into a Shakespeare Museum, where are treasured more or less authentic
relics and those first editions which are worth their weight in
radium. Built of the tough Arden oak and of honest plaster, it was a
respectable residence for the times, not unworthy of that versatile
and vigorous citizen who traded in corn and timber and wool and
cattle, rose from the offices of ale-taster and constable to be
successively Chamberlain, Alderman, and High Bailiff, and loomed
before the eyes of his little son as the greatest man in the world.
The house, whose clay floors it may have been the children's task to
keep freshly strewn with rushes, would have been furnished with oaken
chests and settles, stools, trestle-boards, truckle-beds, and perhaps
a great bedstead with carved posts. Robert Arden, a man of property
and position, had left, among other domestic luxuries, eleven "painted
cloths"--naïve representations of religious or classical subjects,
with explanatory texts beneath. His daughter may have had some of
these works of art to adorn the walls of her Stratford home, and, like
enough, she brought her husband a silver salt-cellar and a "fair
garnish of pewter." Her eldest son, whose plays "teach courtesy to
kings," was doubtless carefully bred,--sent off early to school "with
shining morning face," and expected to wait on his parents at their
eleven o'clock breakfast before taking his own, though we need feel no
concern about his going hungry. Trust him for knowing, as he passed
the trenchers and filled the flagons, how to get many a staying
nibble behind his father's back.
We wandered on to the Grammar School, still located in the
picturesque, half-timbered building originally erected, toward the end
of the thirteenth century, by the Guild of the Holy Cross. Here once
was hospital as well as school, and in the long hall on the ground
floor, even yet faintly frescoed with the Crucifixion, the Guild held
its meetings and kept its feasts. Henry VIII made but half a bite of
all this, but the boy-king, Edward VI, eleven years before
Shakespeare's birth, gave the ancient edifice back to Stratford. Then
the long hall was used for the deliberations of the Town Council, and
sometimes, especially when John Shakespeare was in office, for the
performances of strolling players,--three men and a boy, perhaps,
travelling in their costumes, which, by a little shifting and
furbishing, might serve for an old-fashioned morality or a new-fangled
chronicle, or, should the schoolmaster's choice prevail, for something
newly Englished from the classics. "Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor
Plautus too light." The school, thenceforth known as Edward VI Grammar
School, was permanently established in the top story, where it is
still in active operation. Here we saw the Latin room in which another
William than Mistress Page's hopeful was taught "to hick and to hack,"
and the Mathematics room where he learned enough arithmetic to "buy
spices for our sheep-shearing." He was only fourteen or fifteen, it is
believed, when his father's business troubles broke off his schooling,
but not his education. Everywhere was "matter for a hot brain." And
he, who, since the days when he "plucked geese, played truant, and
whipped top, ... knew not what 'twas to be beaten," would have borne
up blithely against this seeming set-back. Nature had given him "wit
to flout at Fortune," and these, too, were the red-blooded years of
youth, when he was ever ready to "dance after a tabor and pipe" and
pay his laughing court to many a "queen of curds and cream."
"But, O, the thorns we stand upon!"
The mature charms of Anne Hathaway turned jest into earnest and sent
prudence down the wind. There was a hasty wedding, nobody knows where,
and John Shakespeare's burdens were presently increased by the advent
of three grandchildren. It was obviously high time for this
ne'er-do-well young John-a-Dreams--"yet he's gentle; never schooled,
and yet learned; full of noble device; of all sorts enchantingly
beloved"--to strike out into the world and seek his fortune.
Next to the Guild Hall stands the Guild Chapel, whose former frescoes
of the Day of Judgment must have made deep impression on the "eye of
childhood that fears a painted devil"; and over the way from the Guild
Chapel is New Place. On this site in the time of Henry VII rose the
Great House, built by a Stratford magnate and benefactor, Sir Hugh
Clopton,--he who gave the town that "fair Bridge of Stone over Avon."
