrated here, for although the subject of Shakespeare’s marriage has no bearing upon the famous cryptogram and the authorship of the plays, Donnelly spreads himself generously all over Shakespeare’s life, and lightheartedly settles for us the mystery of the bond re the marriage of Anne Hathaway and the license to marry Anne Whateley by suggesting that both names are correct and refer to the same persons. He says Anne Hathaway married a Whateley and that it was as a widow she married William Shakespeare, her maiden name being given in the bond by mistake! The sheer absurdity of this is obvious when we consider that if Mr. Donnelly is right, then the bondsmen made the yet grosser error of describing the widow as a “maiden.” She was actually at that time neither wife, maid nor widow.

Again, Richard Hathaway the father made his will in September 1581, leaving (inter alia) a bequest to Anne “to be paide unto her at the daie of her marriage.” She was a single young woman then, and yet according to the Donnellian view she was already, fifteen months later, a widow, again about to be married.

Apologists for this hasty marriage, jealous for the reputation of Shakespeare, are keen to find an excuse in the supposition that he was a Roman Catholic and that he was already married secretly, probably in the room in the roof of Shottery Manor House, which is supposed to have been used at this period as a place of secret worship. But there is no basis for forming any theory as to Shakespeare’s religious convictions. A yet more favourite assumption is that Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway went through the ceremony of “hand-fasting,” a formal betrothal which, although not a complete marriage and not carrying with it the privileges of marriage was a bar to either of the parties marrying another. Jack was thus made sure of his Jill; and, perhaps even more important, Jill was certain of her Jack. But if this ceremony had taken place, there would have been no necessity for that hasty journey of those two friends of the Hathaways to Worcester.

Nothing is known of the attitude of Shakespeare’s parents towards the marriage, nor has any one ever suggested how he supported himself, his wife and family in the years before he left Stratford for London. At the close of January 1585, his twin son and daughter, Hamnet and Judith were born, and they were baptized at Stratford church on February 2nd. Whether he assisted his father in his business of glover, or helped on his farm, or whether he became assistant master at the Grammar School, as sometimes suggested, is mere matter for speculation. John Aubrey, picking up gossip at Stratford, writes—

“Mr. William Shakespear was borne at Stratford upon Avon in the county of Warwick. His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father’s trade, but when he kill’d a calfe he would doe it in a high style, and make a speech.”

That may or may not be true, but it looks as though William had, about this impressionable age, become stage-struck. He had had numerous opportunities of seeing the players, for his father had in his more prosperous days been a patron of the strolling companies, both as a private individual and as a member of the town council. In 1569 two such troupes, who called themselves the “Queen’s servants,” and “servants of the Earl of Warwick,” gave performances before the corporation and were paid out of the public monies; a forecast of the municipal theatre! And no doubt John Shakespeare, together with many other Stratford people, went over to Kenilworth during the magnificent pageants given there by Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in 1575, in honour of Queen Elizabeth; taking with him his little boy, then eleven years of age. Thus would the foundations of an ambition be laid.

At this time, 1585, John Shakespeare’s affairs, from whatever cause, were under a cloud. They had been declining since 1578, when he had been obliged to mortgage some of the property that had been his wife’s, and now he was deprived of his alderman’s gown. William about this time, whether in 1585 or 1587 is uncertain, left Stratford for London, whither some of his boyhood’s friends had already preceded him, among them Richard Field.

Stratford at this time was certainly no place for William, if he wished to emulate Dr. Samuel Smiles’ worthies and conform to the gospel of getting on in the world, the most popular gospel ever preached. In 1587, Nicholas Lane, one of his father’s creditors, sought to distrain upon John Shakespeare’s goods, but the sheriff’s officers returned the doleful tale of “no effects,” and so he had his trouble for nothing. It is, however, curious that even when reduced to his last straits, John Shakespeare never sold his property, the house in which he lived and carried on business, in Henley Street.

In addition to the discredit attaching to being thus one of the Shakespeares who had come down in the world, William, according to the very old, strong and persistent tradition, was at this time showing a very rackety disposition. He consorted with the wilder young men of the town and went on drinking bouts with them. Sometimes, with them, he raided the neighbouring parks and killed the deer and poached other game; and the old tradition hints that on these occasions the others made good their escape and Shakespeare was generally caught. Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, who was the chief sufferer from the exploits of these youths, is said to have had Shakespeare whipped, imprisoned and fined for his part in them.

To London, therefore, William Shakespeare made his way. With what credentials, if any, did he go? He had friends in London, among them Richard Field, a schoolfellow, who in 1579 had gone thither, to become apprentice to a printer, and in 1587, about this time when Shakespeare left home, had set up in business for himself and become a member of the Stationers’ Company. Shakespeare may quite reasonably have sought his help or advice; and certainly Field six years later published Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, the foremost literary and dramatic patron of the age, from whose friendship and powerful aid all intellectual aspirants hoped much.

It is quite likely that Shakespeare left Stratford with a company of travelling actors, and reaching town with them, gradually drifted into regular employment at one of the only two London theatres that then existed, “The Theatre” and the “Curtain” both in Shoreditch.

It is of some interest to speculate upon the manner in which Shakespeare journeyed to London, and the way he went. Was he obliged to walk it, in the traditional manner of the poor countryman seeking his fortune in the great metropolis? Or did he make the journey by the carrier’s cart? There are two principal roads by which he may have gone; by Newbold-on-Stour, Long Compton, Chapel House, and Woodstock to Oxford, Beaconsfield and through High Wycombe and Uxbridge, 95 miles; or he might have chosen to go by Ettington, Pillerton Priors, Sunrising Hill, Wroxton and Banbury, through Aynho, Bicester, Aylesbury, Tring and Watford to London, 92¾ miles. Such an one as he would probably first go to London by way of Oxford, for, like Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure,” he would doubtless think it “a city of light.” There are traditions at Oxford of Shakespeare’s staying at the “Crown” inn in the Cornmarket in after years. Sometimes he would doubtless go by the Banbury and Bicester route: and along it, at the village of Grendon Underwood, to the left of the road between Bicester and Aylesbury, as you journey towards London, there still linger very precise traditions of Shakespeare having stayed at what was formerly the “Old Ship” inn.

Grendon Underwood, or “under Bernwode” as it is styled in old records, appears in an old rhyme as—

“The dirtiest town that ever stood,”

but it was never a town, and, whatever may once have been its condition, it is no longer dirty.

