Shakespeare the countryman.
WE have abundant evidence of Shakespeare the countryman in his works, and
of the Warwickshire man some evidences, too. In the splendid speech of
the Duke of Burgundy, in _Henry the Fifth_, he makes the Frenchman talk
with an appreciation of agricultural disaster which only an English
farmer, and a Warwickshire or Gloucestershire farmer, too, could show.
In the miseries of France, worsted by war, the Duke speaks thus—
“Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart,
Unprunèd dies: her hedges even-pleach’d,
Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair,
Put forth disorder’d twigs: her fallow leas
The darnel, hemlock, and rank fumitory,
Doth root upon; while that the coulter rusts
That should deracinate such savagery:
The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth
The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover,
Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank,
Conceives by idleness; and nothing teems
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs,
Losing both beauty and utility.”
Bacon would not have made a Frenchman speak with so English a tongue, in
the way of the Midlands, nor could he if he would, for he knew no more
than the real Burgundy could have known, those details of agricultural
life; and he certainly could not have identified a “kecksie,” or a
“keck,” as the Warwickshire children still call the hemlock, of whose
dried stems they make whistles.
“Easy it is of a cut loaf to steal a shive, we know,” says Demetrius, in
_Titus Andronicus_. That ancient Roman is made to talk like any
Warwickshire agricultural labourer who takes his lunch in the hedgerow,
off a “shive o’ bread, a bit o’ cheese or baacon and a drap o’ summit;
maybe a tot o’ cider or maybe a mug of ale.” After which he will “shog
off” to work again; using in that local word “shog” the expression
Shakespeare places in the mouth of Nym, in _Henry the Fifth_. At the
close of the day he will be “forewearied,” as King John describes
himself.
In his plays Shakespeare follows the year all round the calendar and
touches every season with magic. You feel convinced, from the sympathy,
the joyousness, and the intimate touches, of his country scenes that he
was a rustic at heart, and that he must have longed, during those many
years when he was winning success in London, to return not only to his
native place—to which the heart of every one turns fondly—but to the
meadows, the cornfields, the hills and dales and the wild flowers around
the town of Stratford-on-Avon. There again, when spring was come, to
hear “the sweet bird’s note,” whether it were “the throstle with his note
so true,” “the ousel cock so black of hue, with orange tawny bill,” “the
wren with little quill;”
“The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,
The plain-song cuckoo gray,”
or better still the mad joyous outbursts of the skylarks’ songs (“And
merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks”) in those wide horizons in May:
these, you are certain, were Shakespeare’s ideals.
Of all the seasons, although he writes sympathetically of every one,
Shakespeare best loved the spring. He is not exceptional in that, for it
is the season of hope and promise, when the risen sap in the trees makes
the leaves unfold and the buds unsheath their beauties, when beasts and
birds respond to the climatic change and hibernating small creatures and
insects awake from their long sleep; and no less than the trees and
plants, the animals and insects, all mankind finds a renewal of life.
“It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o’er the green cornfield did pass
In the spring-time, the only merry ring-time,
When birds do sing, hey ding-a-ding
Sweet lovers love the spring.”
Thus the pages sung in the Forest of Arden; and Shakespeare, be sure, put
something of himself into the character of Autolycus the pedlar, who
after all was a man of better observation, judging by his song, than
rogues of his sort commonly be—
“When daffodils begin to peer,—
With hey! the doxy over the dale,—
Why, then comes in the sweet o’ the year;
For the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale.
The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,—
With hey! the sweet birds, O how they sing!—
Doth set my pugging tooth on edge;
For a quart of ale is a dish for a king.
The lark that tirra-lirra chants,—
With hey! with hey! the thrush and the jay:—
Are summer songs for me and my aunts,
While we lie tumbling in the hay.”
Shakespeare, we like to think, had the tenderest feeling for those same
daffodils with which Autolycus begins his song; for in lines that are
among the most beautiful he ever wrote, he makes Perdita speak of—
“Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty.”
Here we find, not for once only, Shakespeare and that other sweet singer,
Herrick, curiously in sympathy—
“Sweet daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon.”