In 1597 Shakespeare, who could hardly have been in London a dozen
years, had prospered so well, albeit in the disreputable crafts of
actor and playwright, that he bought the estate, repaired the mansion
then in "great ruyne and decay," and renamed it New Place. Yet
although it was his hour of triumph, his heart was sorrowful, for his
only son, his eleven-year-old Hamnet, "jewel of children," had died
the year before. At least another decade passed before Shakespeare
finally withdrew from London and settled down at New Place with the
wife eight years his senior, a plain country woman of Puritan
proclivities. In his twenty years of intense creative life,
"The inward service of the mind and soul"
must have widened beyond any possible comprehension of hers, nor can
his two daughters, unlettered and out of his world as they were, have
had much inkling of the career and achievements of "so rare a wonder'd
father." His parents were dead. Their ashes may now mingle with little
Hamnet's in some forgotten plot of the elm-shadowed churchyard. Of his
two daughters, Susanna, the elder, had married a Stratford physician,
and there was a grandchild, little Elizabeth Hall, to brighten the
gardens of New Place. As I lingered there,--for the gardens remain,
though the house is gone,--my eyes rested on a three-year-old lass in
a fluttering white frock,--no wraith, though she might have
been,--dancing among the flowers with such uncertain steps and tossing
such tiny hands in air that the birds did not trouble themselves to
take to their wings, but hopped on before her like playfellows.
The deepest of the Shakespeare mysteries is, to my mind, the silence
of those closing years. Were nerves and brain temporarily exhausted
from the strain of that long period of continuous production? Or had
he come home from London sore at heart, "toss'd from wrong to injury,"
smarting from "the whips and scorns of time" and abjuring the "rough
magic" of his art? Or was he, in "the sessions of sweet silent
thought," dreaming on some high, consummate poem in comparison with
which the poor stage-smirched plays seemed to him not worth the
gathering up? Or might he, taking a leaf out of Ben Jonson's book,
have been in fact arranging and rewriting his works, purging his gold
from the dross of various collaborators? Or was some new, inmost
revelation of life dawning upon him, holding him dumb with awe? We can
only ask, not answer; but certainly they err who claim that the
divinest genius of English letters had wrought merely for house and
land, and found his chief reward in writing "Gentleman" after his
name.
"Sure, he that made us with such large discourse
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To rust in us unus'd."
Shakespeare had been gentle before he was a gentleman, and had held
ever--let his own words bear witness!--
"Virtue and cunning were endowments greater
Than nobleness and riches."
The gods had given him but fifty-two years on earth--had they granted
more, he might have probed and uttered too many of their secrets--when
for the last time he was "with holy bell ... knoll'd to church." It
was an April day when the neighbours bore a hand-bier--as I saw a
hand-bier borne a few years since across the fields from Shottery--the
little way from New Place down Chapel Lane and along the Waterside--or
perhaps by Church Street--and up the avenue, beneath its blossoming
limes, to Holy Trinity.
Here, where the thousands and the millions come up to do reverence to
this
"Dear Son of Memory, great Heir of Fame,"
I passed a peaceful hour, ruffled only--if the truth must out--by the
unjustifiable wrath which ever rises in me on reading Mrs. Susanna
Hall's epitaph. I can forgive the "tombemaker" who wrought the bust, I
can endure the stained-glass windows, I can overlook the alabaster
effigy of John Combe in Shakespeare's chancel, but I resent the
Puritan self-righteousness of the lines,--
"Witty above her sexe, but that's not all,
Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall,
Something of Shakespeare was in that but this
Wholly of him with whom she's now in blisse."
Yes, I know that Shakespeare made her his heiress, that she was clever
and charitable, that in July of 1643 she entertained Queen Henrietta
Maria at New Place, but I do not care at all for the confusion of her
bones when "a person named Watts" intruded into her grave fifty-eight
years after she had taken possession, and I believe she used her
father's manuscripts for wrapping up her saffron pies.
We spent the earlier half of the afternoon in a drive among some of
the outlying villages of Stratford,--first to Wilmcote, the birthplace
of Shakespeare's mother. We dismissed a fleeting thought of "Marian
Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot," and sought only for "Mary
Arden's Cottage." Gabled and dormer-windowed, of stout oak timbers and
a light brown plaster, it stands pleasantly within its rustic
greenery. Old stone barns and leaning sheds help to give it an aspect
of homely kindliness. Robert Arden's will, dated 1556, is the will of
a good Catholic, bequeathing his soul to God "and to our blessed Lady,
Saint Mary, and to all the holy company of heaven." He directed that
his body should be buried in the churchyard of St. John the Baptist in
Aston-Cantlow. So we drove on, a little further to the northwest, and
found an Early English church with a pinnacled west tower. The air was
sweet with the roses and clematis that clambered up the walls. It is
here, in all likelihood, that John Shakespeare and Mary Arden were
married.
