Family Relations.
His wife and three children[14] stayed behind. In fact—and it may as well be said here—they always stayed behind. It does not appear that throughout the twenty or more succeeding years, during which Shakespeare was mostly in London, that either wife or child was ever domiciled with him there for ever so little time. Indeed, for the nine years immediately following Shakespeare’s departure from Stratford, traces of his special whereabouts are very dim; we know that rising from humblest work in connection with companies of players, he was blazing a great and most noticeable path for himself; but whether through those nine years he was tied to the shadow of London houses, or was booked for up-country expeditions, or (as some reckon) made brief continental journeyings, we cannot surely tell. In 1596, however, on the occasion of his son Hamnet’s death, he appears in Stratford again, in the prime of his powers then, a well-to-do man (buying New Place the year following), his London fame very likely blazoning his path amid old towns-people—grieving over his lost boy, whom he can have seen but little—perhaps putting some of the color of his private sorrow upon the palette where he was then mingling the tints for his play of “Romeo and Juliet.”
“Oh, my love,
Death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.
Thou art not conquered; Beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.
Why art thou yet so fair?”
His two daughters lived to maturity—both marrying; the favorite and elder daughter, Susanna, becoming the wife of Dr. Hall, a well-established physician in Stratford, who attended the poet in his last illness, and who became his executor. Shakespeare was—so far as known—watchful and tender of his children’s interest: nor is there positive evidence that he was otherwise to his wife, save such inferences as may be drawn from the tenor of some of his sonnets, and from those long London absences, over which it does not appear that either party greatly repined. Long absences are not prima-facie evidence of a lack of domestic harmonies; do indeed often promote them in a limited degree; and at worst, may possibly show only a sagacious disposition to give pleasant noiselessness to bickerings that would be inevitable.
It is further to be borne in mind, in partial vindication of Shakespeare’s marital loyalty, that this period of long exile from the family roof entailed not only absence from his wife, but also from father and mother—both of whom were living down to a date long subsequent,[15] and with whom—specially the mother—most affectionate relations are undoubted. A disloyalty that would have made him coy of wifely visitings could hardly harden him to filial duties, while the phlegmatic indifference of a very busy London man, which made him chary of home visitings, would go far to explain the seeming family estrangement.
But we must not, and cannot reckon the Stratford poet as a paragon of all the virtues; his long London absences, for cause or for want of cause—or both—may have given many twinges of pain to his own mother (of Arden blood), and to the mother of his children. Yet after the date of his boy’s death, up to the time of his final return to Stratford there are evidences of very frequent home visits, and of large interest in what concerned his family and towns-people.
His journeyings to and fro, probably on horseback, may have taken him by way of Edgehill, and into Banbury (of “Banbury-Cross” buns); or, more likely, he would have followed the valley of the Stour by Shipston, and thence up the hills to Chipping-Norton, and skirting Whichwood Forest, which still darkens a twelve-mile stretch of land upon the right, and so by Ditchley and the great Woodstock Park, into Oxford. I recall these names and the succession of scenes the more distinctly, for the reason that some forty years ago I went over the whole stretch of road from Windsor to Stratford on foot, staying the nights at wayside inns, and lunching at little, mossy hostelries, some of which the poet may possibly have known, and looking out wonderingly and reverently for glimpses of wood, or field, or flood, that may have caught the embalmment of his verse. It was worth getting up betimes to verify such lines as these:—
“Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;”
or those others, telling how the gentle day
“Dapples the drowsy East with spots of gray.”
Again, there was delightful outlook for
“——a bank whereon the wild thyme blows
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows;”
or, perhaps it was the
“Summer’s green, all girded up in sheaves”
that caught the eye; or, yet again, the picturesque hedge-rows, which,
Like prisoners overgrown with hair
Put forth disordered twigs;
and these flanked by some
“——even mead, which erst brought sweetly forth
The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover.”
What a wondrous light upon all the landscape along all the courses of his country journeyings! Nor can I forbear to tell how such illumination once made gay for me all the long foot-tramp from Chipping-Norton to Stratford—past Long Compton, and past Shipston (with lunch at the “Royal George”)—past Atherton Church, and thence along the lovely Stour banks, and some weary miles of grassy level, till the spire of Trinity rose shimmering in the late sunlight; afterward copses of elms, and willows clearly distinguishable, and throwing afternoon shadows on the silvery stretch of the Avon; then came sight of lazy boats, and of Clopton bridge, over which I strolled foot-weary, into streets growing dim in the twilight; coming thus, by a traveller’s chance, into the court of the Red-Horse Tavern, and into its little back-parlor, where after dinner one was served by the gracious hostess with a copy of Irving’s “Sketch Book” (its Stratford chapter all tattered and thumb-worn). In short, I had the rare good fortune to stumble upon the very inn where Geoffrey Crayon was quartered twenty odd years before, and was occupying, for the nonce, the very parlor where he had thrust his feet into slippers, made a sceptre of the poker, and enjoyed the royalties of “mine inn.”