It is not at first sight easily to be understood why Shakespeare, or any other traveller of that age journeying the long straight stretch of the old Roman road, the Akeman Street, between Bicester and Aylesbury, should want to go a mile and a quarter out of his way for the purpose of visiting this place, but that they did so is sufficiently proved by the comparative importance of the house that was until about a hundred and twelve years ago the “Old Ship” and is now known as “Shakespeare Farm.” It is clearly too large ever to have been built for an ordinary village inn, and is said to have formerly been even larger. If, however, we refer to old maps of the district, it will he found that, for some unexplained reason, the ancient forthright Roman road had gone out of use, and that instead of proceeding direct, along the Akeman Street, the wayfarers of old went a circuitous course, through Grendon Underwood. When this deviation took place does not appear; but it was obviously one of long standing. The first available map showing the roads of the district is that by Emanuel Bowen, 1756, in which the Akeman Street is not shown; the only road given being that which winds through Grendon. The next map to be issued—that by Thomas Jeffreys, 1788—gives the Akeman Street, running direct, between point and point, and avoiding Grendon, as it does now. That was the great era of turnpike-acts, providing for the repair and restoration of old roads, and the making of new; and this was one of the many highways then restored. The “Old Ship” inn, at Grendon Underwood, at which Shakespeare and many generations of travellers had halted, at once declined with the making of the direct road, and soon retired into private life.

The Shakespeare tradition comes down to us through John Aubrey, who, writing in 1680, says—

“The humour of the constable, in Midsomer-night’s Dreame, [21] he happened to take at Grendon, in Bucks—I thinke it was Midsomer night that he happened to lye there—which is the roade from London to Stratford, and there was living that constable about 1642, when I first came to Oxon.”

The village constable referred to was well known to one Josias Howe, son of the rector, born at Grendon, March 29th, 1612, died August 28th, 1701, who told Aubrey the story at Oxford, in 1642.

The lofty gabled red brick and timber end of Shakespeare Farm, illustrated here, is the earlier part of the building, although the whole of it is probably as old as Shakespeare’s time. That earlier wing, the part to which tradition points, is not now occupied, and is, in fact, in a very dilapidated condition, occasional floorboards, and even some of the stairs, being missing. Where the wearied guests of long ago rested, broody hens are set by the careful farmer’s wife on their clutches of eggs. There is little interesting in the architectural way in these dark and deserted rooms, but the flat, pierced, wooden banisters of the staircase are genuinely old and quaint.

CHAPTER IV

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.

That Shakespeare 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 that because no scrap of Shakespeare’s handwriting, except six almost illegible signatures, has survived, therefore he 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 his Canterbury 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 of plot-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), of Henry 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 tract has 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 his Tygers heart wrapt in a players hide supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes factotum is, 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 of Henry 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 own Hamlet”; not an exacting part; other traditions say Adam in As 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 his Great 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 of Romeo 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 himself the 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 conferred upon 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 October 25th 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 xxx li uppon 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 paiem^r. 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 having made 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 the Taming 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, the Sea 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 stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”

Thus he brings his labours to an end—

“this rough magic
I here abjure; and, when I have required
Some 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 long sermons. 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.

CHAPTER V

Stratford-on-Avon—It has its own life, quite apart from Shakespearean associations—Its people and its streets—Shakespeare Memorials.

Stratford-on-Avon would 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 called Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Cymbeline, Midsummer Night’s Dream and many another will astonish the guest at that really very fine and ancient hotel. I forget if there be a bedroom named after Two Gentlemen of Verona. If so, it must obviously be one of the double rooms mentioned in the tariff.

They gave me As you Like It, and it was sufficiently comfortable: I liked it much. On the other hand, Macbeth makes 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.

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?”

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 to Stratford when 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 about Strateforde, having neither Wife nor Children, converted a great Peace of his Substance in good workes at Stratford, 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, carved on 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.

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 to reach 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 the Philadelphia Ledger. It includes also the function of a memorial of the first Victorian Jubilee. Shakespearean quotations adorn it, including the apposite one from Timon 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 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 the original 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,” in Midsummer 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 the Stratford-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.

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 the accompanying 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 to take 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.

CHAPTER VI

Shakespeare’s Birthplace—Restoration, of sorts—The business of the Showman—The Birthplace Museum—The Shakespearean garden.

To Henley 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.

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 would not 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 greater person 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.

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 in which 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 people much 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 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 diamond rings 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 with him 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.

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.

CHAPTER VII

Church Street—The “Castle” inn—The Guild Chapel, Guild Hall, and Grammar School—New Place.

Church Street is 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 of Holy 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 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 in 1547, 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 seem to 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, although greatly 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.

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 it to 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.

From this long hall the room variously styled the “Armoury,” or the small Council Chamber or “’Greeing Room,” is entered. This Agreeing Room, perhaps for the inner councils of the Guild, was re-panelled about 1619, when the door leading from the hall was built; and as a sign of rejoicing, the royal arms were painted over the fireplace at the time of the Restoration of Charles the Second, in 1660. Here also at one time the arms of the town guard were kept.

The present School Library, overhead, occupies the room under the roof, formerly the large Council Chamber of the Guild. The heraldic white and red roses painted on the west wall, the red countercharged with a white centre and the white with red, were placed there in 1485, marking the satisfaction of the townsfolk at the marriage of Henry the Seventh with Elizabeth of York, and the union of the rival Houses of York and Lancaster.

Out of this room opens the Latin Schoolroom of the Grammar School. The first portion of it was once separate, and known as the Mathematical Room. Here we are on the scene of Shakespeare’s schooldays, the schoolroom where he learnt that “small Latin and less Greek,” with which Ben Jonson credited him; a room still used in the education of Stratford boys. He pictured the schoolboy of his own and every other time in the lines—

“The whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like a snail
Unwillingly to school.”

How unwillingly we do not fully comprehend until we look more closely into the schooling of those days. It was a twelve-hour day, begun extremely early in the morning, and continued through the weary hours with some exercise of the rod.

We know exactly who were the masters of the Grammar School in the years 1571 to 1580, when Shakespeare received his education here, in common with the other children of the town. They were Walter Roche, who was a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and afterwards rector of Clifford Chambers; succeeded in 1572 by Thomas Hunt, afterwards curate-in-charge at Luddington; and in 1577 by Thomas Jenkins, of St. John’s College, Oxford. These may have been pedants, but they were scholars, and qualified to impart an excellent education. They were in fact men distinctly above the average of the schoolmasters of that age, and live for all time in the characters of Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Sir Hugh Evans in the Merry Wives of Windsor; the title “Sir,” being one, not of knighthood, but of courtesy, given to a clergyman. Shakespeare’s allusions to schools, masters and scholars, and his Latin conversations in the plays, modelled on the school methods then in vogue, are much more numerous and illuminative than generally supposed. We find, indeed, an especially intimate touch with Shakespeare’s schooldays in the description of Malvolio in Twelfth Night as “like a pedant that keeps school i’ the church”; a remark whose significance is not evident until we read that during Shakespeare’s own schooldays the buildings were extensively repaired and that for a time the master and pupils were housed in the Guild Chapel.