We still pressed on, splashing through a ford and traversing a
surviving bit of the Forest of Arden, to one village more,
Wootton-Wawen, with a wonderful old church whose every stone could
tell a story. Somervile the poet, who loved Warwickshire so well, is
buried in the chantry chapel, and the white-haired rector told us
proudly that Shakespeare had often come to service there. Indeed,
Wootton-Wawen may have meant more to the great dramatist and done more
to shape his destinies than we shall ever know, though Shakespeare
scholarship is beginning to turn its searchlight on John Somervile of
Edstone Hall, whose wife was nearly related to Mary Arden. Papist, as
the whole Arden connection seems to have been, John Somervile's brain
may have given way under the political and religious troubles of those
changeful Tudor times. At all events, he suddenly set out for London,
declaring freely along the road that he was going to kill the Queen.
Arrest, imprisonment, trial for high treason, conviction, and a
mysterious death in his Newgate cell followed in terrible sequence.
Nor did the tragedy stop with him, but his wife, sister, and priest
were arrested on charge of complicity, and not these only, but that
quiet and honourable gentleman, Edward Arden of Park Hall in Wilmcote,
with his wife and brother. Francis Arden and the ladies were in course
of time released, but Edward Arden, who had previously incurred the
enmity of Leicester by refusing to wear his livery,--a flattery to
which many of the Warwickshire gentlemen eagerly stooped,--suffered,
on December 20, 1583, the brutal penalty of the law,--hanged and drawn
and quartered, put to death with torture, for no other crime than that
of having an excitable son-in-law and a sturdy English sense of
self-respect. A sad and bitter Yule it must have been for his kinsfolk
in Wilmcote and in Stratford. There was danger in the air, too; a hot
word might give Sir Thomas Lucy or some zealous Protestant his chance;
and there may well have been graver reasons than a poaching frolic why
young Will Shakespeare should have disappeared from the county.
FOOTNOTE:
[6] From the account given by Sir William Dugdale, the celebrated
antiquary, who was born at Shustoke, eight miles west of Nuneaton, in
1605, and educated at Coventry. "The Antiquities of Warwickshire" he
published in 1656. He died in 1686, and his tomb, with his own
inscription, may be seen in the chancel of Shustoke Church.
THE COTSWOLDS
Late in the afternoon we started out from Stratford for a peep at the
Cotswolds, swelling downs that belong in the main to Oxfordshire,
although, as our drive soon revealed to us, Warwickshire,
Gloucestershire, Northamptonshire, and even Worcestershire all come in
for a share of these pastoral uplands. It is in the Cotswolds, not far
from the estuary of the Severn, that the Thames rises and flows
modestly through Oxfordshire, which lies wholly within its upper
valley, to become the commerce-laden river that takes majestic course
through the heart of London.
We were still in the Shakespeare country, for his restless feet must
often have roved these breezy wilds, famous since ancient days for
hunts and races. "I am glad to see you, good Master Slender," says
genial Master Page. And young Master Slender, with his customary tact,
replies: "How does your fallow greyhound, sir? I heard say he was
outrun on Cotsol." Whereupon Master Page retorts a little stiffly: "It
could not be judged, sir," and Slender chuckles: "You'll not confess;
you'll not confess." Why could it not be judged? For one of the
delights of the Cotswold hunt--so hunters say--is the clear view on
this open tableland of the straining pack. Shakespeare knew well the
"gallant chiding" of the hounds,--how, when they "spend their mouths,"
"Echo replies
As if another chase were in the skies."
Here he may have seen his death-pressed hare, "poor Wat," try to
baffle his pursuers and confuse the scent by running among the sheep
and deer and along the banks "where earth-delving conies keep."
Still about our route clung, like a silver mist, Shakespeare
traditions. In the now perished church of Luddington, two miles south
of Stratford, the poet, it is said, married Anne Hathaway; but the
same bridal is claimed for the venerable church of Temple Grafton,
about a mile distant, and again for the neighbouring church of
Billesley. Long Marston, "Dancing Marston," believes its
sporting-ground was in the mind of the prentice playwright, a little
homesick yet in London, when he wrote:
"The Nine-Men's Morris is filled up with mud;
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable."
At Lower Quinton stands an old manor-house of whose library--such is
the whisper that haunts its folios--Will Shakespeare was made free. A
happy picture that--of an eager lad swinging across the fields and
leaping stiles to enter into his paradise of books.
