The Second Meeting at the Falcon.
On Saturday evening, about nine o’clock, Mr. Kenwrick having exhibited at Lilly’s at the Falcon a paper signifying what Mr. Hall was to do, and of what materials to repair the monument of Shakespeare, he proposed that Mr. Hall and Mr. Spur should sign the agreement, the former that he might be obliged to do the work in a compleat manner, and the latter that upon its being finished he should pay to Mr. Hall the sum of twelve pounds ten shillings; but though Mr. Hall seemed ready to sign this, and a pen and ink were called for publicly, yet John Spur absolutely refused, and said he would never sign any paper for the delivery of the money, ridiculously vaunting it that his word ought to be taken as credibly as his bond, and his word would go for £1,000. However, at last he was prevailed upon to declare before the undermentioned witnesses that as soon as the monument was finished he would, without further delay, pay the money. This affair happened December 10, 1748.
Witnesses—The Rev. Mr. Kenwrick, Vicar of Stratford; Joseph Greene, clerk, Master of the Free School; Mr. Turbitt, mercer; John Spur, blacksmith, cashier, churchwardens of the borough when the money was collected in 1746; Mr. Benjamin Haynes, glover; Mr. Joseph Broom, weaver (for the borough); Mr. Samuel Morris, farmer; Mr. John Southam, of Welcombe, farmer (for the parish churchwardens in 1748); Mr. John Hall, undertaker of the work.
Another set of letters were “transcribed from the Greene MSS. penes Mr. Wright, Lichfield.” The first from Mr. George Steevens, editor of the Quarto edition of Shakespeare, dated Hampstead, 25th June 1770, to the Honourable James West, Esq., formerly President of the Royal Society, then residing at Alscot, near Stratford-on-Avon. He enclosed a letter from Mr. Theophilus Lane, of Paston Court, near Hereford, addressed to himself, and asked Mr. West to inform him whether the fact relative to Shakespeare’s monument may be depended on, “as it should be added to the other little anecdotes already known concerning him, if it can be well ascertained.” He also asked a confirmation of some conversations he had once had with his honourable friend some years previously.[113]
The letter Steevens enclosed from Mr. Theophilus Lane itself encloses another from a friend of his who had missed seeing him on the day they both visited Shakespeare’s tomb. This friend had misread the date of Mrs. Hall’s tombstone, and could not harmonize it with the date on Shakespeare’s. He considered that Shakespeare’s monument had little authority as to its date and inscription, and thought that the monument must have been put up after everybody had died who knew him.
This letter Theophilus Lane had forwarded to Steevens, and Steevens to the Honourable James West. He apparently in his turn had submitted it to the Rev. Joseph Greene, as the latter writes to Mr. West a long letter containing his strictures on it. He shows that the confusion of dates arose from misreading the date of Mrs. Hall’s death as 1640 instead of 1649, which can be corrected from the parish registers, and therefore that the other arguments based upon this mistake are, of course, valueless; and adds:
Applause is due to every investigator of Truth, provided he is sufficiently attentive in his enquiries; and although I allow this letterwriter’s superstructural remarks are ingenious enough, yet as he did not sufficiently examine the solidity of his foundation, I cannot think him entitled to any man’s thanks.
This letter is only of importance as illustrating a great deal of the shallow criticism of Shakespeare, which is based upon preliminary errors made by the critics themselves. In this case, we might have hoped that the Rev. Joseph Greene would have explained about the restoration of the tomb, so lately carried out under his supervision, and settled the degree of fidelity with which Mr. John Hall had carried out his instructions. Unfortunately, the unnamed writer having only attempted to criticise the dates, which were quite able to be checked, the Rev. Joseph Greene did not think fit to account for the extraordinary freshness of the tomb so lately “beautified,” a freshness which was very likely to have first roused the doubt as to “its authority” in the writer’s mind, if he had not known all the circumstances.
This is all my new information, but it is something to go on. I have not italicized the important words in my transcripts, but I may now remind my readers that by 1746 the “curious original” was much “impaired and decayed,” a decay so serious as to rouse the actively sympathetic feelings of Mr. John Ward towards necessary restoration. The fact is recorded that Mr. John Hall was to have the doing of the work of “repairing and rebeautifying,” or “the direction” of it. But that “materials” were to be used.
My arguments are these. No one would call the present tomb a “curious” one; but, as represented by Dugdale in his “Antiquities of Warwick” (1651), it is “curious,” a curiousness which had increased, by the process of decay, when Rowe produced it in his “Life,” 1709. Mr. John Hall, acting in all good faith, after provincial notions of restoration in the eighteenth century, would fill up the gaps, restore what was missing, as he thought it ought to be, and finally repaint it according to the original colours, traces of which he might still be able to see in the hollows of the bust.