The Latin Schoolroom has an outside staircase built in recent years to replace the original, abolished in 1841. The half-timbered house standing in the courtyard was formerly the schoolmaster’s residence; it is now, with the need for accommodating the natural increase of scholars, used for additional class-rooms.

Shakespeare, retiring early from his interests in London and the playhouses, and coming home to Stratford a wealthy man, hoping to live many years in the enjoyment of his fortune, settled in the old mansion he had bought, adjoining the scene of his own schooldays. He must have looked with a kindly eye and with much satisfaction from the windows of New Place, upon the schoolboys coming and going along the street, as he himself had done. Not every one can be so fortunate. Perhaps the reigning schoolmaster of the time even held up the shining example of Mr. William Shakespeare, “who was a schoolboy here, like you, my boys,” to his classes, and carefully omitting the factors of chance and opportunity, promised them as great success if they did but mind their books. Perhaps, on the other hand—for these were already puritan times—their distinguished neighbour was an awful example: author of those shocking exhibitions called stage-plays, at this time forbidden in the town, under penalties, and an actor, “such as those rogues whom we but the other day sent packing from our streets. Beware, my lads, lest you become wealthy after the fashion of Mr. Shakespeare. ‘What profiteth it a man, if he should gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’”

Shakespeare, although he had become a personage of great consideration, with a fine residence, many times removed from his father’s humble house in Henley Street, had not changed into a more salubrious neighbourhood. The Stratford of his day and for long after was a dirty and insanitary place, according to our notions, but the townsfolk did not seem to be troubled by these conditions, and it never occurred to them that the plagues and fevers that carried off many of their fellows to Heaven—or whatever their destination—untimely were caused by the dirt and the vile odours of the place. Stratford of course, was not singular in this, and had its counterpart in most other towns and villages of that age. The town council, however, drew the line at the burgesses keeping pigs in part of the houses, or allowing them to wander in the streets; and enacted a fine of fourpence for every strayed porker. But the townsfolk regarded the authority’s dislike of pigs as a curious eccentricity, and the swine had their styes and roamed the streets exactly as before. The biggest of the six municipal muckhills that raised their majestic crests in the streets all the year round was situated in Chapel Lane, opposite Shakespeare’s door, but there is no record of his having objected to it. It was this, however, and the deplorable condition of Chapel Lane in general, then notoriously the dirtiest thoroughfare in the town, which probably caused the poet’s death; for the opinion now generally held is that he died of typhoid fever.

Down Chapel Lane then ran an open gutter: a wide and dirty ditch some four or five feet across, choked with mud. All the filth of this part of the town ran into it and discharged into the river.

There is no pictorial record of New Place, as it was when Shakespeare resided in it. He was unfortunate in living long before the age of picture-postcards, and never knew the joy of seeing illustrations of his house, “New Place; residence of Mr. William Shakespeare” (with the tell-tale legend “Printed in Germany.” in ruby type on the back), for sale in all the shop windows. Poor devil!

New Place passed by Shakespeare’s will to his daughter Susanna and her husband Dr. Hall. They removed from their house “Hall’s Croft,” Old Stratford, shortly afterwards, Shakespeare’s widow probably living with them until her death in 1623. Dr. Hall died in 1635. In 1643, Mrs. Hall here entertained Queen Henrietta Maria for three weeks, at the beginning of the royalist troubles, when the Queen came to the town with 5000 men. In 1649 she died, two years after her son-in-law, Thomas Nash, whose house is next door. Somewhere about this time all the Shakespeare books and manuscripts would seem to have disappeared. The puritan Dr. Hall disapproved of stage-plays, and his wife, Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna, could neither write nor read; and thus the complete destruction of the dramatist’s records is easily accounted for.

Nash’s widow, Shakespeare’s granddaughter, married again, a John Barnard who was afterwards knighted. Lady Barnard died childless at her husband’s place at Abington, Northamptonshire, and was buried there, leaving New Place to her husband, who died four years later, in 1674. By a strange chance, the house that had been sold out of the Clopton family now came back to it by marriage, Sir Edward Walker who bought the property in 1675, leaving Barbara, an only child, who married Sir John Clopton. His son, Sir Hugh, came into possession of an entirely new-fronted house, for his father, careless of its associations, in 1703 had made great alterations here. Illustrations of this frontage which survived until 1759, show that it was not at all Shakespearean; being instead most distinctly and flagrantly Queen Annean, in the semi-classic taste of that day, with a pediment and other architectural details which we are convinced Shakespeare’s New Place never included.

The ill-tempered Rev. Francis Gastrell who bought New Place in 1753 completed the obliteration of the illustrious owner’s residence. There cannot, happily, be many people so black-tempered as this wealthy absentee vicar of Frodsham, in Cheshire, who, resident for the greater part of the year in Lichfield, yet found Stratford desirable at some time in the twelve months. His acrid humours were early stirred. He had no sooner moved in than he found numbers of people coming every day to see Shakespeare’s mulberry-tree in the garden, so he promptly had it cut down, to save himself annoyance. Then he objected to the house being assessed for taxes all the year round, although he occupied it only a month or two in the twelve; and when the authorities refused to accept his view, he had the place entirely demolished. Thus perished New Place. The site of it, after passing through several hands, was finally purchased, together with the adjoining Thomas Nash’s house, by public subscription in 1861; and both are now the property of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

The site of New Place is open to the view of all who pass along Church Street and Chapel Lane, a dwarf wall with ornamental railing alone dividing it and its gardens from the pavement. Sixpence, which is the key that unlocks many doors in Shakespeare land, admits to the foundations, all that remain of the house, and also to the “New Place Museum,” in the house of Thomas Nash. Strange to say, the Trustees do not charge for admission to the gardens. Is this an oversight, or a kindly wish to leave the stranger an odd sixpence to get home with? Nash’s house, odiously re-fronted about the beginning of the nineteenth century, showed a stuccoed front with pillared portico to the street until recently. This year (1912) the alterations have been completed by which the frontage is restored by the evidence of old prints to its appearance in Nash’s time. The interior remains as of old. Among the relics in the Museum are chairs, tables, a writing-desk, and other articles rather doubtfully said to have belonged to Shakespeare; a trinket-box supposed to have been Anne Hathaway’s, and an old shuffle-board from the “Falcon” inn opposite, on which Shakespeare is said to have played a game with friends at nights, when he felt bored at home. Unfortunately for tradition and the authenticity of this “Shakespearean relic,” the “Falcon” was a private house in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and for long after. It is known to have become an inn only at some time between 1645 and 1668. The sign was chosen probably in allusion to the Shakespeare crest. Reproductions of portraits of Shakespeare’s friends complete the collections in Nash’s House.

CHAPTER VIII

The Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford-on-Avon.

