The Stratfordian notices none of these things: they are there, but they don’t concern him. You think they do, and that if a suggestion were made that the town should be renamed “Shakespeare-on-Avon” he would adopt it and be grateful; but you would be quite wrong; he would not. If you caught a hundred Stratford people, flagrante delicto, in the pursuit of their daily business and haled them into the Guildhall or other convenient room and set them an examination paper on Shakespeare, no one would pass with honours. Why should any of them? They have grown up with Shakespeare; they accept him as a fact, just as they do the rising and setting of the sun and the waxing and waning of the moon; but they are not interested in him any more than they are in the courses of those luminaries. They talk of anything but Shakespeare, and I have met and spoken with many who have never been inside the Birthplace, or to Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, or in the Harvard House, or indeed to any of the show-places in and about the town. They each save about half a guinea in the aggregate, but they don’t do so either by way of self-denial or economy. They are simply not interested.
Stratford would lose a very great deal if the world in general were to become as indifferent to the Swan of Avon; but it would still be a prosperous market-town, dependent upon the needs of the surrounding agricultural villages. Agriculture has ever been the mainstay of Stratford, and as far as we can see, ever will be. All around in the Avon valley stretch those rich pastures that still “lard the rother’s sides,” and on market days there come crawling into the streets, among the cattle and the sheep, carriers’ carts from many an obscure village, with curious specimens of countryfolk who have not lost the old habit of looking upon Stratford as the centre of the universe. So much the better for Stratford. “’Tain’t much as I waants,” said one to the present writer, “an’ I rackon I can get it at Stratford ‘most as good as anywheer else. Besides, I du like to come to town sometimes, an’ see a bit of life.”
One can, in fact, see a good deal of life in the town, but the liveliest time—quite apart from the Shakespeare Festival, which is exotic and mostly for visitors—is the Mop Fair, much more familiarly known as “Stratford Mop.” This annual event is held somewhat too late for the average visitor’s convenience; on October 12th, when the tourists have mostly gone home. It is the great hiring-fair for farm servants and others: perhaps we had better say, was, for the hiring has almost wholly fallen into disuse, together with the so-called “Runaway Mop,” of a fortnight after, at which the servants already hired and not pleased with their bargain might re-engage.
I think the average visitor might not, after all, be pleased with Stratford Mop, which is in some ways a very barbarous affair; the chief barbarity of course being the roasting of oxen whole in the streets; a loathly spectacle, and not one calculated to increase respect for our ancestors, whose great idea of fit merry-making for very special occasions was this same roasting of cattle whole and making the public conduits run wine. The last sounds better, but from the accounts preserved of the wine dispersed at such times we know that the quantity was meagre and the quality exceedingly poor.
But the vast crowds resorting to Stratford for the Mop see nothing gruesome in the spectacle. Special trains run from numerous places, and all the showmen in the country seem to have hurried up for the event.
The streets of Stratford are broad and pleasant, with a large proportion of ancient houses still left; half-timbered fronts side by side with more or less modern brick and plaster, behind which often lurks a rich old interior, unknown to the casual passer-by. Sometimes a commonplace frontage is removed, revealing unexpected beauty in an enriched half-timber framing which the odd vagaries in taste of bygone generations have caused to be thus hidden. There is in this way a speculative interest always attaching to structural alterations in the town. In this chance fashion the fine timbering of the so-called “Tudor House” was uncovered in 1903, and other instances might be given. Recently, also, Nash’s House has been completely refronted, in fifteenth century style, wholly in oak. In fact, we might almost declare that Stratford is now architecturally, after many years, reverting to the like of the town Shakespeare knew. And if the modernised house-fronts were systematically stripped, among them that occupied by Messrs. W. H. Smith & Son at the corner of High Street and Bridge Street, the house occupied for many years by Judith Shakespeare and her husband, Thomas Quiney, the vintner, Stratford would become greatly transformed.
But the mention of Bridge Street is a reminder that here at any rate a great change has been made. It is the widest of all the streets, and is in fact a very wilderness of width. All the winds that sport about the neighbourhood seem to have their home in Bridge Street. Your hat always blows off when you turn the corner into it, and the dust and homeless straws go wandering up and down its emptiness, seeking rest in the Avon over the Clopton Bridge, but always blown back. Now Bridge Street was not always like this. In Shakespeare’s time, and until 1858, when the last of it was cleared away, a kind of island of old houses occupied part of this roadway. It was called “Middle Row.” Such a collection of houses was the usual feature of old English towns. There was an example in London, in Holborn, with exactly the same name; but it disappeared somewhat earlier than its Stratford namesake. Pictures survive of this Bridge Street landmark. I think a good many Stratford people regret it, but regrets will not bring it back. We think of the irrevocable, and of Herrick’s witch—
“Old Widow Prowse, to do her neighbours evil,
Has given, some say, her soul unto ye Devill;
But when sh’as killed that horse, cow, pig, or hen,
What would she give to get that soul again?”
But the Stratford folk, unlike Widow Prowse, did their spiriting with the best intentions. Unfortunately, good intentions notoriously pave the way to hot corners.