KENILWORTH AND WARWICK
THE MILL, GUY’S CLIFF NEAR WARWICK
The name is derived from Guy, Earl of Warwick, who once lived as a hermit, in a cave below the house, and was buried there
When Shakespeare saw Kenilworth Castle he did not, indeed, see it as it now is, a picturesque mass of ruins,—the wreck made by Cromwell’s soldiers about 1643-45,—but as a stately structure, at once a fortress and a palace. Warwick Castle, on the contrary, was the same imposing structure to him that it is to the observer of today. In the modern part of that castle now the visitor is shown a sumptuous collection of paintings, including Van Dyck’s famous equestrian portrait of King Charles I, and such suggestive relics as the helmet and the death-mask of Cromwell; but those things impress the mind much less than does the building itself. That Shakespeare entered the Castle is not known; but that he saw it cannot be doubted, for Cæsar’s Tower—one of the older parts of it—which dominates the region around Warwick now has been grandly conspicuous there for more than 400 years, and in the poet’s time it must have been familiar to all inhabitants of Warwickshire. Kenilworth, Coventry, and Warwick figure in some of his historical plays, and his particular knowledge of all the surroundings of Stratford, and, indeed, of the whole of central England, through which the Wars of the Roses raged, is manifested in those dramas. He had ample opportunity of acquiring that knowledge.
The first twenty-one or twenty-two years of his life were passed by him in his native town. The next twenty-seven years he passed in London, visiting Stratford once a year. In his closing years, from about 1613 to his death in 1616, he dwelt in Stratford, in his house called New Place, bought by him in 1597, where he died. The traveler who visits the Shakespeare Country, viewing it exclusively with reference to its associations with the poet, should bear in mind these divisions of time. The larger part of Shakespeare’s work was done in London. It is mostly as a youth, though a little as a veteran, that personally he is connected with Stratford.
THE RED HORSE HOTEL, STRATFORD-UPON-AVON
WASHINGTON IRVING PARLOR IN THE RED HORSE HOTEL