The parish church of Stratford-on-Avon is a building larger, more lofty, and far more stately than most towns of this size can boast. There is reason for this exceptional importance, first in the patronage of the Bishops of Worcester, on whose manor it was situated, but chiefly in the benefactions of John of Stratford, one of three remarkable persons born here in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. John, Robert, and Ralph, who took their distinguishing name from the town of their birth, were all of one family; the first two were brothers, the third was their nephew. John, born in the closing years of the thirteenth century, became successively Bishop of Winchester and Archbishop of Canterbury, and was, like most of the great prelates of the age, a statesman as well, filling the State offices of ambassador to foreign powers and Lord Chancellor of the realm. He died in 1348. His brother Robert early became rector of Stratford-on-Avon, in 1319. He it was who first caused the town to be paved; not, of course, with pavements that would meet the approval of a modern town council or the inhabitants, but probably with something in the nature of cobbles roughly laid down in the deep mud in which, up to that time, the rude carts of the age had foundered. It was this mud that set a deep gulf between neighbours, and had led indirectly to the establishment in 1296 of the original Guild Chapel, a small building which stood on the site of the existing larger structure. It was founded by Robert, the father of John and Robert, largely for the spiritual welfare of those old or infirm persons who were not able to attend service at the parish church, by reason of the distance! Not, we may be sure, the distance of actual measurement, for the church is at the end of the not very long street, and a leisurely walk brings you to it in two minutes; but a distance of miles reckoned in the hindrances and disabilities provided by the roads of that age. Nothing in the story of Stratford could more eloquently describe to us the condition of its streets and the then remoteness of the Old Town district.

But to return to Robert of Stratford, who eventually became Bishop of Chichester and died in 1362. He it was who supervised his brother John’s gifts to the church, which was then an incomplete building, languishing for want of means to complete it. Apparently it had long before been decided to replace the small original Norman church with a larger and much more ambitious building, in the Early English style, judging from traces of both those architectural periods discernable in the tower; but the Bishops of Worcester would not loosen their purse-strings sufficiently, and awaited the coming of that benefactor who, they were morally certain, was sure to appear sooner or later and compound with Heaven for his evil courses on earth by completing it. They did not, however, reckon on any of their own cloth doing so, for sheer joy of the work.

John of Stratford’s works included the widening of the north aisle and the rebuilding of the south; the remodelling of the central tower and the addition of a timber spire, which remained until the eighteenth century, when it was replaced (1764) by the present loftier stone spire, which rises eighty-three feet above the roof of the tower. In 1332 he founded the chantry chapel of St. Thomas the Martyr in the church. There five priests were appointed to sing masses “for ever,” for the good of the souls of founder and friends. John of Stratford was a great and wise man, but he did not know that “where the tree falls, there shall it lie”; nor could he foresee that his “for ever” would be commuted by the Reformation into a period of two hundred years.

He endowed his chantry chapel with liberality; almost extravagance, and even purchased the advowson of the church from the Bishop. This extremely liberal endowment was perhaps necessary, for he had considered the eternal welfare of a good many people besides himself and his relations, and included even the sovereigns of England, present and to be, and all future Bishops of Worcester. The priests, therefore, had their hands full, and shouldered some heavy responsibilities; for—not to go into individual cases, or specify some of the shocking examples—it does not need much imagination to perceive that a tremendous deal of intercession would be necessary for so unlimited a company as this. Perhaps, in the circumstances, he could not possibly endow his chantry too richly.

I do not know how his priests fared for lodgings. He seems to have omitted that important detail. But his nephew Ralph supplied the omission, and, in 1351, three years after his uncle’s death, built a house for them adjoining the churchyard. It was styled then and for centuries afterwards “the College.” Thus the church of Stratford-on-Avon became more richly endowed than the usual parish church, and was known as “collegiate.”

Many worthy folk followed the precedent set by the founder, and added to the beauties of the church; chief among them Thomas Balsall, Warden of the College in the second half of the fifteenth century, who built the present choir or chancel between the years 1465–1490. The last beautifier and benefactor was Dean Balsall’s successor, Ralph Collingwood. His is the north porch of the church, and he undertook and completed an important alteration in the nave; unroofing it, removing the low Decorated clerestory, probably of circular windows, and taking down the walls to the crown of the nave-arcades; then building upon them the light and lofty clerestory we see at this day. He added choir-boys to the establishment, and further endowed the College, for their maintenance. These were the last works in the long history of the church. In 1547 the Reformation came and swept away John of Stratford’s chantry and confiscated the endowments. The priests were scattered, and four years later their College was given by the king to John Dudley, the newly-created Earl of Warwick and lord of the manor in succession to the Bishops of Worcester. The College reverted to the Crown, and in 1576 it was let by Queen Elizabeth to one Richard Coningsby, who in turn let it to John Combe. It was a fine and picturesque residence, familiar enough to Shakespeare, who was on intimate terms with Combe, and received from him a bequest of £5 on his death in 1614. It was demolished in 1799.

The church is approached through the churchyard by a fine avenue of lime-trees leading up to the north porch, where a verger, or some such creature, habited in a hermaphrodite kind of garment, which is neither exactly clerical nor lay, waits for the visitor’s sixpences; for you may not enter for nothing, unless perhaps at times of divine service, and even then are allowed but grudgingly by these clerical entrepreneurs, who suspect you have come not so much for worship as with the idea of depriving them of a sixpence. I think, however, you would find it difficult to glimpse the chancel and the Shakespeare monument before the intention would be suspected and the enterprising person successfully headed off.

We will first encircle the exterior, where the many gravestones of departed Stratford worthies lean at every imaginable angle, the oldest of them, almost, or perhaps absolutely, contemporary with Shakespeare, grown or growing undecipherable. Some day Stratford will be sorry for neglecting them and their possible interest in the comparative study of Shakespeare and his fellow-townsmen. But everything connected, either intimately or remotely, with him has always been neglected until the record has almost perished. It is the singular fate of Shakespearean associations.

The exterior of the fabric, it will soon be noticed, is greatly weathered; more particularly the Perpendicular chancel, which must at no distant date be restored. It is surprising, and an excellent tribute to the security of the foundations of this work, built on the banks of the river over four hundred years ago, that its walls have not fallen seriously out of plumb, like that of the north nave-arcade; especially when the rather daring slightness of the design is considered, consisting of vast mullioned and transomed windows with but little wall-space between. The gargoyles leering down from the dripstones are a weird series of bat-winged creatures of nightmare-land. On the south side, however, is a very good Bear and Ragged Staff gargoyle, and next it, going westward, a nondescript Falstaffian monster, his legs amputated by time and weather.

The churchyard wall goes sheer down into the water of the Avon. The elms look down upon the stream, the rooks hold noisy parliaments in their boughs, and the swans float stately by.

Entering by the roomy north porch, where the person with the bisexual garments will take your sixpence and sell you picture-postcards, it is noticed that the good Late Perpendicular stone panelling is obscured, and the effect destroyed, by the extreme licence given in the placing of monumental tablets on the walls; a practice, judging from the dates upon them, still in existence. It is quite clear from this that the building might well be in better hands.