He does not care so ardently for the rose, although he seems, rather
indifferently it is true, to admit that it is the queen of flowers. But
it delays until summer is upon us. It does not dare with the daffodil.
He returns again and again to the more idyllic simple flowers of nature
that the gardener takes no account of. He paints the cowslips in a few
words of close observation. They are Queen Mab’s pensioners—
“The cowslips tall her pensioners be;
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours.”
And in every cowslip’s ear the fairy hangs a pearl, from her harvest of
dew-drops.
Shakespeare’s Warwickshire was rich—and it is so still, although it is a
very much more enclosed countryside than in his day—in wild-flowers; the
gillyflower, the wallflower that loves the nooks and crannies of ruined
walls as much as does the jackdaw; the candy-tuft, the foxglove that
still stands like a tall floral sentinel in many a hedgerow around
Snitterfield; with many another.
“Here’s flowers for you;
Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram,
The marigold, that goes to bed with the sun.”
The “flowers,” however, mentioned in that quotation are, with one
exception, herbs. Such as they grace and make fragrant the old gardens
of many a cottage the casual tourist never sees. There they have grown
for generations, in great clumps and beds; not in meagre and formal
patches, as in some “Shakespearean gardens” that could be named. In the
byways, in short, where things are not consciously on show, everything
is, paradoxically enough, better worth seeing. There the homely virtues
of the people are better displayed; the flowers are brighter and their
scent sweeter; and there the sun is more mellow. In the byways old mossy
walls still stand, russet brown and sere in drought, as though the moss
were a dead thing, but green again so soon as ever the rain comes; and
old roofs bear the fleshy house-leek in great patches, as though they had
burst into some strange vegetable elephantiasis. That is Warwickshire as
it is off the beaten track, yonder, at the horizon, where the sky meets
the earth: a vague direction, I fancy, but sufficient. We must not
divulge all things.
The ragged-robin that blooms later in every hedge; the “crow-flower” as
Shakespeare names it; the “long purple,” otherwise the wild arum;
pansies—“that’s for thoughts”—some call them “love-in-idleness”; all
figure in _Hamlet_, where you find a good deal of old country folklore in
Ophelia’s talk. “Rosemary, that’s for remembrance”; fennel and
columbines: “there’s rue for you; and here’s some for me; we may call it
herb of grace o’ Sundays;—you may wear your rue with a difference.”
There is sometimes an almost farmer-like practical philosophy underlying
his observation, as where Biron says, in _Love’s Labour’s Lost_: “Allons
allons! sow’d cockle reap’d no corn”; and in _King Lear_, in the
reference to—
“Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn.”
The corn-cockle is of course better known as the “cornflower,” whose
beautiful blue is so contrasting a colour with the scarlet of the
poppies, that equally fail to win the farmer’s admiration.
But the greater the study we give to Shakespeare and his treatment of
flowers, the more evident it becomes that his sympathies were all with
the earlier, springtime blossoms that dare, not quite with the daffodils,
but soon after the roaring ides of March are overpast. Thus, he makes
Perdita resume, with—
“Violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes
Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses
That die unmarried ere they can behold
Bright Phœbus in his strength.”
The “daisies pied,” the “lady-smocks all silver-white,” that is to say,
the white arabis which the Warwickshire children of to-day call
“smell-smocks,” and the “cuckoo buds of yellow hue,” otherwise the
buttercups, out of which the cuckoo is in old folklore supposed to drink,
he tells us, all “paint the meadows with delight.” He could never have
written those lines with care and thought and in cold blood: he must have
seen those meadows with all the delight he expresses, and the words
themselves must needs have been penned with enthusiasm. This is a thesis
easily susceptible of proof. The lovely cuckoo-song at the close of
_Love’s Labour’s Lost_, which with a charm unmatched tells us of those
flower-spangled meads, has no bearing upon the action of the play: it is
written in sheer enjoyment, and it is in the same spirit that his other
allusions to the fields and hedgerows and woodlands, the “bosky acres”
and the “unshrubbed down,” are conceived. Ariel, that tricksy sprite of
_The Tempest_, is a true countryman’s fancy, as clearly to be seen in the
lines—
“Where the bee sucks, there suck I,
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry,
On the bat’s back I do fly.”