We were well into Gloucestershire before this, that tongue of
Gloucestershire which runs up almost to Stratford-on-Avon, and were
driving on in the soft twilight, now past the old-time Common Fields
with their furlongs divided by long balks; now over rolling reaches,
crossed by low stone walls, of sheep-walk and water-meadow and
wheat-land, with here and there a fir plantation or a hazel covert;
now through a strange grey hamlet built of the native limestone. Our
road was gradually rising, and just before nightfall we came into
Chipping Campden, most beautiful of the old Cotswold towns. We had
not dreamed that England held its like,--one long, wide, stately
street, bordered by silent fronts of great stone houses, with here and
there the green of mantling ivy, but mainly with only the rich and
changeful colouring of the stone itself, grey in shadow, golden in the
sun. Campden was for centuries a famous centre of the wool trade; the
Cotswolds served it as a broad grazing-ground whose flocks furnished
wool for the skilful Flemish weavers; its fourteenth century
Woolstaplers' Hall still stands; its open market-house, built in 1624
midway of the mile-long street, is one of its finest features; its
best-remembered name is that of William Grevel, described on his
monumental brass (1401) as "Flower of the Wool-merchants of all
England." He bequeathed a hundred marks toward the building of the
magnificent church, which stood complete, as we see it now, in the
early fifteenth century. Its glorious tower, tall and light, yet not
too slender, battlemented, turreted, noble in all its proportions, is
a Cotswold landmark. As we were feasting our eyes, after an evening
stroll, upon the symmetries of that grand church, wonderfully
impressive as it rose in the faint moonlight above a group of strange,
pagoda-roofed buildings, its chimes rang out a series of sweet old
tunes, all the more poignantly appealing in that the voices of those
ancient bells were thin and tremulous, and now and then a note was
missed.
[Illustration: TOWER OF CHIPPING CAMPDEN CHURCH]
The fascinations of Campden held us the summer day long. We must needs
explore the church interior, which has suffered at the hands of the
restorer; yet its chancel brasses, wrought with figures of plump
woolstaplers, their decorous and comely dames, and their kneeling
children, reward a close survey. I especially rejoiced in one
complacent burgher, attended by three wimpled wives, and a long row of
sons and daughters all of the same size. There is a curious chapel,
too, where we came upon the second Viscount Campden, in marble shroud
and coronet, ceremoniously handing, with a most cynical and unholy
expression, his lady from the sepulchre. There was a ruined guildhall
to see, and some antique almshouses of distinguished beauty. As we
looked, an old man came feebly forth and bowed his white head on the
low enclosing wall in an attitude of grief or prayer. We learned
later that one of the inmates had died that very hour. We went over
the works of the new Guild of Handicraft, an attempt to realise, here
in the freshness of the wolds, the ideals of Ruskin and Morris. We
cast wistful eyes up at Dover's Hill, on whose level summit used to be
held at Whitsuntide the merry Cotswold Games. "Heigh for Cotswold!"
But it was the hottest day of the summer, and we contented ourselves
with the phrase.
Other famous Cotswold towns are "Stow-on-the-Wold, where the wind
blows cold"; Northleach in the middle of the downs, desolate now, but
once full of the activities of those wool-merchants commemorated by
quaint brasses in the splendid church,--brasses which show them snugly
at rest in their furred gowns, with feet comfortably planted on
stuffed woolpack or the fleecy back of a sheep, or, more precariously,
on a pair of shears; Burford, whose High Street and church are as
noteworthy as Campden's own; Winchcombe, once a residence of the
Mercian kings and a famous shrine of pilgrimage; Cirencester, the
"Capital of the Cotswolds," built above a ruined Roman city and
possessing a church of surpassing richness. How we longed for months
of free-footed wandering over these exhilarating uplands with their
grey settlements like chronicles writ in stone! But Father Time was
shaking his hour-glass just behind us, in his marplot fashion, and
since it had to be a choice, we took the evening train to Chipping
Norton.
I regret to say that Chipping Norton, the highest town in Oxfordshire,
showed little appreciation of the compliment. It was not easy to find
lodging and wellnigh impossible to get carriage conveyance back to
Campden the next day. It is a thriving town, ranking third in the
county, and turns out a goodly supply of leather gloves and the
"Chipping Norton tweeds." The factory folk were, many of them, having
their holiday just then; their friends were coming for the week-end
and had one and all, it would seem, set their hearts on being
entertained by a Saturday drive; the only victoria for hire in the
place was going to Oxford to bring an invalid lady home; altogether
the hostlers washed their hands--merely in metaphor--of the two
gad-abouts who thought Chipping Norton not good enough to spend Sunday
in. Before we slept, however, we had succeeded in engaging, at
different points, a high wagonette, a gaunt horse, and a bashful boy,
and the combination stood ready for us at nine o'clock in the morning.