A very fine brazen knocker with grotesque head holding the ring in its mouth is a feature of the doorway. Although affixed to late fifteenth-century wood-work, the knocker would seem really to be nearly two hundred years earlier. It appears on picture-cards without number as the “Sanctuary Knocker,” and metal reproductions of it are to be had in the town; but there is nothing to show that this church was ever one of those that owned the privilege of sanctuary. In the inexact modern way, every curious old knocker on church doors is “sanctuary”; but in reality the ancient privilege was too valuable to be granted with the indiscriminate freedom this would argue.

Immediately within the church is seen the old register-book in a glass case, containing the entries recording the baptism and burial of Shakespeare, with the broken bow of the old font at which he was baptised. Many years ago it was removed from the church, to make room for a new, and lay neglected in a garden in the town. It has been re-lined with lead, and is used for baptisms, on request.

From the west end of the nave, where these relics are placed, the long view eastward shows this to be a very striking example of those churches whose chancels are not on the same axis with the rest of the building. The chancel in this instance inclines very markedly to the north. The symbolism of this feature in ancient churches is still matter for dispute; and it is really doubtful if it is symbolical and not the product of inexact planning, or caused by some old local conditions of the site which do not now appear; or whether it was thought to produce some acoustical advantages. It is thought that no example can be adduced of an inclination southwards, and that, therefore, the feature is a designed one. The favourite interpretation is that it repeats the inclination of the Saviour’s head upon the Cross.

Advancing up the nave, it will soon be noticed that the north nave-arcade is greatly out of plumb, and leans outwards; a result, no doubt, of Collingwood’s alterations and additions placing too heavy a weight upon it.

At the east end of the north aisle is the former Lady Chapel, now and for long past known as the Clopton Chapel, from the tombs of that family placed there. No structural difference, no variation in the plan of the church, marks the chapel from the rest of the building, from which it is screened very slightly by a low pierced railing on one side, and on the south, looking into the nave, by the ornate stone screen erected by Sir Hugh Clopton, the founder of the family chapel and architect of his own fortunes. It is a part of the tomb intended for himself, and there can be no doubt but that he saw it rising to completion with the satisfaction of a man assured of being not only wealthy, but hoping to live in fame as the benefactor of his native town, for which he did so much.

The screen is crested with elaborate pierced conventional Tudor foliage, and fronted with his arms, and with those of the City of London, the Grocers’ Company, and the Merchants of the Staple. The brass inscribed plates have long since been torn away, and the tomb is entirely without inscription or effigy; as perhaps it is well it should be, for, in spite of all these elaborate preparations, and although directing that he should lie here, Sir Hugh Clopton was, after all, buried in the City of London, where he had made his fortune, and of which he was Lord Mayor in 1492, and in which he died in 1496. The church of St. Margaret, Lothbury, where he was buried, perished in the Great Fire of London, one hundred and seventy years later.

Sir Hugh Clopton died a bachelor, and the other tombs are those of his brother’s descendants. That of William Clopton, who died in 1592 and is described simply as “Esquire,” stands against the north wall of the Chapel. He was great-nephew of Sir Hugh. He is represented in armour, and his wife, who followed him four years later, lies beside him in effigy, both figures with prayerfully raised hands. Above them, on the wall, quite by themselves, are represented the interesting family of this worthy pair, seven in all, sculptured and painted in miniature, in the likeness of so many big-headed Dutch dolls, with the name of each duly inscribed; Elizabeth, Lodowicke, Joyce, Margaret, William, Anne, and again William, the first of that name having died an infant, as did also Elizabeth and Lodowicke. These three are represented as little mummy-like creatures, swathed tightly in linen folds.

But the most gorgeous of all the Clopton tombs is the next in order of date. This is the lofty and extremely elaborate and costly monument of George Carew, Earl of Totnes and Baron Clopton, who married Joyce, eldest daughter of the already mentioned William Clopton. He died in 1629, and his wife in 1636. This costly memorial, together with that to her father and mother, was her handiwork, and she seems to have completely enjoyed herself in the progress of the commission. The Countess of Totnes and her husband are represented in full-length, recumbent effigies, sculptured in alabaster. The Earl is shown in armour and his wife is seen habited in a white fur robe, coloured red outside. A deep ruff is round her neck, and she wears a coronet. The Earl of Totnes was Master of the Ordnance to James the First; hence the symbolical sculptured implements of war in front of the monument; including two cannon, two kegs of powder and a pile of shot; one mortar, a gun, some halberds and a flag.

A later inscription records that Sir John Clopton caused these tombs to be repaired and beautified in 1714. In 1719 he died, aged 80; and in course of time his own tomb became a candidate for repair. No Cloptons then survived to perform that pious office, which was observed by Sir Arthur Hodgson, the owner of Clopton House, in 1892.

The monument of Sir Edward Walker, who died in 1676, is the memorial of a man who held some important positions. He was Charles the First’s Secretary of War, and afterwards Garter King-of-Arms and military editor of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion. He has some interest for the students of Shakespeare’s life, for it was he who bought New Place in 1675.

There are some smaller tablets on the walls, including one with a little effigy of a certain Amy Smith, who was for forty years “waiting-gentlewoman” to the Countess of Totnes. She is seen devoutly kneeling at a prie-Dieu chair.

CHAPTER IX

The Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford-on-Avon (continued)—The Shakespeare grave and monument.

We now pass beneath the arches of the central tower, under the organ and past the transepts, into the chancel. The chief interest is, quite frankly, the Shakespeare monument and the graves of his family; although even were it not for them, the building itself and the curious carvings of the miserere seats would attract many a visitor.

It is with feelings of something at last accomplished, some necessary pilgrimage made, that the cultured traveller stands before the monument on the north wall and looks upon it and on the row of ledger-stones on the floor. But the sentiments of Baconian mono-maniacs are not at all reverent and respectful. They come also, but with hostile criticism. I think they would like to tear down that monument, and I am quite sure they would desire nothing better than permission to open that grave and howk up whatever they found there. For to them Shakespeare is “the illiterate clown of Stratford”; a very disreputable person; an impostor who could neither write nor act, and yet assumed the authorship of works by the greatest genius of the age, Francis Bacon. Twenty-four years ago in his Great Cryptogram, Ignatius Donnelly exposed the fraud and unmasked Shakespeare. Some one at that time referred in conversation with one of Mr. Donnelly’s ingenious countrymen to “Shakespeare’s Bust.” “Yes, he is,” rejoined that free and enlightened citizen: “he is bust and you won’t mend him again.”