Here, as often elsewhere, the dramatist and the poet are at odds.
Shakespeare the actor-playwright, with every necessity of the stage—its
entrances and exits, and the imperative need for the action of the play
to be maintained—halts the story so that the other Shakespeare, the
idyllic poet, the lover of nature, shall picture some scene for which he
cares everything, but which to the Greeks—for Greeks here read the London
playgoers of his time—must have meant foolishness.
Such an instance, among many, is Oberon’s speech to Puck, in _Midsummer
Night’s Dream_—
“I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
Where ox-lips and the nodding violet grows;
Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania.”
For these lines and such as these Shakespeare risked the brickbats, the
cat-calls and the obloquy that awaited the dramatist whose action
dragged. There is no excuse for them—except that of their beauty, and
that to the groundlings was less than nothing.
That bank whereon the wild-thyme grew must have been, I like to think,
somewhere in The Dingles, a curious spot just north-east of Stratford, to
the left of the Warwick road, as you go up to Welcombe. I think there
are no “dingles” anywhere nearer London than the midlands; none in name,
although there may be many in fact. By a “dingle” in the midlands a deep
narrow vale, or natural gully is meant. The word is especially well
known in Shropshire and the Welsh borders, where such features, between
the enfolding hills, are plentiful. Here The Dingles are abrupt and
deeply winding gullies, breaking away from the red earth of the Welcombe
uplands: a very tumbled and unspoiled spot. Elms look down from the
crest of them, and ancient thorn-trees line their sides. It seems quite
a sure and certain thing that Shakespeare when a boy knew this spot well
and frequented it with the other Stratford boys of his age; catching,
perhaps the “earth-delving conies,” and I am afraid—for all boys are
cruel except those in the Sunday-school books, and they are creatures in
the nature of sucking Galahads imagined by maiden aunts—I am afraid, I
say, also birds’-nesting.
The Dingles, doubtless, formed in Shakespeare’s mind the site of
Titania’s bower. Perhaps you may find it yourself, if you seek there,
somewhere about midsummer midnight, in the full of the moon, when
possibly her obedient fairies will be as kind and courteous as of old to
that gentleman who has the good fortune to discover the magic spot, and
may—
“Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes;
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries.”
If these adventures do befall you, tell no one; for you will not find
belief, even in this same Shakespeare land.
It is, however, much more likely that your walk will be solitary, and
that for the apricots and grapes you will have to wait until you have
returned to your hotel in the town.
The last two years of Shakespeare’s life were concerned with a heated
local question: none other than that of the proposed enclosure of the
Welcombe common fields, including The Dingles, by William Combe who had
by the death of his father become squire of Welcombe and had at once
entered into an agreement with the lord of the manor and other
landholders to enclose the land. The corporation and townsfolk of
Stratford were bitterly opposed to this encroachment. Shakespeare’s
interest in the matter appears to have been only that of an owner of
tithes in these fields, and his sympathies were clearly against any such
extension of private rights. An entry under date of September 1615 among
others in the still-existing manuscript diary of Thomas Greene, then
clerk to the corporation, who calls Shakespeare his cousin, is to the
effect that Shakespeare told J. Greene (brother of the town clerk) that
he—Shakespeare—“was not able to bear the enclosing of Welcombe.” The
ambiguous and ungrammatical wording of Greene’s diary often renders his
meaning obscure and has caused a great conflict of opinion about
Shakespeare’s attitude in this affair, some reading it as in favour of
the enclosure. It really appears to have been one of benevolent
neutrality, and could scarcely have been otherwise. He himself was a
neighbouring landowner, and friendly with others, but sentimentally, he
looked with aversion upon those proposed doings. He “was not able to
bear” the enclosure of the place he had roamed when a boy, but that did
not give him the right to intervene at law. The corporation went to law
with Combe and his fellows and won their case, but by that time
Shakespeare had passed from these transient scenes. To this day The
Dingles is common land.