MOTHER AND SON.
Those of our readers who have visited Stratford-upon-Avon, and looked upon the house in Henley Street, that house which has caused so great an interest in the world, will remember the lattice-windowed room in its upper floor, that room in which (as their eyes have glanced around its walls) their feelings have perhaps been excited almost unto the shedding of tears;—that room in which some portion of the early youth of him whose idea is enshrined in the hearts of all who speak our English tongue, was passed.
It is mid-day, and seated in that room are a mother and an elder son. The mother is employed in some sort of curious work, whilst her baby is cradled, and asleep at her side. Spinning perhaps, like "the spinsters and the knitters of the sun,"—
"Weaving her threads with bones,"
lace-making; and as she works, she chants some old ditty,—some song, "that dallies with the innocence of love, like the old age."
"Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away, breath,
I am slain by a fair cruel maid:
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O, prepare it—
My part of death no one so true
Did share it.
Not a flower, not a flower, sweet,
On my black coffin let there be strewn;
Not a friend, not a friend, greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown;
A thousand, thousand sighs to save,
Lay me, O where
Sad true lover ne'er find my grave,
To weep there."[1]
And whilst she sings, the youth, her son, seated upon a stool at her feet, is deeply engaged in perusing the goodly-sized volume he holds upon his knees.
Such is the picture. The sun streams through the diamond panes of that ample window, and gives a glowing tint to the red curtains of the old square-topped bedstead, and other cumbrous articles of furniture; the high-backed chairs, and the heavy oaken table in the background. What would the illustrious of the world,—what would the most honoured in the world's esteem, of our own day, for arts, for arms, or for learning,—what would they give for one glance into "the dark backward and abysm of time,"—but one glance, so to see that mother and her son;—that mother who implanted grace in her child; that child whose high spirit had been tamed and cultivated by her influence? And what, indeed, should we all be, saith a great writer, but for the influence of women in our youth?
They give us life, and they also give us the life of the soul. How many things do we learn of them as sons, lovers, or friends?
The youthful Shakespeare loved to hold sweet converse with his handsome mother, and whom he loved so well. From her conversation, in his boyhood he had taken his first impressions of things: from her legendary stories, (so sweetly related,) he had gathered many facts of history. In winter's tedious nights, how oft had she pictured to him all she had heard from her own parents, of the York and Lancastrian wars, and the horrors to which England had been reduced—"Discord in every state, discord in every family!" From her's, and from his father's relations, over the winter's fire, were gathered the boy's first impressions of those fierce English, whose characteristics (according to their foes) were force of pride, and obstinacy—those doggedly resolute, those invincibly cool islanders, who, in all their splendour of their feudal pride, had so often walked through the vasty fields of France, as if in some harnessed masque, eating up the lands on all sides, and still fighting onwards in their own joyless way: burning, slaying, and destroying for so many centuries, till they made captive at Agincourt, not only of the French king, but the very realm.
'Twas thus the boy had learnt his first lesson in the history of his country, not either exactly as a lesson, but in the homely popular form of a winter night's tale, as the simple story, or faith of a mother.
And what we thus inbibe with the milk we suck, and with our growing blood, is a living thing as it were, and what the boy loved to listen to as a simple story, the youth loved to follow out as a study. He reads of the events his mother has told him of, and given him a taste for, in the chronicled history of the wars of the time; whilst the little of life and splendour he has already seen, in the brilliant era in which he lives, has given him, even now, an impression of the pride, pomp, and circumstance of the Norman period.
Yes, the mind of the boy had been moulded by his mother, and a great deal of his just appreciation of women, and his delineations of the exquisite females he has drawn, are derived from the impressions she has given him.
As he reads from the thick volume, in which he learnt more accurately the facts, and date, of the history of his own country, he occasionally pauses to listen to his mother's song, to gaze up in her face, and to question her upon some point he has arrived at, and which he remembers to have heard her relate before.
Music and singing were much more cultivated (even amongst the humble classes) than in our own times, in England, and where indeed they are now scarcely cultivated at all. The sweet old songs "of the old age," are for the most part lost to us, they have departed with the quainter dwellings in which they were warbled.
In those days the strains which floated through the halls of the great, and the notes which were heard in the low-roofed apartments of the citizen, were calculated to soothe and quiet the passions of man. In our own times they are meant to arouse and excite—they are a whirl, a discordant noise. The lullabys which the mother chanted as she worked, were scraps of songs, great favourites at the time, and afterwards adapted from the recollection of the hearer in some of his works:
"Take, oh, take those lips away,
That so sweetly were forsworn,—
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn.
But my kisses bring again,—bring again,
Seals of love, but seal'd in vain,—seal'd in vain."[2]
Not only the history of his own land, and which all ranks at this period were lamentably ignorant in, did the youthful Shakespeare receive the rudiments of from his mother; but she loved to amuse him with those stories of romance she had learned from her own parents, and which had been handed down from the chivalric ages, when the female of high degree was the teacher of youth. The great lady—"of exalted rank and inaccessible,"—who cultivates the mind of the youthful page—a mother, a sister, a guardian angel, and yet of such high degree, that she seems (in the austerity of her counsels, and the difficulties to be overcome, ere her favour can be gained) too great even to receive the adoration of him whose service costs so many sighs. Till in the end, as the accomplished knight is produced, the incarnation of merit and grace all fades away before the powerful god.
The youth achieves greatness, and becomes lord of that beautiful lady, her dark castle, and her broad domain, "with shadowy forests, and with champions rich."