He referred to the alleged cryptogram said to be by Bacon, and purporting to be discovered in the First Folio edition of the play, Henry the Fourth. It is amusing reading, this deciphered cipher, and if we were to believe it and Bacon to be its author, we should have no need to revise the old estimate of Bacon, “The wisest, wittiest, meanest of mankind.” We should, however, find it necessary to emphasise “meanest,” because he is made to reveal himself as one who wrote treasonable plays, and, being afraid to admit their authorship, bribed Shakespeare in a heavy sum to take the risk and retire out of danger to Stratford-on-Avon. It is not a convincing tale; but it is printed with much elaboration; and Bacon is made to show an astonishingly intimate knowledge of Shakespeare’s family and affairs. He uses very ungentlemanly, not to say unphilosophical, language, and leaves Shakespeare without a shred of character. He shows how suddenly this misbegotten rogue, this whoreson knave, this gorbellied rascal with the wagging paunch and the many loathsome diseases which have made him old before his time leaves London, where he is in the midst of his fame as a dramatist, and retires to live upon his ill-gotten wealth as a country gentleman in his native town of Stratford-on-Avon. He was never an actor, and only succeeded in one part, that of Falstaff, for which he was peculiarly suited because of his great greasy stomach, at which, and not at the excellence of his acting, people came to laugh. Thus says Bacon; always according to Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, in the bi-literal cipher he persuaded himself he found. Here we see Bacon the philosopher, in very angry, unphilosophic mood, as abusive as any fish-fag or Sally Slapcabbage.

And then this cuckoo, this strutting jay, who sets up to be a gentleman with a brand-new coat of arms presently dies, untimely, at fifty-two years of age, just like your Shakespeares! He must have had some good reason of his own for it; probably the better to do Bacon out of his due fame with posterity. But Bacon was not to be outwitted. He heard early in 1616 that Shakespeare was in failing health, and sent down on that three days’ journey from London to Stratford-on-Avon two of Shakespeare’s friends, Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson, who were in the secret of the authorship. They were instructed to see that if Shakespeare really insisted upon dying, the secret should not be divulged at the time. And Shakespeare, like the ungrateful wretch he was, did die. The diary of the Rev. John Ward, vicar of Stratford-on-Avon, contains an entry in 1662, referring reminiscently to Shakespeare’s last days—

“Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merrie meeting, and it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feavour there contracted.”

Donnelly suggests that Drayton and Jonson in Bacon’s interest duly saw Shakespeare buried, and so deeply that it would be for ever unlikely he should be exhumed, and Bacon’s secret revealed. He founds this upon a letter discovered in 1884 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, written in 1694 by one William Hall, of Queen’s College, to a friend, Edward Thwaites; in which, in the course of describing a visit to Stratford-on-Avon, he states that Shakespeare was buried “full seventeen feet deep—deep enough to secure him!” This recalls at once the reply of one of Mr. Donnelly’s irreverent countrymen before the tomb of Nelson in St. Paul’s Cathedral. The verger had pointed out that the Admiral’s body was enclosed in a leaden coffin and a wooden outer covering, and then placed in a marble sarcophagus weighing 90 tons. “I guess you’ve got him!” exclaimed the contemplative stranger; “if ever he gets out of that, cable me, at my expense!” No doubt Ben Jonson and Drayton guessed they had got Shakespeare safe enough, but to make doubly sure (says Donnelly) they invented and had engraved the famous verse which appears on the gravestone, involving blessings upon the man who “spares these stones” and curses upon he who moves the poet’s bones. The world has always thought Shakespeare himself was the author of these lines. The reason for them is found in the horror felt by Shakespeare—and reflected in Hamlet—at the disturbance of the remains of the dead. In his time it was the custom to rifle the older graves, in order to provide room for fresh burials, and then to throw the bones from them into the vaulted charnel-house beneath the chancel. This revolting irreverence, which, as a long-established custom at that time, seemed a natural enough thing to the average person, was horrific to one of Shakespeare’s exceptional sensibilities; and he adopted not only this deep burial but also the curse upon the sacrilegious hand that should dare disturb his rest. There is not the least room for objection to this story; but the Baconians know better. “There must have been some reason,” objects Donnelly, in italics. There was; the reason already shown. But in dealing with a fellow like Shakespeare you—if you are a Baconian—have to go behind the obvious and the palpable and seek the absurd and improbable. It does not appear what Shakespeare’s widow, his daughters, his sons-in-law and his executors were doing while Drayton and Ben Jonson were thus having their own Baconian way with Shakespeare’s body. They, according to this theory, simply looked on; which we might think an absurd thing to suppose, except that nothing is too absurd for a Baconian, as we shall now see.

Not only did Drayton and Jonson invent and get these verses engraved, they also—more amazing still—inserted Bacon’s bi-literal cipher into them. Now it is to be remarked here that the deeply-engraven lines upon which so many thousands of pilgrims gaze reverently are not, in their present form, so old as they appear to be, but were recut, and the lettering greatly modified, about 1831. Not one person in ten thousand of those who come to this spot is aware of the fact, and no illustration of the original lettering exists; but George Steevens, the Shakespearean scholar, wrote of it, about 1770, as an “uncouth mixture of small and capital letters.” He transcribed it, and so also in their turn did Knight and Malone. Some slight discrepancies exist between these transcriptions, in the exact dispositions of the letters, but the actual inscription appears to have been as under—

“Good Frend for Iesvs SAKE forbeare
To diGG T-E Dvst Enclo-Ased HE.Re.
Bleste be T-E Man Y^t spares T-Es Stones
And cvrst be He Y^t moves my bones.”

The hyphens between the words “the” and “thes” represent the old-time habit of engraving some of the letters conjoined, as seen repeated in the existing inscription illustrated here, in which the word “bleste” forms a prominent example. In that word the letters “ste” are in like manner conjoined, leading very many of the not fully-informed among the copyists of inscriptions to read it “blese.”

Halliwell-Phillipps, the foremost Shakespearean authority of his age (whom his arch-enemy, the emphatic F. J. Furnivall delighted, by the way, to style “Hell-P”) thus refers to the re-cut inscription in his Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 1881—

“The honours of repose, which have thus far been conceded to the poet’s remains, have not been extended to the tombstone. The latter had by the middle of the last century (i.e. about 1750) sunk below the level of the floor, and about fifty years ago (c. 1831) had become so much decayed as to suggest a vandalic order for its removal, and in its stead to place a new slab, one which marks certainly the locality of Shakespeare’s grave, and continues the record of the farewell lines, but indicates nothing more. The original memorial has wandered from its allotted station no man can tell whither—a sacrifice to the insane worship of prosaic neatness, that mischievous demon whose votaries have practically destroyed so many of the priceless relics of ancient England and her gifted sons.”