Meanwhile we had seen the chief sights of this venerable town, whose
name is equivalent to Market Norton. Its one wide street, a handsome,
tree-shadowed thoroughfare with the Town Hall set like an island in
its midst, runs up the side and along the brow of a steep plateau. A
narrow way plunges down from this central avenue and passes a
seven-gabled row of delectable almshouses, dated 1640. Indeed, no
buildings in these Midland counties have more architectural charm than
their quaint shelters for indigent old age. The abrupt lane leads to a
large grey church, square-towered and perpendicular, like the church
of Chipping Campden, but with a few Early English traces. Its peculiar
feature is the glass clerestory,--great square windows divided from
one another by the pillars of the nave. The sexton opened the doors
for us so early that we had leisure to linger a little before the old
altar-stone with its five crosses, before St. Mary's banner bordered
with her own blue, before the warrior pillowed on his helmet and
praying his last prayer beside his lady, whose clasped hands, even in
the time-worn alabaster, have a dimpled, chubby, coaxing look; and
before those characteristic merchant brasses, the men in tunics with
close sleeves and girdles, one of them standing with each foot on a
woolpack, the women in amazing head-dresses, "horned" and
"pedimented," and all the work so carefully and elaborately wrought
that the Cotswold brasses are authorities for the costume of the
period.
[Illustration: THE ROLLRIGHT STONES]
One of the main objects of this expedition, however, was the drive
back over the hills with their far views of down and wold to whose
vegetation the limestone imparts a peculiar tint of blue. We deviated
from the Campden road to see the Rollright Stones, a hoary army with
their leader well in advance. He, the King Stone, is across the
Warwickshire line, but, curiously enough, a little below the summit
which looks out over the Warwickshire plain. This monolith, eight or
nine feet high, fantastically suggests a huge body drawn back as if to
brace itself against the fling of some tremendous curse. The tale
tells how, in those good old times before names and dates had to be
remembered, a petty chief, who longed to extend his sway over all
Britain, had come thus far on his northward march. But here, when he
was almost at the crest of the hill, when seven strides more would
have brought him where he could see the Warwickshire village of Long
Compton on the other side, out popped an old witch, as wicked as a
thorn-bush, with the cry:
"If Long Compton thou canst see,
King of England thou shalt be."
On bounded the chief--what were seven steps to reach a throne!--but
the wooded summit, still shutting off his view, rose faster than he,
and again the eldritch screech was heard:
"Rise up, stick! stand still, stone!
King of England thou shalt be none."
And there he stands to this day, even as the spell froze him, while
the sorceress, disguised as an elder tree, keeps watch over her
victim. The fairies steal out from a hole in the bank on moonlight
nights and weave their dances round him. No matter how securely the
children of the neighbourhood fit a flat stone over the hole at
bedtime, every morning finds it thrust aside. We would not for the
world have taken liberties with that elfin portal, but if we had been
sure which of the several elder trees was the witch, we might have cut
at her with our penknives and seen,--it is averred by many,--as her
sap began to flow and her strength to fail, the contorted stone strain
and struggle to free itself from the charm. And had we seen that, I am
afraid we should forthwith have desisted from our hacking and taken to
our heels. As it was, the place had an uncanny feel, and we went back
into Oxfordshire some eighty yards to review the main body of the
army,
"a dismal cirque
Of Druid stones upon a forlorn moor."
These mysterious monuments, which in the day of the Venerable Bede
were no less remarkable than Stonehenge, have been ravaged by time,
but some sixty of them--their magic baffles an exact count--remain.
Grey Druid semblances, heathen to the core, owl-faced, monkey-faced,
they stand in a great, ragged circle, enclosing a clump of firs.
Deeply sunken in the ground, they are of uneven height; some barely
peep above the surface; the tallest rises more than seven feet; some
lie prone; some bend sideways; all have an aspect of extreme
antiquity, a perforated, worm-eaten look the reverse of prepossessing.
But our visit was ill-timed. If we had had the hardihood to climb up
to that wind-swept waste at midnight, we should have seen those
crouching goblins spring erect, join hands and gambol around in an
ungainly ring, trampling down the thistles and shocking every church
spire in sight. At midnight of All Saints they make a mad rush down
the hillside for their annual drink of water at a spring below.