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.
[Picture: Shakespeare’s Birthplace]
If you be a little exacting, and would keep the full freshness, the
sweetest savour of hero-worship, be content not to see the Birthplace,
and especially not that garden at the back of it. It was not, you know
it quite well, in the least like this when John Shakespeare lived here
and had his wool-store next door, where the Birthplace Museum is now, and
sometimes bought and sold corn or carried on the trade of glover. The
place has had so many changes of fortune, the appearance of the exterior
itself has been so utterly changed and so conjecturally restored, that
the thinking man loses a good deal of confidence. And the interior: the
rooms without furniture or sign of habitation are like a body whence the
soul has fled.
The building did not, for one thing, stand alone as it does now, the
houses on either side having been pulled down after it was purchased in
1848; with the, of course, entirely admirable idea of the better
lessening its risk from fire. The effect, and that of the hedges with
their hairpin railings, is to give the place the very superior appearance
of a private house. If old John Shakespeare could be summoned back and
taken for a walk along Henley Street, he would be surprised at many
things, but by none more than by the odd disappearance of every man’s
midden and the altered appearance of his own house. He would wonder what
had become of his shop, and assume no doubt that the occupier had made
his fortune and retired into private life. He 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.
[Picture: The Kitchen, Shakespeare’s Birthplace]
But let us to the Birthplace. At the door we are met by a caretaker. If
it be late in the day he will be a little, or possibly very, husky. In
any case he is hurried. He hastens us into a stone-floored room 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.”
[Picture: The Room in which Shakespeare was born]
The present attendants have less time for that kind of thing, and hurry
on with their mechanical tale. Why don’t the Trustees economise, and get
a gramophone? “This is the room where Shakespeare was born. The
furniture you see does not belong to his time. Some of the glass in the
window is original; you can tell it by the green tint. Them laths, sir,
in the ceiling? They’re iron, and put up to preserve the original
ceiling. No one is allowed in the room above. The ceiling and the
walls, as you will observe, are covered with names. Before visitors’
books were provided, visitors were invited to write their names here.
You will see that they have fully availed themselves of the privilege,
and those who had 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.
[Picture: Shakespeare’s Signet-Ring]
Haydon, the painter, wrote to Keats in 1818, about the discovery, “My
dear Keats, I shall go mad! In a field at Stratford-on-Avon, that
belonged to Shakespeare, they have found a gold ring and seal with the
initials ‘W.S.,’ and a true-lover’s knot between. If this is not
Shakespeare’s whose is it? I saw an impression to-day, and am to have
one as soon as possible: as sure as you live and breathe, and that he was
the first of beings, the seal belonged to him, O, Lord!”
Among the exhibits in the Museum are the town weights and measures, the
sword of state, and altogether some fine miscellaneous feeding for the
curio-fancier.
The cellars under the building are not shown, nor is the western part of
it, where the town archives are stored.
The garden at the back is laid out in beds planted with the flowers
mentioned by Shakespeare in his works, and in the middle of the well-kept
gravelled path is the base of the ancient town cross which formerly stood
at the intersection of Bridge Street and High Street. It is a pleasant
place, and its present condition is the result of care, the outcome of
much pious thought. But we may declare with all the emphatic language at
our command, that when William Shakespeare and his brothers Gilbert,
Richard and Edmund, and his sister Joan played out here in the back yard,
it was very little of a garden, and not at all tidy unless they were
angel-children, which we have no occasion to suppose. It seems to have
been originally an orchard, but no doubt Mr. John Shakespeare put it to
some use in connection with the several trades he followed.
The piety is undoubted, but it is a little overdone, and everything is in
sample. They are not very good specimens of marigolds we see here, but
still they are obviously marigolds, and we do not—no really we don’t—need
the label that identifies them and the other flowers. We can quite
easily recognise the winking Mary-bud, that beautiful flower whose golden
eyes are among the loveliest blossoms in an old-fashioned garden; we know
the rose, the jasmine, the gillyflower, the sunflower, the stock, the
ladysmock, and the whole delightful posy, and wonder who and what those
folk may be who cannot recognise them, and require these cast-iron labels
for their information.