The cipher which Donnelly, the resourceful sleuthhound, pretends he has found in the older inscription, is destroyed by the re-arrangement in the new. It was not, he says, the sheer illiteracy of the local mason who cut the original letters that accounts for the eccentric appearance of capitals where they have no business to be; for the hyphen which so oddly divides the word “Enclo-Ased”; for the full-stops in “HE.Re.” or for the curious choice that writes “Iesvs” in small letters and “SAKE” in large capitals. No; it was the necessities of the cipher which accounted for this weird “derangement of epitaphs”; and Donnelly proceeds to emulate the conjurer who produces unexpected things from empty hats, and he finally arrives at this startling revelation—

“Francis Bacon wrote the Greene, Marlowe, and Shakespeare plays.”

As Mark Twain—another Baconian—says, “Bacon was a born worker.” Yes, indeed; but he understates it, if we were to believe this revelation. To have done all this he would need to have been a syndicate.

CHAPTER X

The Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford-on-Avon (concluded)—The Shakespeare grave and monument—The Miserere Seats.

The Baconians are so extravagant that it becomes scarce worth while to refute their wild statements; but when they are carried to these extremities we may well note them, for the enjoyment of a laugh. But perhaps Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence gives us the better entertainment when he tells us that Bacon wrote the preface to the Authorised Version of the Bible, and was in fact the literary editor of that translation and responsible for its style!

With an ineffable serenity the portrait-figure of Shakespeare (generally called a “bust,” but it is a half-length) in the monument looks down from the north wall of the spacious chancel upon the graves of himself and his family. The monument itself is thoroughly characteristic of the Renascence taste of the period: in the church of St. Andrew Undershaft, in the city of London, you may see a not dissimilar example to John Stow, the historian, who died eleven years before Shakespeare. He also, like Shakespeare’s effigy, holds a quill pen in his hand. The accompanying illustration renders description scarce necessary, and it is only to the portrait that we need especially direct attention. In common with everything relating to Shakespeare, it has been the subject of great controversy: not altogether warranted, for it is certain that it was executed before 1623, seven years after the poet’s death, when his widow, daughters and sons-in-law were yet living, and it seems beyond all reasonable argument to deny that a monument erected under their supervision should, and does, in fact, present as good a likeness of him as they could procure. The effigy was sculptured by one Gerard Johnson (or Janssen), son of a Dutch craftsman in this mortuary art, whose workshop being in Southwark near the “Globe” theatre, must have rendered Shakespeare’s personal appearance familiar to him, while the features are considered to be copied from a death-mask which was probably taken by Dr. John Hall, husband of Shakespeare’s elder daughter, Susanna.

The inscription runs—

“Ivdicio Pylivm, genio Socratem, arte Maronem,
Terra tegit, popvlvs mæret, Olympus habet.”

which is translated thus—

“He was in judgment a Nestor, in genius a Socrates, and in art a Virgil; the earth covers, the people mourn, and heaven holds him.”

There then follow the English lines—

“Stay, Passenger, why goest thov by so fast?
Read if thov canst, when enviovs Death hath plast
Within this monvment, Shakespeare, with whome
Qvick Natvre dide; whose name doth deck y^e Tombe
Far more then coste, sith all y^t He hath writt
Leaves living art but page to serve his witt,

“Obiit ano doi 1616,
Ætatis 53, Die 23 Ap.”

The author of Shakespeare’s epitaph is unknown. It would seem to have been some one who had not seen the monument, and knew nothing of its character; for he imagines his lines are to be inscribed upon a tomb within which the poet’s body is placed. But however little he knew of Shakespeare’s monument, he knew the worth of his plays and poems: “Shakespeare, with whom quick nature died.” It is the very summary, the quintessence, of Shakespearean appreciation.

Like everything else associated with Shakespeare, the monument has had its vicissitudes. The effigy, originally painted to resemble life, showed the poet to have had auburn hair and light hazel eyes. In 1748 a well-meaning Mr. John Ward repaired the monument and retouched the effigy with colour, and in 1793 Malone persuaded the vicar to have it painted white; an outrage satirised by the lines written in the church visitors’-book in 1810—

“Stranger, to whom this Monument is shewn,
Invoke the Poet’s curse upon Malone
Whose meddling zeal his barbarous taste betrays,
And smears his tombstone as he marr’d his plays.”

It was not until 1861 that the white paint was scraped off and the original colour restored, by the light of what traces remained.

Opinions have greatly varied as to the merits of the portrait, and many observers have been disappointed with it. Dr. Ingleby, for one, was distressed by its “painful stare, with goggle eyes and gaping mouth.” But the measure of this disappointment is exactly in proportion to the perhaps exaggerated expectations held. We must bear in mind that the sculptor worked from a death-mask, and that the expression was thus a conventional restoration.

Mark Twain, who, like the egregious Ignatius Donnelly, did not believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, founded a good deal of his disbelief on the unvexed serenity of this monumental bust. It troubled him greatly that it should be there, so serene and emotionless. “The bust, too, there in the Stratford church. The precious bust, the priceless bust, the calm bust with the dandy moustache and the putty face, unseamed of care—that face which has looked passionlessly down upon the awed pilgrim for a hundred and fifty years, and will still down look upon the awed pilgrim three hundred more, with the deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle expression of a bladder.” What, then, did he expect? A tragic mask, a laughing face of comedy? But Mark Twain hardly counts as a Shakespeare critic.

It is forgotten by most people that the painting and scraping have wrought some changes, not for the better, in the expression of the face, tending towards making it what Halliwell-Phillipps too extravagantly calls a “miserable travesty of an intellectual human being.” However lifeless the expression, we see the features are those of a man of affairs. They are good and in no way abnormal. The brow is broad and lofty; the jaw and chin, while not massive, perhaps more than a thought heavier than usual. This was a man, one thinks, who would have succeeded in whatever walk of life he chose, and that is exactly the impression derived from the known facts and the traditions of Shakespeare’s life.

There have been numerous arguments in recent times in favour of digging that dust which the poet’s curse has thus far kept inviolate, but the courage has been lacking to it; whether in view of the curse or in fear of public opinion seems to be uncertain.

The late J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps wrote, about 1885: “It is not many years since a phalanx of trouble-tombs, lanterns and spades in hand, assembled in the chancel at dead of night, intent on disobeying the solemn injunction that the bones of Shakespeare were not to be disturbed. But the supplicatory lines prevailed. There were some amongst the number who, at the last moment, refused to incur the warning condemnation and so the design was happily abandoned.”

Nor would it appear that the graves of his family have been disturbed. They lie in a row, with his own, before the altar, a position they occupy by right of Shakespeare having purchased the rectorial tithes, and thus becoming that curious anomaly, a “lay rector.” It matters little or nothing where one’s bones are laid, but the doing this, and thus acquiring the right of sepulture in the most honoured place in the church, seems to imply that Shakespeare expected to found a family, and to see that his name was honoured to future generations in his native town.

We are not to suppose that the clergy of that time welcomed Shakespeare’s burial in this honoured place, but they could not help themselves. He had acquired the right, and although he had lived well into a time when puritanism had banished plays and players from Stratford, and although as a playwright he must have been regarded by many as a lost soul—unless, indeed, he became a converted man in his last year or so—his rights had to be observed.

Immediately next the wall is the flat stone that marks the grave of Anne Shakespeare, who survived her husband, and died August 6th, 1623, aged sixty-seven. An eight-line Latin verse, probably by her son-in-law, Dr. John Hall, and couched in the most affectionate terms, is inscribed upon a small brass plate; it is thus rendered—

“Milk, life thou gavest. For a boon so great,
Mother, alas! I give thee but a stone;
O! might some angel blest remove its weight,
Thy form should issue like thy Saviour’s own.
But vain my prayers; O Christ, come quickly, come!
And thou, my Mother, shalt from hence arise,
Though closed as yet within this narrow tomb,
To meet thy Saviour in the starry skies.”

Next in order comes the slab covering the grave of Shakespeare himself, and following it that of Thomas Nash, husband of Elizabeth Hall, grand-daughter of the poet. He died in 1647, aged fifty-three, and is honoured in a four-line Latin verse. Fourthly comes the grave of Dr. Hall, who died in 1635, aged sixty, with a six-line Latin verse, and next is that of Susanna, Shakespeare’s elder daughter, wife of Dr. Hall. She died in 1649, aged sixty-six, and has this poetic appreciation for epitaph—

“Witty above her sexe, but that’s not all,
Wise to Salvation was good Mistris Hall,
Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this
Wholy of him with whom she’s now in blisse,
Then, Passenger, ha’st ne’re a teare
To weepe with her that wept with all?
That wept, yet set herselfe to chere
Them up with comforts cordiall.
Her Love shall live, her mercy spread,
When thou hast ne’re a teare to shed.”

This touching tribute was nearly lost in the gross outrage perpetrated in or about 1707, when it was erased for the purpose of providing room for an inscription to one Richard Watts. Happily Dugdale, in his monumental history of Warwickshire, had recorded it, and it was re-cut from that evidence in 1836.

It is gratifying to note that no monuments to self-advertising members of the theatrical profession, or others keen to obtain a reflected glory from association with Shakespeare, have been allowed here, although we have to thank an aroused public opinion, and not the clergy, the natural guardians of the spot, for that. It was proposed, a few years ago, to place a memorial to that entirely blameless actress, well versed in Shakespearean parts, Helen Faucit, Lady Martin, on the wall opposite Shakespeare’s monument, and it was nearly accomplished. The clergy blessed the project, the public were allowed to hear little or nothing about it, and the thing would have been done, except for protests raised at the eleventh hour. The monument eventually found its way to the Shakespeare Memorial, where it may now be found, but those responsible for the proposal were not wholly to be baulked, and the evidence of their persistence is to be seen in the nave, where a very elaborate dark-green marble pulpit, in memory of Helen Faucit, and given by her husband, Sir Theodore Martin, attracts attention.

There has been a good deal of praise and admiration of the modern stained glass in the noble windows of the chancel and the windows of the church in general, including those given by American admirers of Shakespeare, but the truth is that there is no stained glass in Stratford church above the commercial level of the ordinary ecclesiastical furnisher, and the sooner the fact is recognised, the better for all concerned. The guidebooks will tell you nothing of this, but we have to see things for ourselves, and use our own judgment.

The tomb of the rebuilder of the chancel, Thomas Balsall, is little noticed. It is seen under the east window, on the north side, and is a greatly mutilated, but still beautiful, altar-tomb. Above it, on the wall, is the monument with fine portrait-busts of Richard Combe and his intended wife, Judith, who died 1649. The altar-tomb, with effigy, of John Combe, 1614, of the College, and of Welcombe, a friend of Shakespeare, is against the east wall. Combe was a man of wealth, who did not disdain the part of money-lender. He had the reputation of an usurer, although ten per cent. was his moderate rate, and, according to the tradition, hearing it said that Shakespeare had an epitaph waiting for him, begged to hear it. This, then, was what he heard—

“Ten in a hundred lies here engraved,
’Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not saved.
If any man ask, Who lies in this tomb?
Ho! ho! says the Devil, ’tis my John-a-Combe.”

It is an idle story, and the verse is adapted from an epigram in the jest-books of the age.

A prominent feature of a collegiate church was the stalls, with their miserere seats, for the priests, and we have here stalls for twenty-six, still retaining their beautifully carved seats, little injured by time or violence. We do, in fact, frequently find the miserere carvings uninjured in cathedrals, abbeys and collegiate churches; largely because they are always on the underside of the seats and thus apt to be overlooked. Those at Stratford are well up to the general level of interest and amusement.

Amusement? Yes. The very broadest fun, sometimes particularly coarse, lurks in these often unsuspected places; and the greatest artistry of the wood-carver too, who will turn at random from the loving rendering of flower or foliage, to sacred symbols; then to the representation of birds and beasts and extraordinary chimeras that never existed outside the frontiers of Nightmare Land; and to queer domestic or social scenes. Here we find prime examples of such things. Under one seat a Crown of Thorns and the I.H.S. occur, on either side of a scene showing a man and wife fighting. He has a long beard which she is pulling with one hand, while with the other she bastes him with a ladle. She employs her feet, too, in kicking him.

Under the next seat we see this domestic strife resumed, but it is shown in two scenes, over which a central woman-headed beast presides. Here the termagant pulls her husband’s beard and tears his mouth open, while he retaliates by pulling her hair. The other scene represents the taming of the shrew. A naked woman is being thrashed by a man, and a dog completes the retribution by biting her leg.

Among the other carvings we note the favourite Bear and Ragged Staff of this district; a beggar’s monkey, with chained tin pot, or drinking-vessel, and a variety of minor subjects. Among the most interesting is that example illustrated here.

The subject is that of the once-popular legend of the unicorn, which was, according to mediæval story, an animal of the fiercest and most untamable kind, and only to be captured in one way. This way was to find a virgin, at once of great beauty and unquestioned virtue, and to conduct her to the unicorn’s haunts in the greenwood. Immediately the animal, tame only in the presence of a pure virgin, would come and lay its head gently and fearlessly in her lap; whereupon the hunter would steal forth and slay the confiding beast.

It is to be remarked here that the person who could invent such a story, whatever else he was, and however fearless his imagination, was, clearly enough, no sportsman. It is quite easy to imagine such an one shooting a sitting pheasant, or poisoning a fox.

Here, in the illustration, we perceive the maiden, not so beautiful as the carver intended her to be, caressing the confiding unicorn and apparently scratching him behind the ear, while an unsportsmanlike person digs him in the rump at leisure, with a spear-headed weapon.

CHAPTER XI

Shottery and Anne Hathaway’s Cottage.